My husband and I differ greatly on our views of horror movies. He enjoys them. I continually ask, "Why would I want to spend 2 hours of rare free time SCARED?"
Debora
· 1 year ago
I have to say I completely disagree. I love watching Law and Order type of shows and don't come away from that thinking violence is normal. Nor do I feel aggresive afterwards. I don't like or watch graphic or very violent series and films myself, but I suppose what people get out of that is what I can get out of playing an aggressive rock tune (like Limb Bizkit's Break Stuff) very loudly. I think our brains and ways of thinking are way to complex to directly relate the topic of what we're watching with what effect it will have on us.
Rick_Juliusson
· 1 year ago
Hmm, there are a great many studies out there showing that KIDS become more violent after watching such stuff, but I wonder if it's the same for adults?
I agree that it would be extremist to say that an occasional show will turn us into psychopaths, but I still believe that the cumulative effect of watching 20 hours a week of violence would deeply affect my energies and perspectives in a different and less healthy way than if those same 20 hours were spent watching Mary Poppins, or working in the garden.
My friend has taught me a new phrase, "State equals trait." The longer we stay in a certain emotional state, the more ingrained it becomes. Yes we're complex and it's not as simple as adding up the hours to see the effects on us, but what we immerse ourselves in must influence us.
Daniel Gibbons
· 1 year ago
It's interesting, because while I abhor the various "torture" movies that have been foisted on us in the past few years, there are very different kinds of movie and TV violence. Even on the torture note, I'd certainly say that Funny Games is very different from Saw or Hostel. Unforgiven is, as you say, a very powerful and well-made film, but it's also an important work about morality, and its violence is certainly not gratuitous. In fact it's a hugely valuable counterpoint to the mythology of the American West.
But it is amazing that American media in particular is so desensitized to violence and so over-sensitized to sex and depictions of sexuality. And even five years ago I remember seeing an episode of Entertainment Tonight in which one of the "controversies" they were breathlessly reporting on was an interracial kiss on primetime TV. Somehow a glorification of weapons and violence is less harmful to our children than honest depictions of real life??!!
Kellye
· 1 year ago
I have to say I disagree with you on all counts. I'm in the middle of writing a screenplay about a serial killer, and I think horror movies and movies which are violent have as much of a legitimate position in entertainment as any other type of movie. And as a rule, I think all cinema is exploitative - it's all carefully designed to elicit a reaction from the audience.
For example, in one of the first scenes of the movie I'm writing, the soon-to-be serial killer (at this point a child) burns his abusive father alive. This scene was deliberately chosen for its extreme level of violence. Why? A) It illustrates a certain level of sociopathy in my main character that I want to impress upon the viewer early on, and B) It lends the satisfaction of revenge.
It's *calculated* violence, designed to invoke emotions we don't generally feel on a day to day basis. Before the boy burns his father alive, we feel sorry for him. Afterwards, we are afraid of him (and interested to see what he'll do next...)
I am a horror fanatic, but I honestly can't tell you what the American fascination with violence and murder is all about. I can't even really tell you why I love horror movies so much, but I've been enthralled with them ever since I was a kid. I first read "Pet Sematary" by Stephen King in the third grade, and movies like "The Shining" or "Halloween," while they always keep me on the edge of my seat, have never really frightened me.
My mother shares my horror obsession. Between the two of us we probably have most American horror movies that have ever been made.
On the other hand, my brother and father can't stand what they call "bloody flicks." To this day, my 21 year-old brother (a big tough guy in the Navy) will not watch horror movies or movies with excessive violence because they give him nightmares. They just bore my father, who finds them completely unrealistic. Probably because has never been in a violent situation and does not have the imagination to relate to one.
I think one of the things that people like about horror movies is the adrenaline rush and the chance to think about what they personally would do in the main character's circumstances (at least with old-school slasher films). The audience automatically puts themselves in that situation in their heads as they watch. "Stupid girl, you should know better than to run upstairs!" or "That guy is a real jerk. He deserves to die." In real life, we would not be allowed to judge these people in a life-or-death situation, but since this is a movie, there are a number of rules that have to be followed and we are free to criticize people's actions as we like. Also, horror movies have a very clear-cut perspective on good vs. evil, for the most part, and people like to root for the hero when the villain is really and truly evil. The most evil things we can think of as a species are inherently violent, so that's why our villains are violent. If your bad guy sets people on fire for fun, it is much more satisfying to see him fall.
Also, most people who love violent movies are not exposed to that kind of violence on a day-to-day basis (if ever). People crave all kinds of human experiences, good and bad. Violent movies are a way to experience violence without actually having to be in a violent situation.
MoJo
· 1 year ago
My husband and I were talking about this a week or so ago - right after we watched 'An American Crime', which is based on the same story as The Girl Next Door. I was thinking that I should stop caving in to my morbid sense of curiosity when I'm renting movies, and just let these types go by unnoticed. Saving Grace was a similar waste of attention. And the one movie I actually regret seeing and so sorely wished I could erase from my memory is Trade.
But I have to admit - I'm a big fan of action/sci-fi flicks, and I agree that they are somewhat of an outlet and opportunity for experience. We have what we call an an 'angry chick' collection of movies - Aeon Flux, Resident Evil, Immortal, Serenity, Lara Croft and I have to admit, I do sometimes live vicariously through their round houses and upper cuts...better at home than in my local coffee shop when someone butts into the line ;-)
Robert Arjet
· 12 months ago
This is such a complex issue, and I think a lot of the problem is that the public debate tends to be carried on in such declamatory and alarmist tones that a lot of the people best suited to discussing it find themselves backed defensively into a corner, and end up shouting back at the would-be censors, rather than really trying to participate in an honest discussion.
Case in point. I wrote my dissertation on masculinity and gun violence in action films, and was stunned by how little work there was on the topic at the time. One of the few semi-scholarly books I could find directly on the topic of film violence was a compilation of writings from the National Society of Film Critics, and to my disappointment, many of the articles were of the “I saw such-and-such a film and it didn’t turn me into an axe murderer” variety. At a national meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies, I ran into a lot of the same attitude--People who could discuss in great detail and subtle nuance the effects of racism, sexism, homophobia, class inequalities, etc., etc., in movies seemed to suddenly shut down when it came to violence. It went without saying that movies that perpetuated racist stereotypes or which cast women solely as sexualized victims and/or predators were bad. But movies in which men killed other men relentlessly and cheerfully were for some reason to be defended. In fact, I heard some heated criticism of a CDC study that merely attempted to quantify the amounts and types of violence in the movies released in a certain year. Had it been looking only at violence against women, I have no doubt that it would have been applauded. Had it been trying to painstakingly document every homophobic joke, stereotype, and image, same thing. But since the topic was “violence,” suddenly everyone’s anti-censorship alarms went off, and the propriety of the very project suddenly became the subject of discussion.
That being said, I thought I’d try to give my attempts at answers to some of Rick’s questions, and some of the other questions raised here.
#1 “Why oh why did any person write, produce, distribute or watch it?”
The cynical answer to “write,” “produce,” and “distribute” is “because it makes money.” Even if everyone in Hollywood believed that movies like this were bad for the collective consciousness (and the vast majority don’t), they would still get made as long as there was a market for them.
“Watch” is trickier, and much more important—if no one watched them, they wouldn’t get made. Not that there isn’t a meaningful chicken-and-egg thing going on here (we watch what’s available, not what we would like to be available), but still—as long as movies like this sell tickets and rent DVDs, more will follow.
But why do we watch them? One of my favorite theories is that it’s the same reason we slow down when we pass a wreck on the freeway. Yes, there’s always some amount of morbid curiosity, but I have a hard time not believing that we’re hard-wired to pay attention to scary things. Those flashing lights on the side of the road are the modern-day equivalent to hearing a scream in the forest—we know that something dangerous is near, something with potentially very bad consequences has just happened to someone. For the good of the species, let alone our own ability to survive the afternoon, we want to pay attention. It’s just like when the whole restaurant suddenly gets quiet when table five’s argument gets too loud: we all have a gut-level reaction that tells us “Pay attention. Bad things could very easily happen in close proximity. You need to be aware of this situation, so you can prepare to drop those berries you’re gathering and run like hell if the situation warrants.”
We see the same thing in the checkout line every day. Ever wonder why all those magazines have celebrities’ faces on them? Turns out that we’re hard-wired to pay attention to faces we recognize. I may not think much of Adam Sandler’s acting abilities, but I know his face, and when I see it, something deep in my brain (and this is well-documented, largely by the marketing industry) lights up and says, “Hey—you know that guy. Pay attention!”
And fear, violence, pain, suffering, etc., do a lot more than just make us pay attention. There’s a whole cocktail of neurotransmitters that starts flowing when we get scared, or grossed out, or otherwise alarmed, and they stimulate the hell out of us. Just like a roller coaster, a lot of us find that stimulation pleasurable. On the back of my brother’s motorcycle, those sensations are terrifying, because they mean there’s a very real chance I might die if he doesn’t slow the hell down. On the Texas Cyclone, I know I’m physically safe, so I can enjoy the stimulation, knowing that it’s contained in a mechanism that only presents the illusion of danger.
And I really don’t think there’s anything new about this at all. As far as I know, you can find torture, abuse, cruelty, and garden-variety violence in the folklore of any culture you want. People have always sat around telling each other scary stories. Fear is, in the physiological sense, exciting. That doesn’t mean that the current Hollywood context is remotely the same as a bunch of Greek kids shivering with delighted fear as Uncle Sophocles describes Procrustes sharpening his knife in grisly detail. And hopefully our moral sense, and our understanding of how our cultural consumption influences us have evolved a little in the last 2500 years. But I think a lot of the basic motivations are the same.
#2” What’s with our fascination with crime shows like LA Law, kidnap movies like Ransom, heck let’s even throw in Rambo.”
Rambo is actually a very good example here. In the embarrassment of the sequels most people forgot that the first Rambo movie (spoiler alert) was about a guy with PTSD who withstands a lot of abuse but finally flips out and causes a whole lot of havoc killing exactly one person in the process—his tormenter, the abusive sheriff. More importantly, no one seems to remember that the movie ends with John Rambo being led away with a blanket over his shoulders, sobbing like a baby. To me, the strongest message of the movie is something along the lines of “Ever wonder what happens when you turn ordinary young men into trained killers and then subject them to the horrors of war? How about we watch and see what it looks like when a green beret goes apeshit in Small Town USA, instead of a Vietnamese village. Not too pretty, eh?” But no one remembers that, and that’s one of my biggest problems with 90% of violent movies out there. If you start studying film violence, I guarantee you will not get past your first book without hitting The Wild Bunch, specifically the gunfight at the end that revolutionized gun violence in film. Sam Peckinpah invented a lot of the tropes that we still expect to see forty years later, but he did it with the express purpose of showing “How bloody f**king awful violence is.” At the time, it worked—audiences were stunned, and a nation that grew up with Audie Murphy and John Wayne mowing down hapless Germans and Japanese had a little help from Peckinpah in coming to grips with what was happening in Vietnam. Unfortunately, once a film is released, it’s beyond its creators control, and now that gunfight is usually seen as a celebratory climax, a kind of orgy of destruction.
#3 “Anything to discontinue the self-inflicted exposure to the dark side.”
And I think that’s something very nearly at the core of the question. We have a love-hate relationship with the dark side—with our dark sides—and a lot of movies work on that. We like seeing the dark side vanquished (Superman, et al.) but we also like seeing the dark side get out and play a little. Perhaps it’s no surprise that in Batman’s (a superhero premised on the righteous channeling of the dark side) two biggest movies, the Joker stole the show. That part of us that wants to believe the world is ultimately a safe and orderly place wants to see the bad guy lose. But to the extent that we are in touch with and electrified by our Jungian dark side—in a healthy way or not—we also wants to see him dance around in all his cruel, sadistic, megalomaniac glory before he gets put back in his bottle.
#4 “There Must Be Better Ways to Learn About What’s Happening in the World”
99% of movie and TV violence has absolutely nothing to do with what’s going on in the world. I’ve been accused of “shielding my children from reality” because I strongly restrict their TV, movies, and video games. Occasionally that’s what I’m doing, like when I turn off NPR before the description of the latest massacre gets too far. But what do CSI, Dirty Harry, or Scream have to do with reality? Those are, certainly as far as the violence goes, gross distortions of reality, and ones I think are genuinely harmful to my kids.
No, the violence that’s going on in the world isn’t fun, and it generally isn’t entertaining. There’s a good bit of crossover, mostly on the news, but TV and movies are generally pretty poor places to learn about the world around us.
[Just on a side note, Saving Private Ryan is a pet peeve of mine. It got buzz as an anti-war movie, but Spielberg explicitly made it as a pro-war movie. It was his justification for why we absolutely had to go into WWII. And if you compare the horrifyingly realistic opening with the wildly unrealistic—but cinematically very, very satisfying—ending, that makes perfect sense. Manipulative bastard.]
#5 “They just bore my father, who finds them completely unrealistic. Probably because has never been in a violent situation and does not have the imagination to relate to one.”
I find that idea really interesting. Horror movies are wildly unrealistic as a general rule. And people who have been in violent situations are constantly quoted as saying that it “wasn’t like the movies.” I spent a good bit of time researching how firearms violence actually happens, and then comparing it to what happens in the movies. The short version is that they really have almost nothing in common. Most police gunfights are over in literally less time than it takes to say, “Go ahead, make my day.” If horror, crime, and war movies were filmed in a realistic way, they would be dreadfully un-cinematic. We don’t want realism when we go to the movies. We want a lot of things, but generally realism isn’t one of them.
#6 “If your bad guy sets people on fire for fun, it is much more satisfying to see him fall.”
That’s absolutely true, to the extent that we get satisfaction from seeing the bad guy fall. But the problem with that is that we have to watch him set people on fire first. This is a question that comes up all the time when film folks discuss rape. Obviously, rape is one of those things “happening in the world” that movies can teach us about. The Burning Bed and Extremities come to mind immediately as movies that helped change the way our culture looks at rape and spousal abuse. Likewise, The Accused, but the problem is that if you want to discuss rape, you have to talk about women being raped. If you want to dramatize rape, you have to show women being raped. And now you’re in the position of creating a film, an aesthetic work, that shows rape in a necessarily aesthetic way. And every time you make a movie that involves a woman being raped, you’re doing it knowing that a woman’s rape has now become an aestheticized event, that is going to provide pleasure—artistic, sexual, and/or sadistic, to at least a small percentage of the audience (not to mention which is going to re-traumatize a much larger segment of the audience).
Which is where The Accused tried a different tack. I haven’t actually seen it, for some of the reasons Rick discusses above, but my understanding is that the rape scene (based on an actual incident) was filmed completely from the victim’s POV. This was supposed to both make the audience fully identify with the victim and make it much harder for anyone to detach themselves from the horror of what was being shown an actually take pleasure in it. Did it work? To an extent, probably. But I’ll tell you this—when I Googled “Foster” and “The Accused” just to make sure I got the title right, hit number eight is “The Accused Full Rape Scene” available for download.
Which brings me, I hope, to some kind of conclusion. A lot of what Kellye says are things I more or less agree with—we watch horror films because for most of us, there are pleasures in being horrified. Most of the people I know who don’t like any kind of violent or scary movies fall into two categories. Most are people who have real issues with the dark side, and get freaked out by this kind of stuff: they get a lot of mileage out of being martyrs, or out of being fragile, or they’ve been abused or victimized and they quite legitimately don’t want to bring that stuff up again.
The rest are people who have a pretty healthy relationship with the dark side, just not the Jungian “I embrace my inner vampire” type. It’s more like the “I know what suffering really looks like, and I take no joy in seeing flimsy representations of it” type.
As for me, I write screenplays, too. My first was very dark side: a guy kills someone and then goes crazy trying to figure out what to do with the body. Very black humor, the kind of stuff that some people really don’t like, the kind of stuff that some people walk out on. But I’ve also considered and rejected dozens of writing ideas because they dip into the dark side gratuitously, and maybe that’s the most important word for me in all this. Going dark, dredging up the violence and the horror, be it WWII or rape or child abuse is really, really heavy stuff. We live in a culture where it’s not treated that way—kids watch dozens of murders a week, and we barely blink an eye—but I think we do that at our peril. Dredging up the dark side is a lot like using the heavy-duty hallucinogens: LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, etc. If you’re just doing it for fun, for some kicks because you’re bored and it’s Friday night, watch out. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun, but you’re playing with fire, and there can be some very nasty consequences. If you’re trying to take a trip to your inner space, if you want to connect with the cosmos or understand the human condition, you can accomplish a lot that way. But you’d better still watch out. These are power tools, and like fire—the original power tool—bad things happen when people play with them carelessly. Sam Peckinpah was being anything but gratuitous when he wired his actors with blood squibs for both entry and exit wounds—a cinematic first—and then packed them with ground beef, but what he ended up doing was inventing several of the basic techniques now used by most of the gratuitous cinematic violence out there. Jodie Foster was being anything but gratuitous when she filmed her famously disturbing scene of a real-life gang rape, but that didn’t stop it from being taken grossly out of context and turned into another eager Friday-night download.
But those are from the perspective of the creator. What about as a consumer? I’d say think about the word “gratuitous” when you think about horror, crime and violence at the movies. Yes, there’s a place for violence and horror in what we watch, but just like the celeb’s faces on the magazines in the grocery store, the deep resonances that horror and violence have are nine times out of ten just being exploited for a cheap thrill or a quick buck.
Is this something you want to put in your head? Is it really going to benefit you? If it’s just fun, is it worth it? If it’s carrying an important message, is the education worth the brush with the dark side? Or if you look at it as a dance with the dark side, how good is the dance? How fulfilling will it really be? If it’s worth it, go for it. You know your relationship with the dark side, and you know how to manage it. Anything with the deep psychological resonance of fear and violence is going to be different for every person. I think we should watch—and write, and film—what we think we ought to, but we ought to think about it first. I hear myself sounding all preachy and prudish right now, but I think it’s a legitimate question to ask, at least on some level, before buying a ticket or renting a DVD: “Will this movie make me a better person?” or at least, “Will this movie nurture me?”
And yes, there are times when Buffy the Vampire Slayer has nurtured me. There’s some intense violence at the end of season six, and it’s in the service of one of the most beautiful and haunting stories of grief and forgiveness that I know. The story wouldn’t be the same without the violence, and it’s that waltz with the dark side that gives the story much of its power.
Maybe we, as a culture, are with film violence about where we were with (real) sex about forty years ago. We’ve admitted that it can be a lot of fun, but we’re still not willing to admit that it’s got a hell of a downside if mishandled. We’re still not able to talk about it very well, with most debates coming down to “It’s evil!” vs. “It’s harmless!” I’d like to think that discussions like this are an every day step towards a healthier and more mature relationship with our collective cinematic dark side.
colocation
· 8 months ago
If you are interested in horror you should look at Mark Kermode's writing on horror films.
All Comments
I think our brains and ways of thinking are way to complex to directly relate the topic of what we're watching with what effect it will have on us.
I agree that it would be extremist to say that an occasional show will turn us into psychopaths, but I still believe that the cumulative effect of watching 20 hours a week of violence would deeply affect my energies and perspectives in a different and less healthy way than if those same 20 hours were spent watching Mary Poppins, or working in the garden.
My friend has taught me a new phrase, "State equals trait." The longer we stay in a certain emotional state, the more ingrained it becomes. Yes we're complex and it's not as simple as adding up the hours to see the effects on us, but what we immerse ourselves in must influence us.
But it is amazing that American media in particular is so desensitized to violence and so over-sensitized to sex and depictions of sexuality. And even five years ago I remember seeing an episode of Entertainment Tonight in which one of the "controversies" they were breathlessly reporting on was an interracial kiss on primetime TV. Somehow a glorification of weapons and violence is less harmful to our children than honest depictions of real life??!!
For example, in one of the first scenes of the movie I'm writing, the soon-to-be serial killer (at this point a child) burns his abusive father alive. This scene was deliberately chosen for its extreme level of violence. Why? A) It illustrates a certain level of sociopathy in my main character that I want to impress upon the viewer early on, and B) It lends the satisfaction of revenge.
It's *calculated* violence, designed to invoke emotions we don't generally feel on a day to day basis. Before the boy burns his father alive, we feel sorry for him. Afterwards, we are afraid of him (and interested to see what he'll do next...)
I am a horror fanatic, but I honestly can't tell you what the American fascination with violence and murder is all about. I can't even really tell you why I love horror movies so much, but I've been enthralled with them ever since I was a kid. I first read "Pet Sematary" by Stephen King in the third grade, and movies like "The Shining" or "Halloween," while they always keep me on the edge of my seat, have never really frightened me.
My mother shares my horror obsession. Between the two of us we probably have most American horror movies that have ever been made.
On the other hand, my brother and father can't stand what they call "bloody flicks." To this day, my 21 year-old brother (a big tough guy in the Navy) will not watch horror movies or movies with excessive violence because they give him nightmares. They just bore my father, who finds them completely unrealistic. Probably because has never been in a violent situation and does not have the imagination to relate to one.
I think one of the things that people like about horror movies is the adrenaline rush and the chance to think about what they personally would do in the main character's circumstances (at least with old-school slasher films). The audience automatically puts themselves in that situation in their heads as they watch. "Stupid girl, you should know better than to run upstairs!" or "That guy is a real jerk. He deserves to die." In real life, we would not be allowed to judge these people in a life-or-death situation, but since this is a movie, there are a number of rules that have to be followed and we are free to criticize people's actions as we like. Also, horror movies have a very clear-cut perspective on good vs. evil, for the most part, and people like to root for the hero when the villain is really and truly evil. The most evil things we can think of as a species are inherently violent, so that's why our villains are violent. If your bad guy sets people on fire for fun, it is much more satisfying to see him fall.
Also, most people who love violent movies are not exposed to that kind of violence on a day-to-day basis (if ever). People crave all kinds of human experiences, good and bad. Violent movies are a way to experience violence without actually having to be in a violent situation.
But I have to admit - I'm a big fan of action/sci-fi flicks, and I agree that they are somewhat of an outlet and opportunity for experience. We have what we call an an 'angry chick' collection of movies - Aeon Flux, Resident Evil, Immortal, Serenity, Lara Croft and I have to admit, I do sometimes live vicariously through their round houses and upper cuts...better at home than in my local coffee shop when someone butts into the line ;-)
Case in point. I wrote my dissertation on masculinity and gun violence in action films, and was stunned by how little work there was on the topic at the time. One of the few semi-scholarly books I could find directly on the topic of film violence was a compilation of writings from the National Society of Film Critics, and to my disappointment, many of the articles were of the “I saw such-and-such a film and it didn’t turn me into an axe murderer” variety. At a national meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies, I ran into a lot of the same attitude--People who could discuss in great detail and subtle nuance the effects of racism, sexism, homophobia, class inequalities, etc., etc., in movies seemed to suddenly shut down when it came to violence. It went without saying that movies that perpetuated racist stereotypes or which cast women solely as sexualized victims and/or predators were bad. But movies in which men killed other men relentlessly and cheerfully were for some reason to be defended. In fact, I heard some heated criticism of a CDC study that merely attempted to quantify the amounts and types of violence in the movies released in a certain year. Had it been looking only at violence against women, I have no doubt that it would have been applauded. Had it been trying to painstakingly document every homophobic joke, stereotype, and image, same thing. But since the topic was “violence,” suddenly everyone’s anti-censorship alarms went off, and the propriety of the very project suddenly became the subject of discussion.
That being said, I thought I’d try to give my attempts at answers to some of Rick’s questions, and some of the other questions raised here.
#1 “Why oh why did any person write, produce, distribute or watch it?”
The cynical answer to “write,” “produce,” and “distribute” is “because it makes money.” Even if everyone in Hollywood believed that movies like this were bad for the collective consciousness (and the vast majority don’t), they would still get made as long as there was a market for them.
“Watch” is trickier, and much more important—if no one watched them, they wouldn’t get made. Not that there isn’t a meaningful chicken-and-egg thing going on here (we watch what’s available, not what we would like to be available), but still—as long as movies like this sell tickets and rent DVDs, more will follow.
But why do we watch them? One of my favorite theories is that it’s the same reason we slow down when we pass a wreck on the freeway. Yes, there’s always some amount of morbid curiosity, but I have a hard time not believing that we’re hard-wired to pay attention to scary things. Those flashing lights on the side of the road are the modern-day equivalent to hearing a scream in the forest—we know that something dangerous is near, something with potentially very bad consequences has just happened to someone. For the good of the species, let alone our own ability to survive the afternoon, we want to pay attention. It’s just like when the whole restaurant suddenly gets quiet when table five’s argument gets too loud: we all have a gut-level reaction that tells us “Pay attention. Bad things could very easily happen in close proximity. You need to be aware of this situation, so you can prepare to drop those berries you’re gathering and run like hell if the situation warrants.”
We see the same thing in the checkout line every day. Ever wonder why all those magazines have celebrities’ faces on them? Turns out that we’re hard-wired to pay attention to faces we recognize. I may not think much of Adam Sandler’s acting abilities, but I know his face, and when I see it, something deep in my brain (and this is well-documented, largely by the marketing industry) lights up and says, “Hey—you know that guy. Pay attention!”
And fear, violence, pain, suffering, etc., do a lot more than just make us pay attention. There’s a whole cocktail of neurotransmitters that starts flowing when we get scared, or grossed out, or otherwise alarmed, and they stimulate the hell out of us. Just like a roller coaster, a lot of us find that stimulation pleasurable. On the back of my brother’s motorcycle, those sensations are terrifying, because they mean there’s a very real chance I might die if he doesn’t slow the hell down. On the Texas Cyclone, I know I’m physically safe, so I can enjoy the stimulation, knowing that it’s contained in a mechanism that only presents the illusion of danger.
And I really don’t think there’s anything new about this at all. As far as I know, you can find torture, abuse, cruelty, and garden-variety violence in the folklore of any culture you want. People have always sat around telling each other scary stories. Fear is, in the physiological sense, exciting. That doesn’t mean that the current Hollywood context is remotely the same as a bunch of Greek kids shivering with delighted fear as Uncle Sophocles describes Procrustes sharpening his knife in grisly detail. And hopefully our moral sense, and our understanding of how our cultural consumption influences us have evolved a little in the last 2500 years. But I think a lot of the basic motivations are the same.
#2” What’s with our fascination with crime shows like LA Law, kidnap movies like Ransom, heck let’s even throw in Rambo.”
Rambo is actually a very good example here. In the embarrassment of the sequels most people forgot that the first Rambo movie (spoiler alert) was about a guy with PTSD who withstands a lot of abuse but finally flips out and causes a whole lot of havoc killing exactly one person in the process—his tormenter, the abusive sheriff. More importantly, no one seems to remember that the movie ends with John Rambo being led away with a blanket over his shoulders, sobbing like a baby. To me, the strongest message of the movie is something along the lines of “Ever wonder what happens when you turn ordinary young men into trained killers and then subject them to the horrors of war? How about we watch and see what it looks like when a green beret goes apeshit in Small Town USA, instead of a Vietnamese village. Not too pretty, eh?”
But no one remembers that, and that’s one of my biggest problems with 90% of violent movies out there. If you start studying film violence, I guarantee you will not get past your first book without hitting The Wild Bunch, specifically the gunfight at the end that revolutionized gun violence in film. Sam Peckinpah invented a lot of the tropes that we still expect to see forty years later, but he did it with the express purpose of showing “How bloody f**king awful violence is.” At the time, it worked—audiences were stunned, and a nation that grew up with Audie Murphy and John Wayne mowing down hapless Germans and Japanese had a little help from Peckinpah in coming to grips with what was happening in Vietnam. Unfortunately, once a film is released, it’s beyond its creators control, and now that gunfight is usually seen as a celebratory climax, a kind of orgy of destruction.
#3 “Anything to discontinue the self-inflicted exposure to the dark side.”
And I think that’s something very nearly at the core of the question. We have a love-hate relationship with the dark side—with our dark sides—and a lot of movies work on that. We like seeing the dark side vanquished (Superman, et al.) but we also like seeing the dark side get out and play a little. Perhaps it’s no surprise that in Batman’s (a superhero premised on the righteous channeling of the dark side) two biggest movies, the Joker stole the show. That part of us that wants to believe the world is ultimately a safe and orderly place wants to see the bad guy lose. But to the extent that we are in touch with and electrified by our Jungian dark side—in a healthy way or not—we also wants to see him dance around in all his cruel, sadistic, megalomaniac glory before he gets put back in his bottle.
#4 “There Must Be Better Ways to Learn About What’s Happening in the World”
99% of movie and TV violence has absolutely nothing to do with what’s going on in the world. I’ve been accused of “shielding my children from reality” because I strongly restrict their TV, movies, and video games. Occasionally that’s what I’m doing, like when I turn off NPR before the description of the latest massacre gets too far. But what do CSI, Dirty Harry, or Scream have to do with reality? Those are, certainly as far as the violence goes, gross distortions of reality, and ones I think are genuinely harmful to my kids.
No, the violence that’s going on in the world isn’t fun, and it generally isn’t entertaining. There’s a good bit of crossover, mostly on the news, but TV and movies are generally pretty poor places to learn about the world around us.
[Just on a side note, Saving Private Ryan is a pet peeve of mine. It got buzz as an anti-war movie, but Spielberg explicitly made it as a pro-war movie. It was his justification for why we absolutely had to go into WWII. And if you compare the horrifyingly realistic opening with the wildly unrealistic—but cinematically very, very satisfying—ending, that makes perfect sense. Manipulative bastard.]
#5 “They just bore my father, who finds them completely unrealistic. Probably because has never been in a violent situation and does not have the imagination to relate to one.”
I find that idea really interesting. Horror movies are wildly unrealistic as a general rule. And people who have been in violent situations are constantly quoted as saying that it “wasn’t like the movies.” I spent a good bit of time researching how firearms violence actually happens, and then comparing it to what happens in the movies. The short version is that they really have almost nothing in common. Most police gunfights are over in literally less time than it takes to say, “Go ahead, make my day.” If horror, crime, and war movies were filmed in a realistic way, they would be dreadfully un-cinematic. We don’t want realism when we go to the movies. We want a lot of things, but generally realism isn’t one of them.
#6 “If your bad guy sets people on fire for fun, it is much more satisfying to see him fall.”
That’s absolutely true, to the extent that we get satisfaction from seeing the bad guy fall. But the problem with that is that we have to watch him set people on fire first. This is a question that comes up all the time when film folks discuss rape. Obviously, rape is one of those things “happening in the world” that movies can teach us about. The Burning Bed and Extremities come to mind immediately as movies that helped change the way our culture looks at rape and spousal abuse. Likewise, The Accused, but the problem is that if you want to discuss rape, you have to talk about women being raped. If you want to dramatize rape, you have to show women being raped. And now you’re in the position of creating a film, an aesthetic work, that shows rape in a necessarily aesthetic way. And every time you make a movie that involves a woman being raped, you’re doing it knowing that a woman’s rape has now become an aestheticized event, that is going to provide pleasure—artistic, sexual, and/or sadistic, to at least a small percentage of the audience (not to mention which is going to re-traumatize a much larger segment of the audience).
Which is where The Accused tried a different tack. I haven’t actually seen it, for some of the reasons Rick discusses above, but my understanding is that the rape scene (based on an actual incident) was filmed completely from the victim’s POV. This was supposed to both make the audience fully identify with the victim and make it much harder for anyone to detach themselves from the horror of what was being shown an actually take pleasure in it. Did it work? To an extent, probably. But I’ll tell you this—when I Googled “Foster” and “The Accused” just to make sure I got the title right, hit number eight is “The Accused Full Rape Scene” available for download.
Which brings me, I hope, to some kind of conclusion. A lot of what Kellye says are things I more or less agree with—we watch horror films because for most of us, there are pleasures in being horrified. Most of the people I know who don’t like any kind of violent or scary movies fall into two categories. Most are people who have real issues with the dark side, and get freaked out by this kind of stuff: they get a lot of mileage out of being martyrs, or out of being fragile, or they’ve been abused or victimized and they quite legitimately don’t want to bring that stuff up again.
The rest are people who have a pretty healthy relationship with the dark side, just not the Jungian “I embrace my inner vampire” type. It’s more like the “I know what suffering really looks like, and I take no joy in seeing flimsy representations of it” type.
As for me, I write screenplays, too. My first was very dark side: a guy kills someone and then goes crazy trying to figure out what to do with the body. Very black humor, the kind of stuff that some people really don’t like, the kind of stuff that some people walk out on. But I’ve also considered and rejected dozens of writing ideas because they dip into the dark side gratuitously, and maybe that’s the most important word for me in all this. Going dark, dredging up the violence and the horror, be it WWII or rape or child abuse is really, really heavy stuff. We live in a culture where it’s not treated that way—kids watch dozens of murders a week, and we barely blink an eye—but I think we do that at our peril. Dredging up the dark side is a lot like using the heavy-duty hallucinogens: LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, etc. If you’re just doing it for fun, for some kicks because you’re bored and it’s Friday night, watch out. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun, but you’re playing with fire, and there can be some very nasty consequences. If you’re trying to take a trip to your inner space, if you want to connect with the cosmos or understand the human condition, you can accomplish a lot that way. But you’d better still watch out. These are power tools, and like fire—the original power tool—bad things happen when people play with them carelessly. Sam Peckinpah was being anything but gratuitous when he wired his actors with blood squibs for both entry and exit wounds—a cinematic first—and then packed them with ground beef, but what he ended up doing was inventing several of the basic techniques now used by most of the gratuitous cinematic violence out there. Jodie Foster was being anything but gratuitous when she filmed her famously disturbing scene of a real-life gang rape, but that didn’t stop it from being taken grossly out of context and turned into another eager Friday-night download.
But those are from the perspective of the creator. What about as a consumer? I’d say think about the word “gratuitous” when you think about horror, crime and violence at the movies. Yes, there’s a place for violence and horror in what we watch, but just like the celeb’s faces on the magazines in the grocery store, the deep resonances that horror and violence have are nine times out of ten just being exploited for a cheap thrill or a quick buck.
Is this something you want to put in your head? Is it really going to benefit you? If it’s just fun, is it worth it? If it’s carrying an important message, is the education worth the brush with the dark side? Or if you look at it as a dance with the dark side, how good is the dance? How fulfilling will it really be? If it’s worth it, go for it. You know your relationship with the dark side, and you know how to manage it. Anything with the deep psychological resonance of fear and violence is going to be different for every person. I think we should watch—and write, and film—what we think we ought to, but we ought to think about it first. I hear myself sounding all preachy and prudish right now, but I think it’s a legitimate question to ask, at least on some level, before buying a ticket or renting a DVD: “Will this movie make me a better person?” or at least, “Will this movie nurture me?”
And yes, there are times when Buffy the Vampire Slayer has nurtured me. There’s some intense violence at the end of season six, and it’s in the service of one of the most beautiful and haunting stories of grief and forgiveness that I know. The story wouldn’t be the same without the violence, and it’s that waltz with the dark side that gives the story much of its power.
Maybe we, as a culture, are with film violence about where we were with (real) sex about forty years ago. We’ve admitted that it can be a lot of fun, but we’re still not willing to admit that it’s got a hell of a downside if mishandled. We’re still not able to talk about it very well, with most debates coming down to “It’s evil!” vs. “It’s harmless!” I’d like to think that discussions like this are an every day step towards a healthier and more mature relationship with our collective cinematic dark side.
This is a good article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/may/06/feat...