Friday Night at the Movies: On Film Violence
Fri Feb 01, 2008 at 04:05:22 PM PDT
I love violent movies. Give me splatter and gore and all manner of mayhem. The craft it takes to make viscera look real fascinates me. I don’t cotton to the sanitized, Michael Bay, PG-13, spasm-and-fall-when-shot violence. Give me the Grand Guignol. “I want,” as Arlo Guthrie once said, “to see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth.”
Now, I know some of you are asking yourselves, “What the hell is wrong with this sicko?” Let me assure you, I do not enjoy these moments in film because they give me some cheap thrill, like a snuff film. The Saw films all have plenty of gore, and I find them repugnant. The recent spate of torture-porn exploitations may not sanitize their violence but they certainly glorify it, which is almost worse.
Yet the films that sensationalize or glorify violent images are invariably popular with the American film consumer. Just look at the popularity of violent television like CSI, which censor their killings to avoid fines and such from the odious FCC. While I will not go so far as to say violent television and movies cause violence in the real world, I will say that sanitized violence makes those that watch it less likely to understand the effects savagery has on the human body, and by extension less likely to consider the consequences of savage action. If Americans want to watch violence, they should be made to watch realistic violence portrayed in a realistic manner.
Violence in film is as old as the medium itself, especially in America. One extremely influential example is Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery from all the way back in 1903. The plot is as simple as its title suggests; bandits rob a train. During the robbery they shoot one person, and he flails around in exaggerated death throes. The films verisimilitude suffers from the limits of the silent era, but such ostentatious acting was also necessary because it occurred within the limits of the proscenium arch. Film was so new that its artists hadn’t even dreamt of variable framing yet; they framed their shots like they were shooting a play. The great advance of Porter’s film comes at the end, when he moves, almost like a joke on the audience, to a close up of one of the bandits as he shoots at the screen. There are stories of the audience screaming in terror and mortal fear. It must have given them the thrill that comes with violent images.
Another limit on Porter’s ability to portray brutality effectively was the dearth of make-up technology during his era. The squib, the tool that makes the bloody results of gunshots possible in film, wouldn’t be invented for another sixty years. So, in between that time, we have films assailants shoot people who then clutch the wound and stagger around. It was the only way to convey the event of a shooting. However, even after Sam Peckinpah popularized the use of the squib in The Wild Bunch, filmmakers still seemed reluctant to show violence in a realistic manner. Even today, we still have action spectacles like the latest installment of Die Hard, where collateral damage piles up without any thought to the human consequences that would naturally ensue. The only thing that matters is that stuff blows up real good.
However, there are filmmakers who commit themselves to accurately portraying the horrors of death and destruction. One of these is Martin Scorcese. Aside from the occasional relatively tame effort like The Age of Innocence, Scorcese is one of the most consistently violent directors working in modern Hollywood. However, what separates him from the sensationalists that peddle inconsequential mayhem is Scorcese’s penchant for objectively showing the effects of violence on the human body. More importantly, he never seems to side with his violent characters. Consider the climactic scene of Taxi Driver. We follow Travis Bickle through the entire film as he plans the assassination of a political figure to impress a woman. The plan falls through, so Bickle instead wreaks havoc upon the pimp of a teenage prostitute and his gang. Scorcese makes us wait for the mayhem until the very end of the film, so our bloodlust will be at fever pitch. However, once the carnage starts, there is nothing gratifying about it. It is brutal, and stomach churning, and Scorcese forces us to view it without comment. We look down on Bickle’s handiwork in bird’s eye view, a technique used to achieve an emotional distance. Any normal person will recoil from the savagery on display. When Scorcese finally gets around to the iconic shot of Bickle forming a gun with his blood-drenched and dripping fingers and shooting himself in the head, we are no longer drawn to him, but repulsed by him. The great irony of Taxi Driver is that the public ends up regarding Bickle as a hero for rescuing the teenage prostitute from danger. They must not have seen what we did.
Another director committed to deflating the American fascination with violence is also my favorite, David Cronenberg. This Canadian director has made a career out of creating some of the most memorably disgusting and violent make-up effects ever put to film. Cronenberg seems most interested in the fragility of the flesh, which is why I like his films so much. To my mind, 2005’s A History of Violence is his crowning achievement. Unlike the violence in Scorcese films, which is usually perpetrated by criminals or thugs for their own gain, nobody suffers the pain of violent acts that doesn’t deserve it in Cronenberg’s film. However, that simple fact does not change the effect of the violence on the body of the victims or the psyche of the perpetrators. In a scene where two thugs threaten the patrons of a small town diner, Tom Stahl has every right to protect himself and his friends. It is a situation of kill or be killed, so kill Tom does. We cheer him at first, because his action is justified, and unlike Bickle, truly heroic. Our cheering does not last however, because Cronenberg shows us the aftermath. When Tom shoots his assailant in the head from above (the thug had just stabbed Tom in the foot), the next shot we get is the thug in close-up with his face blown of, his tongue wagging erratically through a giant hole in his cheek and jaw. The man dies badly; face down in a pool of his own blood. It would have been easy for Cronenberg to gloss over this carnage, to present the heroic actions of Tom as glorious, something to be celebrated. Instead, he forces us to acknowledge the horrible results of the act, making the point that violence, whether justified or not, still has far reaching consequences. The scrutiny Tom receives because of his actions nearly tears his family apart.
Compare the violence of the above with films like The Matrix. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Matrix, but the violent images that make up the film are merely titillating and carry no dramatic weight. In the assault to save Morpheus from the agents, Neo and Trinity expend countless rounds of ammo in slow motion, killing a room full of people. Yet nobody bleeds, or even betrays that the bullets cause any pain. Apparently, if you die in the matrix, you do little more than flail about like the victim in Porter’s film almost one hundred years earlier. It is telling that while far more graphic films were available, this film was a flashpoint of controversy after the Columbine massacre. Again, it is doubtful those troubled teen saw the film and decided to kill their classmates, but might they have thought twice if the violence in The Matrix was more graphic?
While films like Scorcese’s and Cronenberg’s gain enormous amounts of plaudits from critics, they by and large do not go over very well with moviegoing audiences, who prefer their violence slick and sensationalized. We are a nation enamored with acts of violence while censoring the consequences. There is a war going on right now, and our government will not even let us see the caskets of fallen soldiers coming home. This is a problem that needs immediate action. If the local news reports on a sensational murder, they should show what that murder looks like. People complain that television is too violent, but what they really mean is that it is not violent enough. If more people had to see the effects a bullet has on the human body, then they would be more hesitant to launch said bullet. Our logic behind the censorship is to protect our children from these images, but I would argue that the sanitized bloodshed on TV and in movies and videogames does more damage to children in that it results in a more cavalier attitude about savagery than an image of real bloodshed ever would. If we truly wish to be a less violent nation, it is time for us to recognize the effects of violence, so that we might have them in mind the next time we decide to send Americans to do it, or do it ourselves.
