Violence in Us Visual Culture

ON-SCREEN BARBARISM: VIOLENCE IN US VISUAL CULTURE PHILIP GREEN That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees… W.B. Yeats1 I o country for old men: a land that once, for Yeats, was a place of sex, Nsensuality, and procreation, has now become, quite extraordinarily, a place of unremitting and inexplicable violence. This strange inversion of meaning and feeling is not the doing of the Coen Brothers (who may or may not have read Yeats in their college days) but of best-selling author Cormac McCarthy, who adapted Yeats’s line (without citation) for his own version of portentous nihilism. Even the works of best-selling authors, though, are a special taste compared to the nation-wide appeal of hit movies; if No Country For Old Men is read through all eternity it will still not have been read by as many persons as saw the movie on its first smash weekend. So the point is not to ask how the change in Yeats’s meaning came to McCarthy, but rather what it means now, that an entire culture (minus a huddle of serious poetry readers), invited to wallow for two hours in unmitigated and uninterrogated violence, shrugs its collective shoulders and accepts what it is being shown as reasonable, as a normal vision of ‘the country’; as ‘formally beautiful’, as representing its makers ‘at the height of their powers’, as being an obvious candidate for a ‘Best Picture of the Year’ Oscar nomination. And its chief competition demonstrated a similarly strange trajectory, though in a different vein: Upton Sinclair’s socialist, muckraking novel, Oil, transformed into Paul Thomas Anderson’s cinematic ‘masterpiece’ (as it was hailed by critics), There Will Be Blood. Oil is not a great nor even a very good novel, but it is about what it purports to be about: the accumulation of capital that ‘comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and ON-SCREEN BARBARISM 55 dirt’. The movie, contrarily, seems to start out as that story, but halfway through, overtaken by a loss of either nerve or interest, descends into a study of unmotivated, over-the-top and brutal individual psychosis, and loses whatever meaning it might have had. If these films were unique there would be no need to ask questions about them; after all, there’s an audience, even a mass audience, for almost anything. Contemporary US cinema, for example, also features movies about teen-age girls who ought to have abortions but instead have babies, virtually without thought or reason – but the existence of this genre signifies nothing ideologically except the power of what pollsters call ‘intensity of preference’, as wielded by the uncompromising body of ‘Right to Life’ opinion in the USA. But No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are hardly unique. In just the past year, as I write these words, the big screen in the US has seen a parade of ‘A’ films, some of them even #1 at the box office, in which brutal and graphic violence explodes on the screen: 3:10 to Yuma, The Brave One, Eastern Promises, Transformers, 30 Days of Night, Jumper, Untraceable, We Own the Night, 300, Grindhouse, Sweeney Todd (much more graphic, obviously, than the stage production), Hostel 2, Saw 4, Rambo (2008). These are not naturally violent films about the nature of warfare (Saving Private Ryan, Syriana, The Valley of Elah, A Mighty Heart), but are rather for the most part about nothing beyond themselves. Meanwhile, even in the much different world of smaller-screen network and cable television, where the general atmosphere of blood-letting that has come to pervade visual culture is of necessity somewhat attenuated, other developments in the kind of stories that TV prefers to tell are equally important to an understanding of what is happening. There has been a sea-change, and we can describe it with some confidence. In cinema, the positioning of the mass audience, or at least a large sector of it, has been transformed from that of sympathetic identification to that of pure voyeurism; and thus from an approach centred on competing versions of moral behaviour to one centred on amorality, or more precisely, nihilism. This change, moreover, has taken place, as it only could, with the acquiescence or even participation of that audience. As one historian of Hollywood, David Bordwell, recounts, ‘Researchers studying the reception of Judge Dredd (1995) found that fans were happy to list things they liked: “Lots of blood... Explosions... Good effects... Dead Bodies...”’.2 So there is something happening on both sides of the producer/consumer transaction. But in any event we want to be able to do more than describe, or even indict, this change; we want to ask, why should this be; how did this come about? 56 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2009 Of course violence has always been a staple of cinema. The same historian, writing about the ‘Hollywood style’, for example, pays particular attention to the violent action movie, and to ‘visceral violence’ in movies. To be sure, the crime films and Westerns of the Sixties that he discusses follow a recognizable moral code, and besides were quite tame by twenty-first century standards.3 But even horrific violence in cinema is hardly a recent discovery. Night of the Living Dead arrived in theatres in 1968, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974; and all ‘slasher movies’, of which the latter is one variant, are recognizably the progeny of Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho. But just the same there have been major changes in contemporary cinematic (and televisual) production. In the first place, with rare exceptions, within the horror genre itself there are significant differences between these forerunners and their contemporary descendants, such as Saw or Hostel and their sequels (and imitators). As Carol Clover has argued, there has been a change in the sexual dimension: above all, perhaps, the horror story of the 70s and 80s films she discusses is told from the visual point of view of, alternately, the female victim, or the audience itself as victim.4 This change from the misogyny of Hitchcock and his followers (e.g., Brian de Palma) to the sexual ambiguity and sometime gender subversion of the slasher genre was culturally significant; but so too, and perhaps now even more so, is the change from the genre as Clover then viewed it, to the contemporary horror film. The simplest way to put this is that the slasher film has become a torture film. It’s not just that audience identification with a (usually female) victim has been replaced by audience voyeurism.5 More, the standpoint of the camera is now neutral; very often, the camera is placed where no human being – at least none in the film – could possibly be, in order to make what we see as inhumane as possible. As two Netflix viewers ofSaw 3 and Saw 4 (respectively) straightforwardly put it: ‘Gore and torture is all you will know. The different ways of torturing a human being is unimaginable in this film. The gore level was very high, higher than any other Saw’; and ‘this movie is nothing but sick and twisted ways of killing and torturing people for 90 minutes’ – though that viewer and several viewers who made similar comments gave the movie five stars just the same. Most striking, perhaps, is the comparison between two films in the serial- killer genre, 1991’s notorious Silence of the Lambs, and last year’s Untraceable. Silence was thought at the time to be particularly shocking, yet like the movies Clover groups under the rubric, ‘Her Body, Himself’, it features an active and aggressive female protagonist, Clarice Starling (played by previous Oscar winner Jodie Foster), who is the centre of the action much more often than ON-SCREEN BARBARISM 57 the sadistic Hannibal Lecter (an Oscar-winning performance by Anthony Hopkins).5 Sixteen years later, another A-list actress with Oscar-nominee credentials, Diane Lane, is reduced to the role of surrogate for audience voyeurism, spending most of her screen time merely watching (on her computer) the considerably more hideous activities of the serial killer who is pursuing her more than she is pursuing him. Silence is subtle and gripping – even, due to Foster’s activism, for many female viewers. Untraceable has the subtlety of an attack with a sledgehammer – or a meat cleaver. The former could be fitted into Clover’s text as containing subversive elements within the slasher genre; the latter, not at all. To speak now of ‘the pornography of violence’, in other words, is to be literal. We, the viewers, are asked to watch a seemingly literal enactment: to watch, even if the ‘money shot’ of hardcore can’t really be duplicated (or we’d be watching a snuff film), very convincing imitations of the most horridly graphic insults to the human body. Entrails seem ‘really’ to be yanked out of stomachs, eyes gouged out of their sockets, knives plunged deep into torsos, and so on. After this, hardcore porn would be a relief: though clearly, millions of viewers much prefer the sight of knives cutting into flesh. The second significant difference is that, as the casting and marketing of Untraceable demonstrate, now the techniques and standpoint of the new horror film have leached into the mainstream. The movies from that era discussed by Carol Clover were indeed ‘horror movies’, conspicuously if informally labelled as such. It is when mainstream films, helmed by mainstream directors and more often than not aimed at that dominant demographic, ‘18 to 39 year old males’, take on the appearance of sheer graphic and voyeuristic brutality that we have to take special notice.

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