7/99
Sticks and Stones:
Some Notes Toward a Theory of Film Violence
The afternoon of Thursday, July 1, was a cloudy yet warm day in Portland, Oregon. It was also one of those days in which everything seemed to go wrong. Blame it on the full moon, the heat, or the crowded madhouse that is a city, but by the end of the day, at about 4:30 pm, I finally made it, with a sense of relief, to my favorite magazine store at Southwest Fourth and Taylor.
I made my usual swing through the weeklies, the book review mags, the fashion slicks, and the film journals. As I was breezing out of the cordoned off dirty magazine section, I bumped into a guy's foot. He was a youngish kid, no jacket, wearing a long limp t-shirt; tall, slightly cross-eyed, and snaggletoothed, resembling in a sloppy, dirty way the street kids that afflict downtown Portland.
He said "Excuse me," rather loudly, and I appreciated the thought, as he had almost tripped me. But as I continued on, he added, "Jack off!" I though that was unseemly or at least hypocritical of the lad, for he was the one quickly and irresponsibly riffling through a copy of Numbers. I asked, "Do you have a problem?," but then he ignored me, so I foolishly added, "So now you're not talking."
I went to the counter to make my purchases, but I could hear him muttering something. The owner of the store, a soul of peace and reconciliation born of his radical politics, asked me what was going on. I said, "Some guy back there tripped me and now he is heaping abuse on me." As I was writing a check, suddenly the youth was in my face, growling, "I didn't trip you, but I will be waiting for you outside."
What was he angry about? I had no idea. But obviously he had been spoiling for a fight with someone - anyone - all day. I finished writing my check, gathered up my purchases, and went outside. There, on the sidewalk just outside the door, the owner was trying to talk the guy down. I walked past them,but paused to get a good look at and memorize the youth's face, figuring that the incident was not over.
It wasn't. As I continued down the street, he followed me down the street, and screamed further abuse at me, not coming too close, but near enough to create a scene. He followed me down the street and around the corner, hurling epithets that in their vulgarity and cruelty would only demean this anecdote further were I to reiterate them. I suggested to him that he was mentally ill and should seek help, but that only inspired another round of even more vicious name calling. The American way is to win, but not merely triumph; also to destroy the opponent, to utterly squash him and annihilate him, and any squeak of protest is an outrage that must be silenced immediately.
I have to confess that I wasn't particularly surprised at this incident. All my life, I have inspired irrational anger in strangers. In grade school I was the classic misfit tormented by school bullies (and I am here to tell you that there is nothing that can be done to stop bullies, not challenging them, not being nice to them, nothing, regardless of what adults tell kids. In the end, careful extermination is the only answer, and given that bullies are going to grow up to become proud members of the wife-beating criminal class that is an answer that helps all of society, not just the victims of irrational abuse). In high school I was hated and bullied; almost every job I have had as been for a bully of one kind or another, either financial bullies, or, at a newspaper I worked at, intellectual bullies. And worse, I come from a family whose stance toward conflict was essentially fearful, in which authority was implacable, unfair, and cruel, and that we must huddle in our homes with our meager possessions hoping that no one will notice us and come and take them away. Sadly, I grew up into your classic American drudge, spineless before bosses, cops, and other forms of authority, and infused with a pessimistic assumption that the bullies rule the world. Even children and kids sense an inherent weakness and futility in me, and I have even been harassed even by them on the street, with impunity, too, as one cannot strike back without courting charges of violating various child abuse laws. Be it my voice, appearance, posture, general oddness, or whatever, I inspire hate. In fact, you are probably getting a little inpatient with me right now yourself. But I am not addressing you. I am speaking to the millions who understand me and recognize my agonies in their own lives, in which they too were irrationally singled out for abuse by contemporaries whose own frustrations found solace in harassing victims who were slightly more cowardly then themselves.
The shootings at Littleton, Colorado, Springfield, Oregon, and other schools across the country have naturally evoked another round of outrage at the media, as usual assumed to be the inspirer of violence rather than its mirror.All I can say is that if I had access to firearms, those great equalizers, I too would have been tempted to eradicate without ill conscience the contemptuous social elites, herd-clustering athletes, future convicts, and other despoilers of the American dream. But as I suggest, I may be an exception, as throughout life I have naturally attracted hostility, For the last six years, I have even had a stalker, a disturbed man who has been, ostensibly because of my former association with various newspapers, harassing me via letters, telephone calls, and threats of violence, a man of such determination and focus that finally I had to seek redress in the courts. Curiously, the epithets that this stalker used to scream at me over the telephone at three in the morning were replicated by the disturbed street kid chasing me down the streets.
Many of us lead lives of quiet fretfulness. Our only outlet for the pent up frustration at the hostilities we endure, our only recourse to justice, and only a fantasy justice at that, is in the media. And now, the government, in its desire to maintain us as squirrely fearful frustrated creatures prone to doing what it says, wants to remove that option, as usual in all violation of the first amendment, an article of law that has more or less been fought against since its ratification. In light of the new war on violence, and given that the author is in his view a representative of a significant cross-section of American life, he offers up this reflections on violence in the media.
Just as the blow job is more cinematic than cunnilingus, violence is more cinematic than conversation. Cinema is motion. The strip of 35mm film moves through the camera so that movement in the real world can be recorded. Not to use cinema to record motion is to misunderstand the nature of the popular art form. Like the atomic bomb, it's there; like the bomb, the temptation will always exist to use it. There can no longer be a world without the atomic bomb; there can no longer be a world without violent movies.
Sure, there is a certain beauty in films by those filmmakers who resist the natural purpose of film. I love the films of Carlos Saura, who among other things created in Carmen a whole movie about a dance rehearsal; and I love films such as Thèrese, about the saint, which was filmed entirely in bare rooms with backdrops and the mere hint of sets; and I love neo-documentaries such as The Thin Blue Line, with its reënactments and staged interviews, or the highly verbal, almost actionless films of Jean-Luc Godard or Louis Malle.
But these movies acquire their beauty because they go against the grain of cinema, like David Hemmings bopping against the rhythm of the music in Blowup. They provide the thrill of contrariness, of rebellion against the logical marriage of form and function.
Paradoxically, that large screen in the cavernous, crowded dark, public room creates intimacy. And violence is an intimate act. If you are punching someone, or if you are pinpointing them in the telescope of your rifle, you are as close to your victim as a lover, trying to think like him, anticipate his moves, overcome him.
The cinema recreätes the thrill of violence because it recreätes with a certain amount of clarity the intimacy of the violent act. The fist fight is a cinematic and aësthetic institution. Kids love to see frenzied cowboys fight it out on cheap sets with loud thwacks and the sound of clopping boot heels and jangling spurs; adults love to see grown men engage in ritual bouts of feverish defense, designed to establish dominance. What is Mortal Kombat but a series of fist fights, embellished with kicks and tricks? If lovemaking is deemed pornographic, then the fist fight is mega-pornographic, its consequences much more permanent and its intimacy much more disquieting.
But the best fist fight in all cinema occurs in Jim Sheridan's The Field, from a play by John B. Keene. Toward the end there is a fist fight near a body of water that is among the most brutal ever committed to film. It communicates as few other similar moments have the true horror of punching another man, and its real consequences.
What makes people respond to a movie? What aspects of the cinematic experience really get people going? Usually, it is only the crudest of emotions. Audiences weep like programed robots at tearjerking moments, Sandra Bullock revealing how lonely she is, or Meryl Streep debating whether or not to get out of the pick-up truck. They laugh at the jokes in The Flintstones whether or not they are funny. They cheer when Rocky goes the distance, and achieves a split decision.
In 1973 one crisp, clear autumn night, I was with some friends in the now-defunct Round-Up Theater in downtown Portland, Oregon. The Round-Up was located where a parking structure and an Italian restaurant now reside, a rundown all night theater that showed triple bills 24 hours a day (and changing one of the movies every day, so that every three days there was an entirely new trio). We were there for Big Jake, For a Few Dollars More, and No Way to Treat a Lady, at that time all "old" movies.
It was the ultimate, the parody of the all-night theater. Men snored. The concessions were old and stale. The cops came through periodically sweeping flashlight beams across the sparse crowd. The bathroom was a nightmare out of a Scottish pub.
Down near the front sat a single man - there were only single men, there is always only single men - who cheered on John Wayne in Big Jake. "Get him, Duke," he'd cry out drunkenly as Wayne kicked ass with brief, balletic violence. This lonely, near-homeless man found some stale, fugitive solace in the fantasy of the competent Wayne creating quick justice. Like porno, violence in the movies makes men feel good, and like porno, men feeling good is something that society cannot currently abide.
G. Legman, dirty limerick collector and analyzer of blue humor, theorized that Americans prefer violence over love and sex both in their art and in their lives.
Thus it is interesting to observe the audience of a violent movie when the love scene materializes. In Desperado, Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek eventually get around to making love. The audience, which has been laughing, gasping, and perhaps even cheering at the elaborate, Hong Kong action film-influenced physical pyrotechnics of guns and men, bullets and angles, suddenly grows still. Are they more interested in the sex, or are they made uncomfortable with the real intimacy of this intimate scene? Violence is intimacy without the embarrassment, free of ambiguities and disappointed hopes.
Violence can be portrayed in film in a manner that evokes the gladly somber pieties of concerned liberals. Sheridan's fistfight in The Field, is presented with such authenticity one recoils from the concept of violence, as one does from the graphic images of the L.A. riots.
This is the kind of violence that American women are able to tolerate (I mean the typical American woman, in conflict between what she is bred to do and what the political climate dictates that she do): anti-violent violence. And it is true that as one watches a bad, repetitiously violent film one wonders just what it is that people are getting out of the succession of bland battles. The rote fight scenes, the predictable reversals of fortune - it is as if the cretins in the audience will accept anything as long as it has the patina of aggression. The anti-violent violent films that are popular with the more conventional American woman, horror films, such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle that play and perhaps expiate maternal fears, offer violence and aggression of a much more subtle and psychological nature.
There's a difference between portraying violence and creating a violent world. The Usual Suspects portrays a violent world. So does The Wild Bunch and The Godfather. All arguments are settled with violence, or at least the threat of physical prowess and superior gunmanship. Glengarry Glen Ross portrays a violent world, though no one is physically hurt. It is the violence of language, of words that are meant to hurt, chosen to conquer a foe, be it the boss or a sucker.
Like comedy and romance, violence has its own conventions. One of them is The Stallone Imperative, the visual equivalent of Nietzsche's Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker (That which does not destroy me makes me stronger). Villains dig their own grave when they begin to torture Stallone. He feeds off the pain, grows strong from it, until he bursts from the chains that hold him and vanquishes his enemies. Stallone is the fantasy figure of that pervasive American reality, the put upon little guy, who wishes that somewhere, somehow, he will find release, who may look meek and mild on the outside, but is really Superman.
Violence is essentially a comic form. It is the beauty of the clever mind enacted through a it body. Buster Keaton and Chow Yun-Fat are equivalent. Example: Clint Eastwood in Joe Kidd is walking up a stairway in a hotel to confront Robert Duvall. Duvall's lackey and enforcer, Don Stroud, is standing at the top of the stairs, starting to utter something along the lines of, "He doesn't want to see you." Eastwood, with beautiful simplicity and cunning economy of motion, grabs Stroud by the belt buckle and yanks him forward, sending him tumbling down the stairs in mid-sentence. The scene is funny, the way Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati are funny. It is a scene to which Elmore Leonard pays comic hommage in his novel about Hollywood, Get Shorty. Joe Kidd also happens to have been made from a screenplay by Leonard.
Violence in popular movies is about justice. When Steven Seagal conquers a scurvy villain, you cheer. If he does it cleverly, you laugh. But he must do it, because American cinema inhabits a cult of justice in which the laws have been devised by other movies.
Yet there is something to cheer about when Seagal triumphs. To say one likes this style of violent movies isn't to say that one likes violence in reality, or that one is incapable of appreciating analyses of violence as a phenomenon in more decidedly intellectual films. Nor is it to say that "violence" is a genre unto itself. Rather it is more along the lines of a technique, a comic mode, a discipline, like good dialogue or story structure.
But all of intellectual justifications are ultimately neither here nor there. We are alone in the theater as we are in life. The movies exist to sate our crude needs while pretending to be or do something else. Given this medium, given this world, I like violent films.
—D.K. Holm
A thorough account of The Godfather series can be found at its official website. Screenit gives lists of violent or unsavory moments in movies.
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