Blood On Film: A History of Violence in Cinema
"[Columbine killers] Klebold and Harris do not seem to have been inspired by Hitler, as early theories in the press suggested, but by a desire to see their stories told in a Hollywood movie." -- The Washington Post
“Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.” -- Paul Giamatti, actor
The 2007murder rate in Philadelphia is once again on pace to top 400 bodies for the year. Other American cities are also suffering a jump in the rate of violent crimes. Whether related or not, the level and graphic nature of violent images in mainstream film has increased through the decades. If conflict is the center of drama, then violence is the most cinematically compelling way to present conflict.
The early German talkie M (1931) was perhaps the first modern serial-killer film, starring a young Peter Lorre as a child killer. Director Fritz Lang implies the murders through seemingly mundane images. For instance, a rubber ball--minus its owner--bounces through an empty courtyard, a signal that the killer has struck again. The M of the title refers to the chalk letter (signifying “murderer”) slapped on the back of Lorre’s jacket by a citizen, marking him for local gangsters who compete with the police to capture him first. There is an implied moral order that applies to all, whether citizen, cop or criminal, and Lorre has transgressed it. When the mob catches him and takes its revenge, moral order is restored.
In mainstream Hollywood studio films of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in gangster pictures, a handgun is the weapon of choice for dispatching characters. In most of these films, a single shot (invariably to the chest) with little or no blood spells doom for a character. Violence in the movies was clean and neat, unlike in real life. The detective murder-mystery was another popular genre in the same era. Many a C-list actor suffered an early screen death so that the likes of Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man series), Charlie Chan or Dick Tracy could prove his or her genius by solving the crime before the last reel. Violence in such lightweight fare was devoid of emotional impact, instead serving as a parlor game for the witty detectives. Still, the killer was inevitably found and punished and, as in M, moral order was restored.
Alfred Hitchcock was not interested in violence itself, rather the suspense leading up to the act and to the pursuit and capture of the criminal. In an interview, Hitchcock cited a hypothetical cinematic scenario in which he and the interviewer may be discussing something innocuous such as baseball while a bomb ticks away under the desk. Without audience knowledge of the bomb, there is only momentary shock upon its explosion. But if the viewer is clued in to the existence of the bomb, suspense is born. As Hitchcock put it: “The audience is saying, ‘Don’t talk about baseball, there’s a bomb under there! Get rid of it!’” This is the director manipulating his audience, a key element in the art of cinema. Think of it as audience buy-in: the more emotionally invested a viewer is, the more impact a scene (and film) will have.
The best example of Hitchcockian suspense is Rope (1948) in which two upper-class sociopaths serve a dinner party atop an unlocked trunk containing the fresh body of their victim. Their motive is a sense of smug superiority; they see themselves as Nietzschean supermen who transcend traditional morality. Released after World War II and toward the end of the Nuremberg trials, the film is a clear indictment of the superman philosophy.
The concept of the serial killer was featured in Hitchock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) with Joseph Cotten as a bachelor uncle who seduces and strangles rich widows. In a memorable scene, Cotten betrays his misogyny to his family with a diatribe against women presented with a medium shot that gradually zooms into extreme close-up. The psychosis is evident only in his voice and facial expression. A similar theme was featured in his later film Frenzy (1972), which featured a graphic (for its time) rape/murder scene in which the killer repeats the word “lovely” as he strangles a victim.
Hitchcock’s Psycho was a turning point in cinematic violence. Though it seems tame by today’s standards, the shower scene shocked audiences in 1960. A naked woman being repeatedly stabbed with a butcher knife was uncharted territory for Hollywood, as was the fact that an established megastar like Janet Leigh could be dispatched just 30 minutes into a film. There is an implication that Leigh’s character (a fornicator and a thief) gets what she deserves, a theme that would be echoed in later (and lesser) slasher flicks.
War is violence on a grand scale and war pictures are an important cinematic genre. The early Best Picture winner All Quiet On The Western Front (1930) presents the awful reality of war. In one scene, Lew Ayres’ character shares a foxhole with the corpse of an enemy soldier he has killed, imploring the dead man’s forgiveness. In Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), the failed trench warfare tactics of World War I lead officer/lawyer Kirk Douglas to defend three soldiers who are to be court martialed and executed for cowardice. In the post-Vietnam hangover of the late 1970s, films such as The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) feature extremely violent scenes showing war as a primal force flourishing in the jungle, destroying civilized men. Using a jungle setting in a different time and place, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006) shows the clash of two civilizations, as the Mayans seek to destroy a small tribe and use its men for human sacrifices to appease their gods.
In an era with ever more graphic violence, the sheer realism of Steven Spielberg’s World War II film Saving Private Ryan (1998) still managed to shock audiences. The documentary-style depiction of the D-Day Normandy invasion in the film’s first twenty minutes viscerally portrays that fateful day as no history book can. However, a later scene with no violence is equally riveting: a woman on an idyllic American homestead crumples to the ground when military officials arrive to inform her of her sons’ deaths in the war. The scene is wordless; the image is enough. It is an iconic scene, repeated in real life thousands of times in that war and other wars, and even today.
Terrorism is a compelling topic for cinema. Spielberg’s Munich (2005) dramatizes the Israeli hunt for the 1972 Black September terrorists in the normal three-act-plot-with- Hollywood-stars treatment, and is therefore not as effective as other recent films. Omagh (2004) portrays the 1998 Irish car bombing that killed 29 people by focusing on the father of one victim who struggles to cope in the aftermath. As in his earlier Bloody Sunday (2002), British director Paul Greengrass uses documentary-style visuals in United 93 (2006). The film puts the viewer on board the ill-fated flight as the passenger revolt against the 9-11 Islamic hijackers is recreated in excruciatingly realistic fashion. It is key to the sense of realism that United 93 doesn’t feature big-name actors, which would only have detracted from the film’s impact. The ground control scenes use many of the actual airline and government officials who were in charge that day, recreating the actual words spoken. Some critics see this as a disturbing development in the already blurred division between real life and art/entertainment.
In the late 20th century, as society changed, so did the cinematic treatment of violence. Amid the onslaught of slasher films of the 1980s, critics Siskel and Ebert denounced the use of point of view (POV) camera work in which the viewer sees through the eyes of the killer, in effect turning the viewer into the killer. Nihilism was an emerging theme, particularly manifested as violence for its own sake. Stanley Kubrick’s seminal A Clockwork Orange (1971) portrayed assault, rape and murder as leisure pursuits for young gang members in a near-future society. In River’s Edge (1986) a group of California teens have minimal reaction to the murder of a friend at the hands of her boyfriend. Her death makes no impact on them except as a curiosity, as they venture into the woods to see her naked body. They are empty vessels from broken homes, devoid of souls. The moral order of earlier films is utterly absent, replaced by a moral vacuum. Director Gus van Sant’s Elephant (2003) is a fictionalized retelling of the Columbine massacre. The film has a strange dream-like quality; the West Coast, new-age high school and its doomed students seem vaguely alien, somehow not quite right. There is no dramatic build up to the shootings, only a strange sense of ennui which is ultimately more disturbing than even the cathartic violence in Taxi Driver (1976). Van Sant is clearly questioning the culture that produces such kids.
The serial killer has become a cinematic cliché. Films such as Silence of the Lambs (1991), Copycat (1995), Se7en (1995), The Cell (2000) and Zodiac (2007) follow a by-the-numbers formula: the heroic yet flawed protagonist matches wits with the deranged yet brilliant serial killer. In these films, Hitchcockian suspense is taken to ever-higher levels of tension but the violence is far more graphic. One fictional killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, has become a sort of cottage-industry, starring in Lambs, Red Dragon (2002--a remake of the superior 1986 film Manhunter), Hannibal (2001) and even a prequel, Hannibal Rising (2007). Hannibal is of particular note for one bizarre scene in which Dr. Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) serves an anesthetized victim (Ray Liotta) a cooked piece of his own brain while the helpless protagonist (Julianne Moore) watches in horror. Through special effects, Liotta’s scalp is gone and his exposed brain (minus one chunk) is displayed as he unknowingly devours his own gray matter. It is a shocking scene, similar to Psycho in the sense that this is not a low-budget slasher flick with no-name actors but rather a mainstream, high-budget blockbuster with established stars. It is as if the digital technology available to the f/x wizards has trumped any moral responsibility the actors, writer and director may have.
Quentin Tarantino’s films are noted both for witty dialogue and extreme violence. His masterwork Pulp Fiction (1994) manages to make two hit men (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson) seem funny and likeable even as they commit multiple murders. In one scene, Travolta’s character accidentally shoots a man in a moving vehicle, causing his head to explode. It is a twin testament to Tarantino’s skill and to the viewer’s tolerance for violence that a subsequent scene, in which the two killers clean blood and brains out of the car, is played for laughs. Tarantino’s two Kill Bill films (2003 and 2004) feature minimal plot development, instead featuring scene after scene of martial-arts style sword fighting, with the resulting body count in the hundreds.
Film is above all a visual medium, and violence is visually compelling. Thus far the 21st century has brought ever-more violent images to the screen. Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) was criticized for making a fetish of Christ’s suffering, yet the film exceeded all box office expectations as Christians and others flocked to the theaters. Action films such as Sin City (2005) and Shoot ‘Em Up (2007) feature cartoonish hyper-violence. Remakes, sequels and prequels of earlier horror/serial killer films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and The Hitcher are each more violent than the originals. There is in modern cinema a perverse fascination with the human body and the endless number of ways it can be tortured. Film series such as Saw and Hostel are essentially nihilistic nightmares manifested on screen. In Saw (2004), a serial killer doesn’t directly kill his victims; instead he arranges scenarios in which one person must kill another to save him or herself. In Hostel (2005), a Slovakian hostel is a literal tourist trap: rich psychotics pay hefty sums for the privilege of torturing and murdering the tourists who stay there. There is even a pricing structure depending on the tourist’s nationality, with Americans being the most coveted (and therefore most expensive) victims.
Perhaps the most violent movie ever made is not a Hollywood production but a French one, the little seen (in the US) Irreversible (2002). It is simply unlike any other film, and though it has only two scenes of violence, they are more gut-wrenching than anything out of Hollywood. Told in reverse chronological order, Irreversible begins with two enraged men, Marcus and Pierre, searching through a gay sex club for another man, whom neither has seen before; all they know of him is his nickname Le Tenia. The scene is jarring, disorienting and hellish. Upon identifying Le Tenia, Marcus bashes his head in with a fire extinguisher; you actually see the man’s head cave in. Later we see the reason for their rage: Le Tenia’s anal rape of Marcus’ pregnant girlfriend in a subway tunnel. As horrific as the fire extinguisher scene is, the rape is worse. The camera is implacably still, forcing us to endure a 10-minute long scene of unbearable brutality. The film has been criticized for its graphic violence but such criticism misses the point. Director Gaspar Noe is holding up a mirror to us, showing us the violence that occurs every day in every part of the world (the rape), and the violence that we are all capable of inflicting (the vengeful murder).
One film is remarkable in its honest questioning of the reasons for violence. The Coen Brothers’ Fargo (1996) is a tale of kidnapping for ransom that spirals into multiple murders. Upon capturing the only surviving suspect, police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) vainly seeks to understand the man in the back of her police cruiser. Driving through the spare landscape of a frozen Minnesota field, Marge ponders the evil that can produce such mayhem. In doing so, she makes an eloquent plea against nihilism and violence:
“So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't ya know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it.”
The killer offers no response. There is none to give. As the 21st century continues, it is the task of the serious filmmaker to present the violence in the human heart without glorifying it. Like Noe and the Coens, they must show us the worst of human nature so that we remain ever mindful of it.