Violence and American Cinema

J. David Slocum, J. David Slocum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135204907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

American cinema has always been violent, and never more so than now: exploding heads, buses that blow up if they stop, racial attacks, and general mayhem. From slapstick's comic violence to film noir, from silent cinema to Tarantino, violence has been an integral part of America on screen. This new volume in a successful series analyzes violence, examining its nature, its effects, and its cinematic and social meaning.

Part One:

Historicizing Hollywood Violence

one

violence and film

william rothmana

America is a less violent place than it used to be (say, five or ten or twenty-five or fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago). But Americans believe that violence is escalating out of control, that it is threatening the moral fabric of our society, and that the proliferation of violence in the mass media, especially the graphic violence in today’s movies, is a cause, and not only a symptom, of this threat.

During the Nixon administration, the United States Surgeon General issued a report that appeared to lend scientific legitimacy to the widespread belief that violence in the mass media causes violence in society. The report concluded that mass media violence desensitizes people, makes them more hostile and aggressive and more likely to perform violent acts. In Mass Media Violence and Society (1975), Dennis Howitt and Guy Cumberbatch scrutinized the research cited by the Surgeon General’s report and demonstrated that none of the data actually constituted evidence that media violence significantly affects violence in society. Social scientists had compiled voluminous statistics, yet by and large they had assumed, rather than shown, that media violence causes real violence. The book went further to conclude that the available data strongly supported the conclusion that media violence has no effect on, perhaps even reduces, the level of violence in society.¹ That conclusion seems quite unjustified, though. Indeed, thinking in statistical terms may well hinder more than help in clarifying the roles mass media play in the diverse forms of life lived by Americans today. Our readiness to allow human beings to be reduced to statistical abstractions, I suspect, plays no small part in American society’s obsession with violence.

Since its beginnings, the American cinema has been dogged by the belief that movies are harmful to society. In the early years of the twentieth century, New York’s mayor tried to close all the city’s nickelodeons, citing the “fact” that those “immoral places of amusement” were “liable to degenerate and menace the good order and morals of the people.” Chicago passed a law requiring films to receive permits before they could be exhibited. When two were denied permits, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the Chicago edict, saying that those films “represent nothing but malicious mischief, arson and murder . . . and their exhibition would necessarily be attended with evil effects upon youthful spectators.” The United States Supreme Court concurred, endorsing the proposition that films were “capable of evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition.”²

As such language suggests, the belief among film’s earliest critics that movies caused harm to society was inseparable from their puritanical sense that movie viewing was in itself immoral. That moral judgment, in turn, was inseparable from a Victorian sense, as we might call it, that movies and moviegoing were improper. In the darkened movie theater, after all, women—some unescorted—sat shoulder by shoulder with men of all classes, viewing salacious scenes steeped in violence and eroticism. Film’s turn-of-the-century attackers were fighting a rear-guard action against a modern medium that they took—perhaps not wrongly—to be a threat to their moral values, which meant it was an affront to their sense of propriety. In America, the idea that movies have harmful effects has remained inextricably intertwined with the puritanical notion that movies are intrinsically immoral. And a Victorian moral outlook that equates what is morally right with what conforms to conventional social practices (especially sexual mores) remains deeply entrenched in American culture, as well. Victorian moralists are hardly fashionable intellectual company, and I draw the lesson that we need to question our own motivations for being so ready to believe that movies cause our fellow Americans, but presumably not us, to lose their moral bearings. Another lesson is that we need to attend more thoughtfully to the origins and history of film, and to the larger history out of which film emerged, so that we may stop drawing the morals of movies too hastily.

No one more fervently believed in film’s capacity for evil than D. W. Griffith. Griffith’s films were awesome demonstrations of the terrifying power of the new medium. Yet Griffith staunchly defended, against the attacks of Victorian moralists, his tapping into film’s power. Griffith’s early films couched his defense in terms of Victorian moral values. The Drunkard’s Reformation (1909), for example, acknowledged that film was capable of intoxicating viewers and thus had the “power for evil.” Yet he also believed, when he began his career as a film director, that the new medium possessed an unfathomable capacity to restore lost innocence. By the time of The Birth of a Nation (1915), however, Griffith had lost his faith in film’s capacity for redemption, his faith that tapping into the powers of the medium could be justified within the framework of Victorian morality. In the last third of The Birth of a Nation, the vengeful Ku Klux Klan, whose agency the film endorses, is no moral force—it is a nightmare inversion of Victorian moral values, no more capable of restoring America’s innocence than movies are capable of saving America’s soul. The American nation was born with blood on its hands, Griffith had come to believe. And so was the American cinema. Griffith envisioned film as possessing the power to whip viewers into a frenzied state, to cause viewers to lose their moral compass and give in to what is base in human nature. In Griffith’s vision, movies have a voracious appetite for violence, as human beings have; violence is internal to film’s nature, as it is internal to human nature.

The view that movies are inherently violent is at the heart of so-called apparatus theories, which emphasize film’s supposed ability to force malignant ideological effects upon viewers. Indeed, it is a view that has surfaced again and again in the history of what we call “film theory,” bridging otherwise opposed theoretical frameworks. Sergei Eisenstein famously insisted that montage, with its percussive, violent power, was the essence of the film medium, and championed radically new kinds of films that would more fully exploit the medium’s capacity to force its violent effects—visceral, emotional, intellectual—on viewers. Less famously, Eisenstein believed that every frame of every film had, as it were, the blood of the world on it, due to the violence of the camera’s original act of tearing pieces of the world from their “natural” place. The idea that the camera is an instrument of violence was taken up, at least implicitly, by André Bazin (if the film image is a “death mask” of the world, must not the camera be implicated in killing the world?), for whom Eisenstein’s ideas were otherwise anathema, and, in turn, by Stanley Cavell (in its transformation into the world on film, the world undergoes a metamorphosis, or transfiguration, so profound as to be akin to death and rebirth). And the idea that film is inherently violent comes up again and again, and in a number of guises, in my own writings. It surfaces, for example, when in Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze I characterize Psycho’s author, Hitchcock, in the famous shower murder sequence, as unleashing murderous rage upon Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), and upon us, the film’s viewers, or when, in my reading of that film, I suggest that Hitchcock is characterizing film—a characterization I embrace, at least rhetorically—as a medium of taxidermy.

Today’s films are filled with images of arteries spurting, limbs mutilated or chopped off, faces exploding, flesh penetrated or torn, and so on. Thanks in part to the Production Code, such explicit, graphic images of violence, or of the effects of violence, were absent from the so-called classical Hollywood cinema, as were explicit, graphic images of sexuality. But there was violence, as there was sex, in classical movies. Without sex, after all, there could have been no romantic comedies or melodramas or musicals. Without violence, there could have been no gangster films, war films, Westerns, private eye films, or horror films. In classical movies as in Greek tragedies, however, violence was generally left for the viewer to imagine. When acts of violence and their effects were explicitly shown in classical movies, the camera refrained from dwelling on the gory details; the violence was not eroticized, as we might put it.

Two quite obvious distinctions complicate these matters.

First, when critics or theorists discuss film violence, they usually have in mind what we might call physical violence—killings, beatings, mutilations, and the like. Yet what we might call psychological violence, though lacking in gore, can be no less brutal and no less devastating to those subjected to it. In Gaslight, the Charles Boyer character does not set out to do his wife physical harm, but rather to drive her mad, to deprive her of a voice and, ultimately, even a mind of her own. Then, too, as Freud recognized, there can be violence in the most apparently innocent of actions. One might object that the violence in a joke or a slip of the tongue is merely symbolic, not real, violence. As Freud also recognized, however, a clear boundary between real and symbolic violence is difficult or impossible to draw. “Real” violence can have symbolic meaning, and “symbolic” violence can have real consequences. In the Ophuls masterpiece, after all, a mere letter from an unknown woman proves quite literally death-dealing (if, perhaps, redemptive).

Second, in fiction films, violence is generally simulated, not real. When a gunman shoots Liberty Valance, no one really dies, or, rather, no existing person dies. The most graphic images of violence (or of the effects of violence) are illusions created through the magic of makeup, tricks of photography and editing, and, increasingly, special effects. Violence in live action movies is generally no more consequential than the violence in cartoons, such as the violence Wile E. Coyote suffers from the machinations of Road Runner. When we view President Kennedy’s head exploding in the Zapruder film, by contrast, the violence projected on the screen is, or was, real. And yet John Kennedy, no less than Liberty Valance, is shot to death on the screen—which also means he is first brought back to life on the screen—every time the Zapruder film is projected. Even in nonfiction films, death is not final, in the world on film, the way it is in the “real world,” the one existing world into which we are born and within which we are fated to die. On the other hand, if Kennedy had not met his death in the violent way he did, the Zapruder film, as we know it, would not exist; real violence is a condition of that film’s existence. Luis Buñuel kicked a goat down a cliff in order to create one of the most memorable shots in his documentary, or mock documentary, Land without Bread. In fact, the goat was already dead, but it could have been a living goat that Buñuel pushed to its death as a condition of his film’s existence. And, in this regard, in the medium of film the distinction between fiction and nonfiction can be difficult, or impossible, to draw. In order to film a crucial sequence in The Rules of the Game, hardly a documentary, Jean Renoir directed a hunt in which dozens of rabbits were shot to death, the violence real, not simulated.

In writing about Nanook of the North in Documentary Film Classics, I argued that Flaherty’s film equates filming with hunting. Such an idea often arises in discussions of nonfiction film. But if in To Be or Not to Be, the “great, great Shakespearean actor” played by Jack Benny does to Shakespeare what Hitler did to Poland, what Flaherty does to Nanook by filming him hardly compares to what Nanook does to the walrus he harpoons, butchers, and consumes. Night and Fog asserts that the cameras of the Allied liberators were akin to the cameras of the Nazis, which were integral to the operation of the death camps, as guns were. But are cameras generally like guns?

To be filmed, a person must be in the world, a creature of flesh and blood. Filming people in the world, the camera does no real violence to them. But it does reveal their mortality, reveals their vulnerability to violence. In the early years of photography, no one envisioned the making a photograph as a violent act. The introduction of Kodaks toward the end of the nineteenth century, which made it possible for photographers to go out into the world and take snapshots of whomever they wished, coincided with the adoption of the violence-tinged language now universally applied to photography (calling the photographer’s act “shooting,” for example, or speaking of a person’s picture as something a photographer takes). The emergence of the idea that photography has a violent aspect, the idea that cameras are like guns, coincided with the birth of motion pictures, which itself coincided with the birth of what we call modernity.

It is a strange idea, implausible on the face of it. Primitive peoples, we once were told, naively believe that cameras steal souls. Is it less naive to believe that cameras are violent? Unlike guns, cameras do not break bones (except, we now know, for X-ray cameras). In doing their mysterious work, cameras cause no physical harm. To be sure, photographs can be used in ways that harm their subjects, but in and of itself taking a photograph, like taking a look, has no effect whatever on the world. We may well have reason to envision the birth of cinema, as we envision all births, as traumatic, violent. But every time the world is transformed or transfigured by being projected on a movie screen, every time the world is born again on film, re-created in its own image, the world no more suffers from the creation of its double than the cloned sheep suffers from the birth of Dolly. Furthermore, violence within the world on film, in and of itself, has no effect whatever on the real world. And insofar as film violence has no real consequences, it is not real violence at all.

Eisenstein insisted that films, to be true to their medium, should be made to have as violent an impact as possible; viewers were to be hit on the head, as it were, by a series of percussive hammer blows. Apparatus theories, too, insist that movies do violence to viewers, although they deplore, rather than celebrate, this condition. And yet the train pulling into the station that would crush us to a pulp if we fell under its wheels is divested of its power to wreak violence on us when it is transformed into a train-on-film. Hence the popularity of the often imitated Lumière film, which, like all the earliest films, vividly demonstrated to its original audiences a defining condition of the new medium, in this case the condition that the world on film differs from the real world by being exempt from real violence, by being unable to do violence to us and by being impervious to our capacities for violence. In Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, I argue that the shower murder sequence in Psycho declares Hitchcock’s wish to murder the viewer, a wish it may well be natural for anyone to feel who makes the classical role of movie director his or her own. But that sequence also declares it to be a condition of the film medium that the movie screen shields us from the world on film, shields the world on film from us.

Because it is not real violence, it would not be possible for film violence to harm us were it not for the massive ways we involve movies in our lives. In particular, film violence would pose no danger unless it were capable of causing real violence, whether by desensitizing viewers to real violence and thus neutralizing their inhibitions to performing violent acts in the world, by making real violence seem attractive, or by some other mechanism.

Viewing an action sequence in a John Woo film, we take pleasure in the fusillade of images purporting to represent the impact of high-power bullets on human bodies. Why it is so pleasurable to view graphic images of violence (or of the effects of violence), how viewing such images can be pleasurable, is a perplexing question. However we might go on to answer that question, though, we can agree that viewing such images is, or at least can be, pleasurable. We have an appetite for film violence, an appetite that film violence feeds, and perhaps also creates.

Puritans would condemn our appetite for film violence, as they would condemn all our appetites, as sinful. Again, though, film violence would only be capable of causing harm if it had the power to lead viewers to crave real violence, not merely more film violence. Film violence would be capable of this if it had the power to lead view...