Violence and Cinema

Part I: The Death of Boromir

It is an obvious enough cultural fact in America that movies often gain attention for their thrilling action sequences, displays of prowess in war, and, of course, for the streams of blood extracted from a stylized severance of human limbs – Cf. “300.”

Short of displacing all violence from some puritanical desire to save the virgin eyes of children – short of creating the idea of some farcical utopia in which there is no suffering – it is beneficial to discuss the proper place of violence in art. In this post, we will focus specifically on the motion picture.

However, ancillary to this discussion is a clarification that still remains unclear. Many aesthetically educated folks – and here I include myself, if only as an acolyte – detest utterly the idea of an association of art with morality. In the case mentioned above, concerning an irrational fear of violence for the sake of preserving an unreal innocence, we might refer to the early days of the Focus on the Family reviews of newly released films. In these reviews, the question was whether or not the story had a good “moral” at the end or whether it had too much “sex” or “violence,” not whether or not the film was “beautiful.”

Apparently, there is a social separation between “morality” and “beauty.” The separation arises from bad “Christian” – scare quotes – films like “Fireproof.” “Fireproof” is supposed to be a morality tale about a married man addicted to pornography who has a “come to Jesus” moment. But I think it is immoral – both because it lacks beauty and imagination and because it has a design upon the viewer that has little to do with love. The filmmaker seems to have been more concerned with telling everyone that “pornography is bad” whilst wagging his pulpit finger at a bored and tired audience than with producing a beautiful work of art in the Western tradition. Obviously.

It is this understanding of morality that gives pause to the aesthete as he attempts to reconcile the two. But when he realizes that morality is something far other than moralizing, that virtue defies his attempts to contain it, he has no problem with admitting a trinity: goodness, truth, beauty.

And so to violence.

In order not to reduce violence – oh and the excitement! – to mere hacking and thrashing, I would like to proffer an example from Terrence Malick's “To the Wonder.” This latest of the Texas filmmaker's accomplishments portrays the relationship of two lovers, one a young Parisian mother, the other a Kansas environmental analyst. They meet in France, go to Mont Ste.-Michelle, fall in love. She follows him to America. They live in a builder home in the grassy fields under a Kansas sky. The relationship is fraught with cultural tensions, doubtful romance, the utter brokenness of these individuals as they strive for fulfillment and meaning, attempt to find it in each other.

At one point, the woman encounters another American man to whom she is drawn – a tradesman type, a rough. She sleeps with him in a seedy motel. She never smiles. It seems almost a moral experiment.

As an invested viewer, I watched this sequence in a fit of soulful agony. I could not bear the pain of the moment, but my eyes remained open. My heart clung to the asphyxiating beauty of the woman, of that beauty that seemed consummate in the love of the first man, and which was utilized like a well-greased tool by the second.

After the fact, she does not know what to do. She begins to walk confusedly on the side of the highway. The Kansas man finds her, finds out. In Malick's lack of verbal exchange, focus on physical expression, fragmented, frantic cinematography, the psychological struggle is an exquisite strain, as if someone had a grip on your veins.

But in all of this what is expressed? A beauty of wrecked potentiality. A beauty that must be sought and yet which is accessible if one will only choose to see. A beauty that cannot otherwise be portrayed to any believable extent.

We do not know perfection, and thus perfection must be shown by degradation, destruction, desolation. By opposites. Malick implies the possible anthesis. At the end of the movie, though a sort of reconciliation is achieved, the lovers part. We are forced to think of the alternate, but in homage to Malick, I will not state it here. It is the unspeakable, incomprehensible reality whereof this present life is but a shadow and a lie. If there is a lie, there is truth.

So what of violence in cinema? This too:

Boromir's brave breast went forth to meet the serrated point of the Uruk's shaft. Valor can have no expression without violence. And valor is beautiful. Violence is a foil to beauty, and like a foil it falls aside to reveal purpose behind it's veil.

But what if it cannot do this?

Part II: The Death of the Zombie

Violence without meaning, such as in the zombie thriller or the horror film – where guts and limbs and heads are split and crushed and splattered – lacks all imagination whatsoever.

What portends that visceral pleasure we experience when a gaping humanoid drags its festering top half across a field in pursuit of the not-yet-zombified protagonist? What is the significance of our cultural taste for violence of all sorts, especially mutilation of the human form?

→ The idea that all can – and so must – be subjected to our perusal for the selection of what brings most pleasure, excitement, artificial stimulation of the ego. Like masturbation. Violence in every instance is a display of misused power.

When Rick's group in “The Walking Dead” attempts to extract a bloated “swimmer” from a water well, the creature's body simply disintegrates and it's entrails fall one by one and plop into the water. The scene has no overarching significance. The group simply finds another water source. Thus, we must imagine that the design of the director was to draw upon some capacity for sadistic pleasure in his audience. Sadism by its very definition is an expression of a darker form of lust: the desire to have both the physical gratification available from sexual excitement and complete and utter power over the object of that excitement – in this case, a mutilated human form.

And so when scenes of violence – e.g. battle sequences – are placed before our eyes, such as those in Braveheart, where bodies are gratuitously mutilated for the visual feasting of the spectator, we are led to question the effectiveness of that human creation in reaching a manifestation of the beautiful or the sublime.

Sublimity through violence is a sort of intellectual damnation. When we are brought to such a state where our endorphins rush in a whirlwind of ecstasy at the sight of ruptured corpses – especially if we can figure ourselves in the place of the protagonist who ruptures them – then we blunt our ability to experience beauty, to experience the ultimate contrary of violence, which is the dizzying complex of the human person in all of his or her yearnings.

Meaningless violence, then, is ultimately an expression of self-loathing.

Therefore, the filmmaker who employs violence without implying its counterpoint is an enemy to culture, which is, after all, a human enterprise, the pursuit of the best that has been thought and said. In the representation of a violent annihilation of the human or the humanoid, the project of culture is annihilated. Self-loathing takes its place, a mis-anthropology that encourages the collapse of society, and all art with it.