A Bit of the Old Ultraviolence

Posted 6 May, 2008 in Uncategorized |

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about violence recently.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine confessed to being a bit of a “blood junkie” when it comes to the movies, and I must confess a degree of sympathy for this affinity. Violence in art is clearly nothing new: it goes back at least to the Greeks — the only difference between Oedipus blinding himself in Sophocles’ play and the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear is that Shakespeare had the violence occur onstage. Aristotle even had a name for the vicarious pleasure that an audience takes in the artistic depiction of violent acts: katharsis.

“Since the poet should provide pleasure from pity and fear through imitation,” Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, “it is apparent that this function must be worked into the incidents.”

And while it is not at all certain that Aristotle could in his wildest fantasies have imagined Hostel or Ichi the Killer, his notion of a cathartic release through the artistic depiction of violent acts still has traction in the 21st century. In Hostel, Eli Roth uses the techniques and the approach of genre horror first as an excuse to depict some of the most visceral torture sequences in film history, but also to forge a subversive commentary on our post-9/11 psyche in the wake of the United States’ war on terror. And Takeshi Miike’s Ichi the Killer juxtaposes sequences of over-the-top, cartoonish violence, with brutally realistic scenes of rape and torture in an attempt to get the viewer to question his or her own responses to the violence onscreen: watching the film, a viewer is made uncomfortable when the screen violence stops being enjoyable and starts being unpalatable. How and where this line is drawn is one of Miike’s primary considerations.

Right up until his death, Stanley Kubrick refused to allow A Clockwork Orange to be shown in British movie theatres. He felt the film was too sadistic and that audiences did not respond to it in the proper way. Indeed, while admiring the technical skill that is evident in the filmmaking, to this day I have great difficulty with those who claim to have been “entertained” by Kubrick’s movie. Ritualized rape, torture, and murder, even set to an ironic Beethoven score, is not “entertaining.”

And yet we continue to watch television series such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which routinely involves sexual and physical violence being visited on children; we continue to consume ultraviolent movies such as the Saw films and this year’s Rambo; we continue to read books by writers such as Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh, which regularly describe all manner of degradation and viciousness, and we claim to be entertained.

Why should this be?

I think that Bill Buford has at least part of the answer. In his book Among the Thugs: Face to Face with English Football Violence, Buford meditates on the peculiar attraction that violence exerts for those who get caught up in it:

I have so many images for it — this state of being a citizen, of being civilized. I see it as a net that holds me in place, keeps me from falling. I see it as a fabric — a network of individual threads, intertwined, pulled tight — that keeps me warm, that I can wrap around both me and others. I see it as property, a house, a structure, a made thing, walls to keep out the cold, a door to keep out the unwanted, a roof to protect me from the night and its terrible undifferentiated darkness.

But I see it, too, as a weight. I see it as a barrier, an obstacle between me and something I don’t know or understand. I see it as a mediator, a filter that allows only certain kinds of experience through. And I am attracted to the moments when it disappears, even if briefly, especially if briefly: when the fabric tears, the net breaks, the house burns — the metaphors are arbitrary. This line, again; this boundary: I am compelled, exhilarated, by what I find on the other side. I am excited by it; I know no excitement greater. It is there — on the edge of an experience which is by its nature antisocial, anti-civilized, anti-civilizing — that you find what Susan Sontag describes as our “flair” (the word is so attractively casual) for high temperature visionary obsession: exalted experiences that by their intensity, their risk, their threat of self-immolation exclude the possibility of all other thought except the experience itself, incinerate self-consciousness, transcend (or obliterate?) our sense of the personal, of individuality, of being an individual in any way. What are these experiences? There are so few; they are so intolerable. Religious ecstasy. Sexual excess (insistent, unforgiving). Pain (inflicting it, having it inflicted) — pain so great that it is impossible to experience anything except pain, pain as an absolute of feeling. Arson. Certain drugs. Criminal violence. Being in a crowd. And — greater still — being in a crowd in an act of violence. Nothingness is what you find there. Nothingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity.

Moments of violence, moments in which the fabric of civilization is rent open, are among the most atavistic moments in human experience, and they show us how little removed we are from nature red in tooth and claw.

Not being given to masochism, and tending towards pacifism in my political views, I nevertheless confess an affinity — perhaps even a troubling attraction — to displays of violent acts in movies and books. To touch that kind of atavism, to experience — even vicariously — that sense of civilization falling by the wayside, to stand unadorned by societal repressions and restrictions: this is an energizing, animal sensation. To do this within the safe confines of an artistic medium assures the acceptable release of the kind of negative human emotions that Aristotle pointed to. Better to take in a screening of Hostel than to grab a sniper rifle and ascend the nearest bell tower.

I have as yet seen no good scientific evidence to prove that people who consume violent entertainment become, ipso facto, more violent themselves. If one holds with the Aristotelian precept of catharsis, then there is a good intuitive rationale for believing exactly the opposite: those who expunge their negative impulses in the safe confines of an artistic setting need not worry about having these spill over into the real world.

On the weekend, I took in a screening of Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris’s corrosive documentary about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The film is distressing: simultaneously heartwrenching and infuriating in its implication that the participants in the abuse of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib acted with the tacit endorsement of the U.S. military and, by extension, the American government. Listening to Pte. Lynndie England attempt to paint herself as the real victim, saying that she was only twenty years old and in love, is enough to make one seethe with anger and frustration. Surely no twenty-year-old is too naive or innocent to realize that forcing a hooded, naked man to masturbate while pointing at his penis with one hand and giving a thumbs-up with the other, smiling broadly all the while, is inhuman behaviour. And it boggles the mind to view a picture of a naked, hooded Iraqi bound to a metal bedframe, his arms stretched behind him almost to the breaking point, and hear one of the military investigators involved in the case describe this as “standard operating procedure.”

The documentary footage in Morris’s movie is disturbing enough. But what is equally disturbing, on an artistic level, is that the director, in collaboration with Academy Award-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson, intersperses recreated footage of certain scenes into the documentary footage and shots of the infamous photographs. This footage is presented in glorious slo-mo photography, and has the effect of aestheticizing the experience documented in the film, in much the same way that Anne Michaels has been accused of aestheticizing the Holocaust in her poetic novel Fugitive Pieces. Here again, the viewer is brought up short on the horns of the question: with the actual violence being so potent and unacceptable, how acceptable is it to take pleasure in the aesthetic recreation of that violence? How culpable are we as viewers for looking at these sequences and seeing first and foremost a series of beautifully shot tableaux?

Nietzsche wrote, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Engaging in an Aristotelian act of catharsis by consuming violent entertainment is worlds apart from the actual dehumanization and violence depicted in Standard Operating Procedure. Still, perhaps one of the reasons I feel so uncomfortable at the moment has to do with the stark realization that the line separating me from those soldiers in Iraq is a razor thin one. I am human, and nothing human is alien to me. How long is it possible to stare into the abyss and remain unscathed or unaffected?

1 comment to “A Bit of the Old Ultraviolence”

Jess, May 6th, 2008 at 6:42 pm:

• This is another passage by Nietzsche that appeals to me. I read it as another argument in favour of the cathartic role of cartoon violence as it appeals to our base desires which are suppressed to allow us to properly function within society.

  –

  From Nietzsche’s Beyond Good And Evil

  259. To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one’s will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one organization). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIETY, it would immediately disclose what it really is—namely, a Will to the DENIAL of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;—but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal—it takes place in every healthy aristocracy—must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendancy— not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it LIVES, and because life IS precisely Will to Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter, people now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which “the exploiting character” is to be absent—that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. “Exploitation” does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life—Granting that as a theory this is a novelty—as a reality it is the FUNDAMENTAL FACT of all history let us be so far honest towards ourselves!

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