Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry is a 2000 film directed by Paul Tickell from a screenplay by Simon Bent, based on the 1973 novel of the same name by B. S. Johnson.
It stars Nick Moran as Christie Malry, an accounts clerk in contemporary London who uses the system of double-entry bookkeeping as a way to compensate himself for perceived injustices inflicted upon him by society, committing what he deems to be equivalent acts of revenge that begin with petty acts of vandalism but soon escalate to full-on terror attacks.
Plot
Christie Malry is twenty-something male who lives in West London with his terminally ill mother and works in an office, a job he finds unfulfilling and so distracts himself from the boredom by having violent fantasies in which he threatens his manager with a shotgun. At the suggestion of his friend Bernie he takes a night class in accountancy, where he is introduced to the theories and teachings of Fra Luca Pacioli, an early pioneer in the field of accounting and the author of Summa de arithmetica, one of the first books on the practice of double-entry bookkeeping. Christie then resigns from his job and, shortly afterwards, Bernie is killed in a vehicle collision.
Interspersed with the main story are scenes set in Renaissance Milan in which Fra Luca Pacioli is seen teaching his theories on accountancy at the court of Ludovico Sforza. In addition, Leonardo da Vinci is employed there, and these scenes also follow his struggles as he challenges what he sees as interference into his artistic vision from the Catholic Church, against a backdrop of an imminent invasion by the French army.
As Christie continues his accountancy studies and learns that debits must be cancelled out with credits he begins to ponder whether the same principles should apply to his actual life, wondering who will credit him for his mother’s cancer. He then starts a job at Tapper’s chocolate factory, where he meets Headlam, an eccentric co-worker whom he becomes friends with, and shortly afterwards hits upon the idea of using double-entry bookkeeping as a method of recording perceived wrongs made against him by society then cancelling them out by committing what he deems to be equivalent acts of revenge. Following the motto ‘for every debit there must be a credit’, he keeps detailed notes of such transactions in a ledger he carries with him, explaining his new system to his mother moments before she dies.
Christie’s initial attempts at balancing out the supposed injustices against him start with him committing petty acts of vandalism, such as running a key along the paintwork of a car whose owner had sounded its horn at him or throwing a brick through the window of an off licence he believed had sold his mother bootleg alcohol, along with causing trouble for his employer by discarding letters of complaint sent to the company and, in addition to starting a new job, he enters into a relationship with Carol, a girl he meets at his local butcher’s shop.
However, from this point on Christie’s acts of revenge become increasingly serious before gravitating to full-on acts of terrorism: he phones the police claiming to have planted a bomb in Leicester Square then, when the Foreign Secretary dies of a heart attack he makes another phone call in which he claims he was responsible. Not knowing who the true perpetrator is, the British government blames Iraq for his activities and begins to escalate military action in retaliation. Christie now gravitates to actual violence, taking advice from sources such as The Anarchist Cookbook and blowing up a local tax office by placing a home-made bomb in a toy train and sending it through a tunnel adjacent to the building. He then kills over twenty thousand people by poisoning a reservoir in West London, another attack that is blamed on Iraq and leads to air strikes being launched against the country.
At this point Carol receives a visit from the police telling her that Christie is in hospital as the result of a bomb exploding on a bus he was travelling on, which is initially blamed on an Irish passenger. Christie is fatally wounded and dies in hospital with Carol by his side. However, when Carol returns to his flat she goes inside the spare room that he never let her enter and discovers it contains extensive details of his plan to bomb the Houses of Parliament, and it is revealed that he was in fact carrying a bomb with the intention of doing this when it went off prematurely, exploding as the bus crossed Westminster Bridge.