Watch Out for the Recoil

“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”

--Jean-Luc Godard

*

“The Great Train Robbery” caused a sensation when it was released by Edison back in 1903, and not because it was the first western ever made. Its closing image, a huge close-up of a desperado pointing a six-gun at the audience and firing, reportedly so unnerved naive moviegoers that they panicked and fled the theater.

No one is leaving when the shooting starts anymore; in fact, just the opposite seems to be true. Violence has become the quintessential American movie taste, something audiences can be counted on to line up for the way they will line up for nothing else.

As American movies become increasingly dominant around the world, it is once again violence that is leading the way. Director James Cameron, whose pair of expertly done “Terminator” movies were major successes overseas, put his finger on the reason in an interview a few years back. Ideas of romance differ from culture to culture, Cameron said, as do standards of beauty and the notion of what’s funny and what’s not. But one man hitting another, that’s a situation and an image that is universally understood.

Yet as familiar as blood and destruction have become on screen, the violence Steven Spielberg shows us in “Saving Private Ryan” feels in a way different, a thing apart. It’s a situation the MPAA acknowledged by giving the film a controversial R rating with an unusually long and descriptive reason attached: “for intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence, and for language.”

“Ryan” is the event movie of the summer, but though its violence has been considerably discussed, a key point has been missed. Watching this film strongly underlines the ambivalent feelings carnage on screen calls forth, pointing out how almost painfully divided and tied into knots brutal actions can leave audiences.

It may be enough for Quentin Tarantino to respond when asked how he could justify the slaughter in “Reservoir Dogs” by saying he didn’t have to defend it, he simply loved it, but for most moviegoers the situation turns out to be not quite that simple.

For if violence is anything, it’s part of nature and the human condition. Not only are our oldest, most revered texts, from “The Iliad” to the Bible, rife with explicit descriptions of bloody doings, but some of our most brilliant filmmakers have chosen to work with that as a subject.

Since anything in the hands of serious artists functioning at the top of their game is of value, there is no difficulty picking out great works that include graphic violence, ranging from “The Godfather” to Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood” to John Woo’s Hong Kong fantasies and Sam Peckinpah’s classic “The Wild Bunch.”

But as anyone who has seen that 1969 feature lately can testify, though “The Wild Bunch” still manages to take our breath away, it looks almost quaint in terms of how increasingly graphic on-screen violence has become in the interim.

As technology has aided our capacity to deceive the eye, movie-makers eager to satisfy brutality junkies who crave that one step beyond sensation have considerably upped the ante for what is shown on screen. And when that capability gets utilized by people who are not film artists, who are at best glib craftsmen eager to make a buck by appealing to our worst instincts, then the price society has to pay for violence on screen has nothing of worth to serve as a counterbalance.

For even if violence is part of our nature, it seems naive to pretend that watching a great deal of it on film will have absolutely no effect on consumers. So much of our commercial culture is based on the premise that exposure to visual stimuli is influential in all kinds of ways, from buying products to voting for candidates, that it serves sales more than logic to insist that movie violence is a situation apart.

The core of the problem with on-screen butchery is not the occasional headline-making copycat actions that specific movies call forth. “Natural Born Killers,” which ironically is an anti-violence satire at heart, is usually cited here, and just a few weeks ago, according to the Hollywood Reporter, a bank robbery in Washington was apparently inspired by “Set It Off” and an attack on a baby-sitter by “Halloween: H20.” Grim though these situations are, relying too much on isolated instances to set policy would be the equivalent of the FDA banning a drug if it made so much as a single person ill.

Rather, the difficulty with most movie violence is that the more of it you see, the more profoundly degraded you feel. Apologists like to call it cartoonish, but in truth those advances in effects technology have made watching savage beatings or rivers of blood pouring through newly slit throats considerably more than the equivalent of having Tweety drop a safe on Sylvester.

Critics subject themselves to uncountable hours of this stuff, more than any sane person would want to, and much of the time it couldn’t be a more unpleasant experience. Violence in the hands of an amateur is not something you get used to, it’s something you increasingly dislike--something that turns viewers into unwilling sadists as horror after horror passes before our eyes.

Also, though it can’t be proved either way, it’s impossible to be awash in the flood of violence that permeates the movies and be sanguine about the effect it all has on young people who know how to strike cool and cynical poses but in reality tend to be impressionable and even naive. If a culture spends tens of millions of dollars to create these films and even more money to patronize them, is it surprising that children have difficulty understanding that physically destroying another human being is not something to be done and then casually shrugged off?

Good or bad, inspired or meretricious, violence-filled films will continue to be made because, quite frankly, people continue to pay good money to see them. Even if movie executives admit privately that they can’t bear to watch, or, worse, have their children view them, they will continue to approve vividly bloody efforts until either the public tires of them or, more likely, an inevitable backlash wipes things clean.

For while movie-makers happily bury their heads in piles of money, refusing to sensibly discipline themselves, a slowly building mainstream resistance to all this carnage makes a backlash inevitable. It won’t be this year, it probably won’t even be this decade, but any student of history knows the cyclical nature of taste and morality. For nearly 100 years, obscenity laws in Britain and America used as a standard the notion that no adult could see anything that might corrupt an innocent child, and anyone who can’t see the great possibility of conservative leaders like Pat Robertson eventually agitating to bring that standard back is simply dreaming.

What seeing “Private Ryan” does is underline how unfortunate any kind of blanket condemnation of violence would be. Though the things it shows, from spilling guts to severed limbs, are truly horrific, the intention is the complete opposite of what run-of-the-mill violent films are about. Hokum like “Halloween: H20,” with victims wriggling on enormous butcher knives, and “Lethal Weapon 4,” which ends with the villain graphically impaled on a long iron rod, aims to titillate--to get a rise out of the audience by, in effect, insisting that watching very graphic suffering is, hey, nothing but fun.

“Private Ryan,” by contrast, wants to link its violence to reality, wants you to take it personally and wince with the understanding that what’s being shown is the most dreadful thing. Though violent films are often rated as suitable only for adults, “Ryan” is one of the few times this kind of material has been put together in a specifically adult manner.

While it might be overstating things to call Spielberg’s film a great pacifist document, the fact that it’s a statement worth debating shows how much we’d lose should revulsion at the excesses of Hollywood’s blood lust lead politicians to seriously consider, as they well might, banning violence from the screen. Though movies are far from the root cause of violence in our society, it wouldn’t be the first time a messenger was shot for bringing bad news.