Have you seen any good movie violence lately? Two movies this fall, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises and Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, which opened yesterday, have some outstanding killings.
The Cronenberg film, which opened in September, actually contrasted inept violence with the masterly kind. There's an early gruesome, sloppy, sawing, throat-slashing in a barber chair. Later, the perpetrator is deftly eliminated by a much more skilled killer. Then there's the movie's most talked-about sequence, where the naked gangster Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) kills his two attackers in a bath house, stabbing one through the eye. The scene echoes one of the most famous violent images in film history, the razor blade across an eyeball in Luis Bunuel's surrealistic classic from 1929, Un Chien Andalou.
No Country for Old Men features Javier Bardem who, early in the film, strangles a sheriff's deputy from behind (shot from overhead, with the victim's boots painting the floor with scuff marks). Other victims die with abrupt dispatch, their frontal brains demolished with a cattle-killing device operating on compressed air. Bardem's the modern representative of the devil, eliminating human beings as if they were livestock.
No Country for Old Men and Eastern Promises are made by admired directors. They transcend their genres (a western and a gangster film) and pass any reasonable test for artistic legitimacy. Both films place the violence in both a sociological, even mythic framework. Eastern Promises's twisted Christmas fable portrays a parasitic Russian subculture in contemporary London, linked to a global trade in electronics, drugs and sex slavery. No Country for Old Men , based on Cormac McCarthy's meditative novel, is about an aging lawman (Tommy Lee Jones) contemplating a new order of violence in the world, where psychopaths work for giant cartels linked to men in corporate office towers. The directors' consummate filmmaking skills, the narrative energy and murderous themes are of a piece.
At the same time, columnists and critics have been increasingly worried about a wave of "bad" violence produced by the group of young directors known as the Splat Pack, who since 2002 have initiated a new wave of so-called torture porn.
The Splat Pack includes such directors as James Wan ( Saw, Death Sentence), Eli Roth ( Cabin Fever, the Hostel movies), Rob Zombie ( The Devil's Rejects) and Alexandre Aja ( The Hills Have Eyes), all of whom are fond of plots involving disagreeable people being captured, terrified, tortured and murdered.
In fact, though, the distance between today's high-brow and low-brow violence is often exaggerated. The same artists (Cronenberg or the Coens, for example) who were reviled as schlockmeisters and dilettantes in one generation are hailed as masters in the next. Though the reasoning is not rational, violent cinema is held to a higher moral standard than, say, movies that encourage a false belief in superhero leaders or unrealistic romantic fantasies.
The trouble with talking about violent film is that both critics and defenders insist on talking about them in relation to real life. Anyone who likes movie violence risks the stigma of someone who likes depravity.
Movie violence is portrayed as a social pathology, desensitizing viewers to real violence, encouraging everything from war to school shootings to sex crimes. The counterargument - that the vast majority of people who enjoy violent films aren't at all violent - seems easily ignored. As the Splat Pack's spokesman Eli Roth puts it: "People don't enjoy violence in real life, but they love it in their movies."
Defenders of violent cinema, from Sam Peckinpah to John Woo to Quentin Tarantino, often fall back on socially useful justifications for violent cinema, that they use violence to condemn it. Horror directors claim their violent dramas work as a kind of medicine to cope with our fears: "You look at the war, you look at 9/11, the tortures at Abu Ghraib, the things going on down at Guantanamo - these are real horrors and we are all scared.... I think these films help people deal with the real world," Roth says.
Reality, though, may be the wrong place to look for a way to evaluate movie violence. The proper context of a film, or any other work of the imagination, is other works of the imagination, and for that you have to look at the history of the form.
The idea that the public needs protection from movies is a hangover from the Prohibition era. From 1934 to 1967, Hollywood movies followed strict rules, including that the audience should not sympathize with characters involved in wrongdoing, evil or sin.
All that was finally blown away, 40 years ago this year, with the release of Bonnie and Clyde. The British poster featured a tagline that would still raise controversy: "They're young, they're in love. They kill people. The most exciting gangster movie ever made." The final shoot-out, filmed in slow motion (borrowed from Japanese master Akira Kurosawa) saw the glamorous corpses of the title characters (played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) turned into Swiss cheese by machine-gun fire.
The next decade saw filmmakers pushing to one-up each other in more dramatic, splashy, graphic, sublime and ugly violence: Bullitt, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Death Wish, Jaw s, Taxi Driver, Halloween and Raging Bull. The golden era of American cinema was also the golden age of violence.
In a sense, this can be understood as a healthy return to normality. Murder is a great theme of literature, from Homer to Shakespeare to Dickens. Violence is the great American movie theme that permeates science fiction, horror, gangster films, westerns and period films. Steven Spielberg's terrifying opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan has been praised for initiating a new intergenerational dialogue. Mel Gibson's spectacularly gory The Passion of the Christ was, for many Christians, a profound expression of faith.
Influenced by the rise of American independent cinema and Asian genre movies, the movie violence of the nineties and the early years of the millennium was often hyperstylized and ironic. Movies turned violence into ballet (the films of John Woo, Matrix) or they meditated on the nature of violence as an escape from contemporary social alienation ( Crash, Fight Club, American Psycho). They mocked movie conventions ( Scream). They treated it as convulsive humour, such as Quentin Tarantino, whose aesthetic violence reached an extreme in the Kill Bill movies where the martial-arts battles served as a kind of living painting, with the sword slashing through bodies dancing like a brush across a canvas.
What many violent movies today have in common is an emphasis on physicality over spectacle. In films such as The Passion of the Christ, Eastern Promises, Hostel, Casino Royale and The Bourne Ultimatum, we experience movie worlds where characters sweat, bleed, struggle and hurt with their hands. Their bodies split and leak, the characters grunt and scream. This graphic violence is also part of the new horror films and their strongest claim to credibility. The purveyors of the new violence believe that we have lost our way. In their case though, real horror belongs to the visceral films of the late sixties and seventies, movies rich in pulp, breaking social taboos and violating bodies in a tradition that goes back to Gothic literature and Surrealism. The Splat Pack's pantheon of heroic filmmakers focuses on the margins: George Romero ( Night of the Living Dead), pre-Spiderman Sam Raimi ( Evil Dead), Wes Craven ( The Last House on the Left), Tobe Hooper ( Texas Chainsaw Massacre), David Cronenberg ( The Brood), Brian De Palma ( Carrie, Scarface) and David Fincher ( Seven, Alien 3). Other sources include extreme Asian horror ( Ichi the Killer), and underground cult films ( Blood Feast, Cannibal Holocaust).
Film critic A. S. Hamrah, in a U.S. National Public Radio program this spring, suggested such movies may be a reaction to the detachment of cyberspace. They are "an attempt to reconnect to the physical. They're this kind of fantasy of returning to a world where people were reconnecting to one another, even if it's through pain and torture."
What then can we conclude about these movies' artistic merit?
To give the devils their due, the new horror films have some artistic coherence. Their mean, dingy visual style are consistent with their grim subjects. They don't flinch away from pain or glamorize torment. Unquestionably, they undoubtedly have their inventive moments: The first Saw movie, with its emphasis on video-game-like choices and consequences, was innovative. Hostel II, with its human pinata torture scene, showed a gift for the grotesque, and The Devil's Rejects has its own scabby ambience and energy.
No doubt, the filmmakers devoted themselves to making memorable torture sequences, combining a semblance of physical realism with inventive cruelty, which has helped make these movies, widely reviled by critics, into huge popular successes.
Yet all of these films seem stunted by their limited ambitions. The stories serve as nothing more than vehicles to deliver the butchery. They lack dynamic range, have no epiphanies, and, in between the scenes of torment, the acting and narratives are barely functional.
Though these movies share a frank brutality about violence, there's a great gap between the art of Cronenberg and the Coens and their younger colleagues. Eastern Promises and No Country for Old Men are terrific movies that embody and explore the subject of violence. Movies like Saw and Hostel offer queasy physical experiences with some inventive moments. The best thing about them is their violence, while everything else about them feels third-rate.
A history of violence
The Great
Train Robbery (1903)
In the last scene of Edwin Porter's film, the leader of the gang aims his gun directly at the camera and fires. Audiences shrieked and ducked, and the film was the most popular American movie for the next dozen years. Martin Scorsese pays homage to it in Goodfellas, when Joe Pesci fires a gun directly at the audience.
Scarface: Shame
of the Nation (1932)
Starred Paul Muni as an apish gangster based on Al Capone. In a scene set in a bowling alley where his rival (Boris Karloff) is shot, right after throwing a strike, the camera follows the ball down the lane, where it knocks over all the pins except one, which totters for a second before falling over as well.
White Heat (1949)
Raoul Walsh's film noir about a crazed gangster, Cody Jarrett (James Cagney), with mother issues. In the last scene, the cackling Jarrett, riddled with bullets, yells: "Made it Ma! Top of the world!"
Throne of Blood (1957)
In Akira Kurosawa's version of Macbeth, the ruthless Washizu's (Toshiro Mifune) eyes pop open as he meets his end in a hail of arrows.
Psycho (1960)
Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals some money and, after repenting, takes a shower in a remote motel run by an unbalanced young man who loves his mother. Uh-oh.
A Clockwork Orange (1971) Stanley Kubrick and author Anthony Burgess address the question of whether art is possible without violence. In a key scene, Alex (Malcolm McDowell) dances about a rich couple's art-filled home, singing Singing in the Rain while committing rape and vicious assault.
Taxi Driver (1976)
In Martin Scorsese's film, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), dressed in military gear and wearing a Mohawk haircut, surrounded by rooms painted in blood, raises his finger to his temple and, with a smirk, mocks shooting himself.
Robocop (1987)
Policeman Anthony Murphy
(Peter Weller) is gunned down by the cackling Cop Killing Gang, who laugh unconvincingly as they shoot his limbs and then leave him for dead.
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Vincent (John Travolta) turns to ask Marvin, the guy in the back seat, a question while holding his gun. Whoops! Vincent shoots Marvin in the face and splatters the car with gore.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
For the first 24 minutes, simulating the landing on Omaha Beach of June 6, 1944, the sound, imagery and bloodshed are so intense, viewers may find themselves scrambling to see if their limbs are still attached.
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
Noted for the battle between The Bride (Uma Thurman) and the malevolent Japanese schoolgirl, Gogo Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama), the seventh bodyguard to attack her at the House of Blue Leaves. After almost strangling The Bride with a chain, Gogo finally gets it with a broken chair leg.
L.L.
Liam Lacey