Motion Pictures: Screen Violence

Motion Pictures: Screen Violence

Teen Violence and the Movies

In the movies of the 1990s violence was more prevalent and more graphic than ever before, even as many educators and politicians—as well as some moviemakers—expressed concerns about the connection between violence on the screen and the increasing levels of violence on the streets and in schools. After the release of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), in which a pair of hedonistic sociopaths played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis go on a senseless killing spree, teenaged murderers around the world claimed to have been inspired by the movie. The staging of the shootings at Columbine High School in April 1999 was similar to those in The Basketball Diaries (1995), in which a trench-coat-clad young man with a machine gun attacks people who had mocked him. This sort of violence is different from that in the popular action movies of the 1980s, where heroes such as Rambo sprayed bullets in defense of the American way of life. Rather, movies such as Natural Born Killers and The Basketball Diaries —as well as Kalifornia (1993), in which Lewis and Brad Pitt play serial killers—seem to celebrate purposeless violence in a deliberately provocative manner. Psychologists, politicians, educators, and concerned citizens in general began to discuss what levels of violence were acceptable in motion pictures and when graphic depictions of violence might be justified in moral and artistic terms—say, for example, in Saving Private Ryan, which attempts to educate the public about the D-Day invasion was really like.

GUTSY WOMEN IN THE MOVIES

Some of the movie roles for women in the 1990s were more complex and grittier than those of earlier decades. In The Grifters (1990) Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston played tough con artists at odds with one another. Jodie Foster had a major hit with The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in which she played an FBI trainee who convinces a savage mass murderer (played by Anthony Hopkins) to help her solve a grisly crime, proving her toughness in a traditionally masculine job.

Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis starred as the female equivalents of Butch Cassidy and Sundance in Thelma & Louise (1991), a dark comedy about two women on the run from meaningless relationships who end up as murderers on the run from the law. Pop-music star Madonna played another sort of tough woman in Evita (1996), director Alan Parker's screen version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's hit musical about Eva Peron, who clawed her way from poverty to become first lady and then president of Argentina. Some reviewers noted that Madonna had an almost mystical identification with Eva Peron. As Madonna explained, "Its comforting to know that I'm not the only person the press picks on or tries to turn into a monster or dehumanize in some way … I feel like I understand where she came from. And I love her." Despite the increase in strong roles for women, however, Foster complained that women's parts were still all too often "written as plot adjuncts: sister of, daughter of. The hero has to save someone so they wrap that someone in cord and put her on a railroad track."

Sources

Richard Corliss, "Women on the Verge of a Nervy Breakthrough," Time, 137 (18 February 1991): 58-60.

Alice Hoffman, "Thelma & Louise," Premiere, 11 (October 1997): 69.

Susan Isaacs, Brave Dames and Wimpettes (New York: Ballentine, 1999).

Raising the Bar

One of the most critically acclaimed movies of 1994—a year that critics consider to be the best of the decade for movies—seemed to raise the level of acceptable violence. Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is an outrageous comedy filled with profanity, senseless shootings and stabbings, sadomasochism, a homosexual rape, and drug overdoses—all designed to have audiences reeling from one experience to the next. Tarantino intended the movie as a tribute to old pulp-magazine stories about hard-boiled detectives who survive in an amoral world of crime and violence by being as tough and ruthless as the criminals they are trying to defeat. Tarantino's tough-guy heroes, however, are not detectives but hit men, played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, who blunder through a bizarre sequence of events played out on-screen in a non-linear fashion. Critics praised Travolta's acting and acknowledged the artistry of the movie, for which Tarantino and Roger Avary won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Yet, some commentators also took Tarantino to task for the violence in the movie. According to Tom Whalen, the movie lacked "moral clarity," but other critics took exception to that characterization, pointing out that there are far fewer dead people in Pulp Fiction than there are in movies such as Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Cyborg (1989), or Marked for Death (1990).

Violence and Redemption

Another of the top-rated movies of 1994 was The Shaws hank Redemption, a movie about hope, friendship, love, and survival, that is also a riveting prison drama filled with violence. Directed by Frank Darabont and adapted from a novella by Stephen King, the movie stars Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, a banker condemned to life imprisonment in a maximum security prison for the double murder of his wife and her lover. Insisting on his innocence, he endures beatings, taunts, baiting, and sexual propositions. Gradually, with the help of another lifer, played by Morgan Freeman, he learns to survive by putting his intelligence and savvy to work, and he continues to hold out hope for freedom because: "Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free." As Roger Ebert pointed out, The Shawshank Redemption "is not about violence, riots or melodrama. The word 'redemption' is in the title for a reason." Andy's final redemption is both physical and spiritual.

Grisham's Crusade

Some critics also found redeeming qualities in Natural Born Killers. Ebert, for example, pointed out that the movie is not so much about the two murders as it is "about the way they electrify the media and exhilarate the public." While Stone may have intended the movie as an exposé of American society's morally bankrupt obsession with violence and celebrity, many critics blasted Stone for glorifying murder and exploiting the obsession he had set out to expose. As teenage murderers began to proclaim their kinship to Mickey and Mallory, the two killers in Stone's movie, one case in particular made headlines. In 1995 a couple in their late teens shot two people, killing one and paralyzing the other. The young woman later told investigators that they had been taking LSD and her boyfriend friend had begun fantasizing about reenacting a scene from Natural Born Killers. The man who was murdered, William Savage, was a friend of author-lawyer John Grisham, who wrote an article in his magazine, The Oxford American (Spring 1996), charging that Stone should be held responsible under product-liability laws for the copycat murders inspired by his movie. According to Grisham, Natural Born Killers "catered to unbalanced people," while Stone thinks that because "he's an artist" he does not have to be concerned "with the effects of what he produces." If, however, Stone loses a $1 million product-liability lawsuit, said Grisham, "the party will be over," Stone's legal representative called the charges "ridiculously bizarre" and said Grisham should focus his anger on the "gun toting crazies." A noted First Amendment attorney, Martin Garbus, characterized Grisham's legal thinking as "preposterous" and no such suit was ever filed against Stone, but in 1997 an attorney for Patsy Byers, the woman who was paralyzed, filed a civil suit on other grounds against Stone and Time Warner, the studio that produced the movie, charging that they "knew … or should have known" that the movie would inspire violent behavior. The suit was still unsettled in autumn 2000.

Regulating the Movies

In 1990 the Motion Picture Association of America replaced the old X rating with an NC-17 rating for movies that included excessive violence or overt sexuality and instructed theater owners that anyone under seventeen should not be admitted to such movies. Because newspapers often refused to advertise NC-17 movies, and theaters frequently refused to show them, directors whose movies earned NC-17 ratings began cutting or reshooting scenes to earn the less-restrictive R rating. The first big commercial movie rated NC-17, Showgirls (1995), bombed with critics and moviegoers, less for its rating than for its hackneyed script and amateurish acting. By the mid 1990s politicians had begun to target movie violence and to accuse the entertainment industry of creating what Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole called "nightmares of depravity," Congressman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) proposed legislation to ban sales of violent materials to minors. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) proposed a bill to require the entertainment industry to label violent products with government-approved warnings. Another proposed bill would keep movie directors from using federal property as a setting for violent pictures, Critics of such legislation called them "hand-wringing" measures that might appeal to voters but would have little impact on the movie and recording industries.

Sources

Todd and Kenneth Womack Davis, "Shepherding the Weak: The Ethics of Redemption in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction," Literature Film Quarterly, 26, no. 1 (1998): 60-66.

Tim Dirks, "The Shawshank Redemption/' The Greatest Films, online at <www.filmsite.org> or< www.greatestfilms.org>.

Susan J. Douglas, 'The Devil Made Me Do It: Is Natural Born Killers the Ford Pinto of Movies," Nation, 268 (5 April 1999): 50.

Martha Duffy, "Grisham's Law," Time, 145 (8 May 1995): 87-88.

Roger Ebert, Review of Natural Born Killers, Chicago Sun-Times, 26 August 1994.

Ebert, Review of 'Pulp Fiction, Chicago Sun-Times, 10 October 1994.

Ebert, Review of The Shawshank Redemption, Chicago Sun-Times, 17 October 1999.

Elizabeth Gleick, "A Time to Sue," Time, 147 (17 June 1996): 90.

Michael Schnayerson, "Natural Born Opponents," Vanity Fair, no. 431 (July 1996):" 98-105, 141-144.

Tom Whalen, "Film Noir: Killer Style," Literature Film Quarterly, 23, no. 1 (1995): 2-5.