Putting Violence In Its Place : Movie carnage? It’s as American as apple pie

For those of us who think that violence has an unassailable place in the movies, these are dog days indeed. Walking into a movie theater is like strolling into the Roman Coliseum. Consider the following from the summer’s top three hits:

In Walter Hill’s “Another 48 HRS.,” Eddie Murphy quiets an unruly redneck by calmly shooting him in the knee. A villain gets his ear shot off; he titters. A team of psycho bikers periodically lay waste to squadrons of innocents. In the last scene, Nick Nolte, in order to hit the bad guy standing behind his partner, shoots Murphy point blank in the shoulder. The scene invites--and gets--big laughs. Throughout the movie, the roar of breakaway glass is like an obbligato to the non-stop carnage.

In “Bird on a Wire,” a cop is speeding after Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson. When his car is back-ended by an express train, we expect the obligatory cutaway that shows he’s all right. Instead, the cutaway shows him about to be flattened. Later, a mobster falls into a piranha tank. The director, John Badham, thoughtfully provides an insert of the man’s face being frenziedly fed upon. It’s violence as garnish.

In Paul Verhoeven’s futuristic “Total Recall,” Arnold Schwarzenegger punches out his lady, rips the arms clean off an assailant, decimates entire populations of attackers, uses an innocent bystander as a bullet shield. And he’s the hero . All told, we’re looking at a higher body count than “The Longest Day.”

Just another evening at the movies.

At a time when the National Endowment for the Arts is being neutered, the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s ratings board is increasingly punitive, and rap artists are being arrested for indecency, it’s crucial to frame an objection to the violence in these films without joining the reactionary forces that would sweep all violence from our screens.

Movies may not be very good at depicting interior psychological states but they’ve always been great with action; and, in the movies, physical action and violence go hand in glove. Violence is basic to the movies, particularly American movies, and always has been. (Passive heroism has always been frowned upon in our movies; films with a pacifist core, like “Friendly Persuasion” and “Witness,” usually end up backtracking into violence.) In one of the first Edison Kinetoscopes, “The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots,” we’re treated to a beheading. The 1903 “The Great Train Robbery,” often cited as one of the first “real” movies, closes with a bandit shooting point blank at the audience--for no reason except to jolt us.

If the graphicness of movie violence has increased dramatically in the past several decades, that may have less to do with the supposed terminal sickness of society than with the fact that, in the late ‘60s, Hollywood’s Production Code restrictions on sex and violence were replaced by the current MPAA ratings system. Suddenly it became possible to depict the most excruciating bloodletting as long as the filmmakers were willing to take the ratings rap. Since its advent, the ratings system has undone much of its benefit by, in effect, functioning as a hidden censor; but it’s still true that violent movies, provided they issue from a major studio, escape the X cattle brand far more often than explicitly sexual movies. It’s understood that violence is as American as apple pie-- hot apple pie.

This is not to say that styles of violence have remained the same over the years. It’s possible that, even without a Production Code in place, the movies would have charted a rising wave of explicit gore. It is in the nature of the appeal of movies that each excitement top the preceding one. Old forms wear out and are replaced by new ones designed to shock us out of our complacencies.

It’s always a bit amusing--and unsettling--to look back at the movies which, in their time, were excoriated as “too much.” In 1969, the film department of New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted a notorious, much-debated series entitled “Violent America: The Movies 1946--1964” which attempted to categorize the violence of postwar America in terms of three genres: the Western, the gangster-detective film and the juvenile delinquent movie. The representative movies, including “The Killers,” “D.O.A.,” “The Lady From Shanghai,” “Hondo” and “Johnny Cool,” seem practically kiddie fodder compared to what we’re currently wading through.

And, regarded in its best aspect, the uppage in explicitness over the years has been a qualitative improvement. The themes and conventions of a Western like John Farrow’s 1953 “Hondo,” starring John Wayne as a cavalry scout, are not the same as those of Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 “The Wild Bunch,” not only because the films are the products of different temperaments and talents but also because they reflect their respective eras--namely, Eisenhower-era conservatism and the full flush of Vietnam.

Seven years earlier, Peckinpah made one of the gentlest Westerns ever made, “Ride the High Country,” but, in “The Wild Bunch,” he required the freedom to agonize over the violence, to explode it and lyricize it; to make it definitive for us by rubbing our noses in it. A large measure of that film’s power lay in Peckinpah’s own tortuous, fascinated ambivalence towards what he was showing us. The movie was nothing so simple as an “anti-violence” tract, and we could respond kinesthetically to Peckinpah’s own conflicts because we were made to recognize that they were our conflicts, too.

Just as “The Wild Bunch,” with its ferocious ambiguities about the use of force, was intimately connected to the Vietnam era, a film like Robert Siodmak’s 1946 “The Killers” was part of a time when it was still acceptable to regard gangsterism as a malign growth on a healthy society; its violence was contained within that scheme. (Eighteen years later, the same source material became Don Siegel’s “The Killers,” originally made for television but relegated to the screen because it was judged “too violent.”) With the advent of Francis Coppola’s 1972 “The Godfather,” gangsterism became a nightmare image of American capitalism. Society itself was malign, and the violence--the garrotings and point-blank shootings--were appropriate to the vehemence of the conception.

Violence has often been at the service of a conception in our movies. That’s one of the ways in which it’s sanctioned. War movies, for example, have from their very beginnings carried a heavy body count. And yet we don’t often think of war movies as being “violent.” They’re war movies. Likewise the quasi-cartoon violence of the James Bond movies or the Spielberg adventure films or the comic-book fantasias like “Batman” or “Dick Tracy” are often so far removed from our experience that the mayhem carries no sting. It’s not meant to. (When Spielberg went “too far” in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” the resulting outcry was a recognition that he had overstepped his sanction.)

The teen slasher film is a genre that’s probably closer to the old juvenile-delinquent movie than is commonly recognized. The misunderstood leather-jacketed misfit-outlaws of the ‘50s have become the acid-etched, leather-faced, hockey-masked misunderstood ghouls in the “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” serials. The purplish violence in these films functions for the teen audience as a kind of sicko-comic-book-in-motion, and the funhouse effect often has a hothouse quality. Couples use the frights in these films as a way to get all hot and bothered, which, considering how much of the violence is directed at nubile young things, makes for one creepy dating ritual.

Violence in the movies is sometimes hustled in under the cover of some personal or political agenda. This approach is often rife with exploitation, like the “Death Wish” or “Dirty Harry” films which depicted urban despair as an excuse to thump for vigilante justice. But there have also been films like Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” which posited its carnage as a defense of the territorial imperative. Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” was about violence as a crucible for manhood. Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” with its clinical, anesthetized rampages, was a laboratory experiment in the promotion of free will, whatever the costs. The riot that capped Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” was violence as racial polemic.

While many of the above films were attacked as much for what they were saying as for how they said it, generally it’s the movies without any categorizable agenda that pressure groups have hit the hardest. Films like Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill,” Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and John McNaughton’s “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” can’t be explained away by retrofitting them into some social scheme; they’re too disturbingly “private” for that. And the creepy privacies of these films make them seem irresponsible to people who don’t recognize the expressive power of violence to liberate an artist’s psyche--or at least certain artists, at certain times in their career.

It used to be regarded as a truism that intimated violence on screen is more effective than explicit violence. This attitude has a measure of truth, but its “tastefulness” has its reactionary side. It brands as dangerous cretins filmmakers who want to use violence on screen as a way to extend aesthetic and psychological borders. Filmmakers like David Lynch and Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma are at their most electric when all their furies are released. In another, less permissive era, they would not be able to fully realize their gifts.

Am I making a case for violence onscreen only when it’s “artistic”? Not exactly. One of the best violents moments in film history is that moment in the first “Indiana Jones” movie when Indy shoots the guy with the saber. Or the moment in “RoboCop” when the junior executive is blown away by the mechanical lawman during a fouled-up boardroom demonstration. Adult audiences, as opposed to most teen-agers, are often uncomfortable with violence as a comedy device--witness the dazed, lukewarm response to “Miami Blues.” But surely it all depends on how it’s done? What is a movie like “Jaws” or “The Road Warrior” if not a comedy about violence?

The current free-for-all movie climate, however, has yielded few memorable violent sequences, comedic or otherwise. Instead, the prevailing approach has been crass overkill. The movies aren’t just about Terminators; they look like they’re being directed by the Terminator. It’s significant that even the filmmakers who in the past have worked memorably with violent themes, like Paul Verhoeven and Walter Hill, have succumbed to the Hollywood house style.

To an extent, that style is a reflection of the tastes of the male youth market which still makes up the bulk of moviegoers. Adults are going to movies now more than they did a few years ago, but not enough to rejigger the cinematic landscape. If the violence in movies like “Total Recall” and “Another 48 HRS.” has all the emotional content of video-game kills, that’s because these movies are both co-existent with video games and in competition with them for teen-agers’ disposable income.

There have been occasional outcroppings of principled violence in our movies. The core of De Palma’s extraordinary, neglected Vietnam film “Casualties of War” was a rape during a combat reconnaissance mission, and its horrifying consequences. But such a film is the vast exception. If there are essentially no “serious” explorations of violence on our screens now, it’s largely because there is no market for violence that is not a species of kiddie carnival. It’s not much of a step up from “Nightmare on Elm Street” to the current big-studio fare; the budgets and the actors may be higher-grade, but the scorched-earth attitudes are essentially the same. The bigger they come, the harder they splatter.

In the movies, the difference between violence that affects us emotionally and violence that leaves us uncomfortably numb has everything to do with how much we care about the characters in the line of fire. It’s not necessary to like those characters--De Palma’s and Peckinpah’s protagonists, for example, are usually pretty scurvy. But even the scurviest among them are bursting with life. And when we do care about them, the way we were made to care about, say, Bonnie and Clyde, their demise cuts very deep. The single most affecting violent scene in modern movies, for me, was also the most brief and unexploitative: That moment in “Under Fire” when Gene Hackman, playing a news correspondent in Nicaragua, is casually dispatched, almost as an afterthought, by Somoza’s soldiers.

In the modern violent movie, heroes and villains are often equally vicious, and equally expendable. They’re extensions of the technology of their death arsenals. And because special effects and make-up wizardry are becoming ever more advanced--i.e. horrific--they demand more and more horrific storylines with which to be realized.

Video-game protagonists, like most comic book characters, always follow the logic of their own behavior. Dependability is their appeal. The good are good; the bad are bad; the sexy are sexy. So too with the current violent movie protagonists. Their appeal is based on their absence of psychological possibilities--an absence that makes them easy to insert into scenarios of techno-violent mayhem. These scenarios are then easier to sell to an international market which is assuming almost equal commercial importance to the domestic market. Foreign markets crave big violent American action flicks, the less (dubbed) dialogue the better.

The violence in these movies is usually explained away by their creators as “just a cartoon.” If this is so, then they’ve failed as cartoonists, because the carnage is just too flesh-and-blood graphic. If they’re really fancy, the perpetrators of these films may argue that their movies satisfy a deep need in audiences for “mythic” conflict. Even if this is true--which I seriously doubt--who says every need has to be met? In Hollywood these days, there’s a Joseph Campbell hovering inside every executive suite. “Mythology” is a great way to gloss the garbage.

In anxious times, feel-good euphoria in popular culture usually runs parallel with a rage that expresses everything the euphoria is denying. In the current movie fantasy arena, there’s practically nothing in between “Field of Dreams” and “Total Recall.” It’s not much of a choice. Are adult American audiences going to the new violent movies because these are the films they want to see? Or, as I believe, is it that these violent movies are simply the only such scenarios being offered to audiences? If you accept the necessity for violence in movies, if you enjoy a certain kind of violence for its power to reveal, to amuse, to horrify, then where can you locate yourself in the current movie universe where body count is all? Violent movies are great for mass escapism, but, these days, only one escape route is being provided, and it leads straight to the morgue.