On Violence Part One
An unguessed kinship exists between the disaster genre of late, in which the most apocalyptic excrement devised by cinematic writers are played out, and that genre that is known as torture porn, typically filed under horror.
At first glance they could not be more different. Disaster films are by their nature vast in scope, invariably pits a group of survivors against some contrived natural calamity, which humanity as represented by a microcosmic group must either prevent or survive whereas horror is almost exclusively calustrophobic, focused upon a small group of stock characters that are picked off sequentially in as creatively a brutal manner the writers can conceive by whatever the monster of the proverbial week is. The shallowness of each group is self-evident.
Pick any disaster film of the last decade and examined close enough the gradual impression must emerge that none of it means anything. Simply to say that nothing exists behind the frame. It is a testament to the human capacity for suspension of disbelief that entire coasts can be washed away by a tsunami or a city annhilated by an asteroid without a single casualty being shown on screen. The falling man comes to mind. All those poor financers splattering on New York streets.
If disaster films focus on the destruction of civilization than horror is obsessed with the obliteration of the body. There is no limit to the tortures which the human body seems to be subject to. As any number of horror franchises can attest. If the stories are lacking the mutilation is not. There are however certain limitations. Nothing sexual, nothing against children. Or at least on screen.
What unifies these two genres then under the umbrella of a metagenre is that neither brings into quesiton, in fact neither attempts to bring into question, the validity of a civilization, its values and beliefs. Inevitably a disaster film ends with the triump of a band of survivors but oft enough the credit overture serves as a prophetic amnesiac whereby the audience forgets the coming slaughter that would inevitably ensue from the scarcity of resources, the lax of laws, the propagation of plague. It posts a sterile world, an inherently decent mankind successfully and inextricably yoked to benign ideals.
The torture film, while obsessed with human depravity, depends for its life on existing outside civilization and so is robbed of any ability to comment upon it. An odd trait since horror so oft occurs in city and suburb. Perhaps horror is sterilized in the objective typfont of newsprint. Nevertheless a horror film may or may not end with the death of the final survivor but this is irrelevant because the structure of civilization is in no way threatened. How many centuries, how many millennia, must some end of the road murderer operate his abbattoir operate to equal the battle of Borodino?
The lesson to be drawn then is that plots may be extreme to any degree so long as they do not pose discomfiting questions, so long as they show nothing the audience didnt want to see, so long as nothing is subverted.
What then to make of the war genre? Like the Puritan missionaries penetrating the Indian wilderness the army deployed is a crosssection of the nation that sent it. All foreign lands are inherently barbaric and a metropolis is nothing more than a wilderness of concrete where armies are expected to perform outrages surpassing the wettest wicked dreams of De Sade.
An early scene from Black Hawk Down depicts an M249 gunner, identified as Wad on his helmet’s cat eyes, opening up on a crowd, and no one dies. They simply disperse. It is an unbelievable scene but not an incomprehensible scene. In a film that revels in its own sanguinuity it nevertheless refrains from indiscriminate carnage because that is not the proper venue of that particular strain of sadism.
Overseas, as is almost always the case for US films outside of the revolution and civil war periods, the platoon or company combats a natural event embodied in the presence of the enemy with the means of the horror film. That is to say it would be so if accurately depicted. A film must at all costs avoid or downplay offenses against civilians, innocents, otherwise they would be as guilty as the stalkers of slasher flick, though there has been a disconcerting trend to lionize generalized butchery, the melodramatic Okinawa scenes of the miniseries The Pacific being such a case (capstoned by a ridiculous moment in which the semi-protagonist Sledge admonishes a fellow soldier for shooting an unarmed boy [ever more ridiculous because the shooter is in clean fatigues and thus uninitiated], thereby satisfying the requirement of his enlightenment as to the common humanity of mankind). By turning their weapons upon a deserving and sufficiently dehumanized enemy (or more perniciously an enemy humanized after the slaughter) they satisfy the violent urge without violating the accepted mores of the civilization, requiring nothing but a reflexive jingoism.
In BHD not a single act of cold bloodedness is committed. Not a single civilian is killed by US forces, not a single enemy combatant is wounded to incapacitation. There are hardly any cries of anguish. It would almost be a wonder anyone at all died if it were not for the fact that the audience desires a sanguinous sanitized slaughter. The narcissism of the film appropriates a mass starvation event as its setting and the audience accepts this without even the slightest curiosity as to the history. Never is it questioned the unfailing and inherent goodness of the soldier. Notably it is omitted from the film that the real life character of Grimes was arrested on pedophilia charges.
While propagandists worldwide understand you must exaggerate the worst characteristics of a national enemy those that fight them must overcome them and in any war there is often parity in arms and armament. By discharging their weapons at a suitably dehumanized foe the audience vicariously indulges in an actor’s navigation of a forged scene with all the mock sacrifice and ritual and idealism required to achieve the desired emotion, typically patriotism via patronage.
The vacuity of such films, the empty braggadocio and fanatical nationalism, has undoubtedly influenced the general public. How could it not? If all film strived to be moderately informative audiences could not help but by strident effort be more informed, though it is certainly possible sheer need of ignorance might succeed.
