Moral Macabre - The Ethics of Cinematic Violence

As a self-aggrandising wanker, I am possessed of a highly sensitive ethical compass. As a jaded, testosterone-addled film nerd, I also like to watch the inside of someone’s skull being sprayed all over the camera by some sharp talking mother-fucker with a magnum. Nietzsche claimed that the mark of a great personality was how many paradoxes it could contain without destroying itself. Perhaps the reason I love that man so much is because he manages to flatter me for opinions and tastes that ought to be damned as hypocritical.

How can I, or anyone, support the anti-war movement one moment, and then gorge on cinematic violence the next? Should our off-screen ethics have any bearing on the way we feel about onscreen events? Or are ethics a bit of a third wheel when it comes to latex flesh and corn-syrup blood? Tarantino’s Kill Bill series and the recent Frank Miller adaptations Sin City and 300 demonstrate the acceptance of highly stylised, fetishistic bloodshed into cinema’s mainstream. More and more of us are consuming cinematic violence not as an expression of a hero’s moral force as in, say, Rambo or Die Hard, but as a conscious revelry in the spectacle of violence itself. But what place can our ethical convictions hold while we bask in the crimson glow of the latest skull-splitting symphony?

It would be nice to claim that ethical considerations do not apply to films because they are just simulations – neutering cinema as ‘mere entertainment’. But the practise of film criticism is predicated on the idea that films actually mean something. Perhaps then, it is not the films that are insubstantial simulations, but our ethics. Are morals just socialised superego niceties that censor our baser instincts for blood – things that can be neutralised in order to enjoy a hearty celluloid gore fest? Maybe – but again, that’s not the most attractive formulation of the human condition. Surely there must be some way to remain ethical while enjoying lashings of the ol’ ultra-violence.

But before we imbue our bloody filmic diets with ethical meaning, we must first establish the types of violence we are addressing. There are, after all, many flavours of cinematic violence – flavours so distinct you can identify a film’s director by the texture of its violence. There’s the slimy, septic violence of a Cronenburg film (Video Drome, eXistenZ); the snap, crackle and pop violence of a Wachowski Bros film; the crunchy violence of a Rob Zombie film; the insinuated, subterranean violence of a Lynch film; the torrential violence of a Takashi Miike film (Ichi the Killer); the rubbery, gushy, starburst violence of a Tarantino a film; and most recently, the treacly, photoshoppy violence of the Frank Miller film (Sin City, 300). Though the flavours of violence may be diverse, they still generally fall under two categories: ‘sweet’ and ‘savoury’. ‘Sweet’ violence tries to get you to whisper, ‘Cool’, as stylised arcs of blood and intricate kung-fu strikes hurl across the screen. ‘Savoury’ violence is the kind that wants you to screw your eyes up, clutch your gut and rasp, ‘Ow … my immortal soul.’

Our encounters with savoury filmic violence are not difficult to ethically affirm. There is little that is contemptible in confronting the iniquitous, putrid and cripplingly tragic aspects of the human condition. While it may be easier for us to quarantine the more horrifying aspects of our world from investigation – to dismiss the conscious cruelties of our social epochs as ‘evil’ aberrations to the rational progression of ‘the human good’ – it is far less fruitful than studying them.

Films can provide us with an intimate study of the mechanics of cruelty without anyone actually having to be killed. They can show us a psychopath or tyrant’s rationales and modes of evaluation (and indeed, allow us to investigate the modes of cultural evaluation by which we condemn their horrors). A thorough investigation of violence can disarm atrocities of their power to traumatise, debilitate and degrade, preventing them from bewildering us with terror. Even more importantly, a sound knowledge of violence (and our feelings toward it) can help us to prevent violence from subtly colonising our lives.

American Psycho presented us a character whose world was devoid of any meaning beyond egoistic consumption and instrumentalisation, to the point where he hacks people to pieces in order to experience some sort of intensity. While recitations of rape and murder drop casually from the glossed mouths of mellifluous news reporters, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, through its violently nauseating rape and murder scenes that had my friends and I shaking with rage and disgust, reminded us of what utterly harrowing and irreconcilable crimes rape and murder really are. Pan’s Labyrinth coaxes out our inner child with a fantasy story, then traumatises that inner child with savagely realistic war crimes to draw out the profound repulsion we felt for atrocities as children. Confronting such spectacles of violence on the screen re-invokes feelings that we may have thought were long-since desensitised by our constant engagement with violent discourse.

So much for the violence we loathe. But what of the violence we are meant to enjoy? The sweet violence, the violence that film directors package as a savage delight. Confronting this violence always troubled me - despite my wet dreams of being ethically impeccable, I couldn’t stop myself from loving the kaleidoscopic carnage.

For a long time I just assumed that I was a sucker for a bit of sanitised savagery – until I watched the latest spate of Frank Miller adaptations. The bludgeoning and slaughtering in those films was stylistically flawless, but goddamn those films were boring. I was never so happy to hate a film in all my life as when I yawned at one of Sin City’s shaved gorilla-men grind some guy’s face into the road by hanging him out of a moving car. At that exact moment the entirety of my psyche crooned in unison, ‘Yeah … this is utter shit.’ Finally, I knew that there was something more to my appreciation of violence than jugular slicing.

While I appreciated the technical brilliance of the visuals, these Frank Miller mediocrities have managed to get something grievously wrong. Somehow, they’d done what the Bible does – they managed to make violence tedious. This is because the characters of these films are completely vacuous and everything they stood for was a bore. The denizens of Sin City were as thin and transparent as beer-sodden souvlaki paper. And the film’s three plotlines are almost exactly the same: hard man’s sex-working dame gets fucked with by bad men, so hard man shrugs his shoulders and goes on an all-or-nothing rampage until his dame’s shit is sorted.

It was almost as if the film was trying to critique the vapidity of macho posturing by recycling the same humdrum adventure, but unfortunately these towers of testosterone were sincerely pitched at us as objects of admiration rather than ridicule. The three different men were so two dimensional, they actually managed to come off as exactly the same person. Devoid of depth or human interest, Sin City’s fight scenes ended up being as engaging as a computer screen saver. The fight scenes of 300’s Spartans shared a similar fate. 300’s warriors were such caricatures of masculinity that they couldn’t even say ‘I love you’ to their wives for fear of not being tough. Consequently, who was to care if they lived or died? They were just waxed chests attached to a bad cliche.

If you cannot become intoxicated with a film’s character or passionately root for their goals, it is almost impossible to become lost in the frenzy of combat. Unless it can be meaningfully engaged with, filmic violence is nothing other than a reflection on the back of one’s retina. Pulp Fiction was such a treat on account of its magnificently flamboyant characters. We accepted their forays into violence because it seemed like the natural expression of those characters’ potency – they were paying the price of having lived so large, carving the final bloody stanza of their life poem before disappearing into death, exile or domesticity. In good exploitation films, the stylised violence isn’t a meaningless excess, it’s an avenue of a character’s expression. Nowhere is this idea presented more brilliantly than in Jim Jarmusch's west-ploitation flick Dead Man, when the Indian shaman turns to the protagonist William Blake – awkwardly holding a pistol for the first time – and says,

That weapon will replace your tongue.

You will learn to speak through it,

and your poetry will now be written with blood.

Within the cinematic context, violence is a means of expression that does not require the extinguishing of a biological life. When evaluating the ethical viability of sweet violence, perhaps we should ask ourselves what this violence is expressing, rather than prematurely damning the carnage as appealing to some inherent bloodlust.

Published in Voiceworks Magazine # 70

http://www.expressmedia.org.au/voiceworks.php