Violence

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Violence

BEGINNINGS
WORLD WAR II AND AFTERMATH
THE 1960s AND AFTER
FURTHER READING

The representation of violence in the cinema has been a topic nearly as contentious as sexuality for those concerned with what is proper for the content of film. Yet censorship organizations have focused less on violence than on sexual images or images suggestive of various forms of gender liberation. Cursory application of psychoanalytic theory provides at least tentative answers for this: Western civilization, heavily influenced by organized religion, has been fairly obsessed with policing the body and in controlling sexual conduct of both men and women. Freudian and post-Freudian thinking has postulated that the libido is policed in such fashion as to channel its energies to the service of commerce and state interests. Violent acts—from sports to warfare—have been theorized as a way of providing a safety valve for errant sexual energies. Violence has been viewed, if the cinema is any guide, as a reasonably acceptable form of human expression in a highly competitive civilization that sanctions warfare as a way for states to settle grievances.

There are variations to this acceptance, as becomes plainly obvious when observing how the Production Code and organizations such as the Catholic Legion of Decency regulate the violent image. The regulatory process often sanctions violent images that conform to standing political and moral values, but disallows those that challenge capitalism and notions of social normality. In general, the European cinema has taken a progressive attitude toward images of violence, showing its consequences or using it to jolt the complacent spectator, as with the graphic scenes of bloodshed in Sergei Eisenstein's masterpieces Stachka (Strike, 1925) and Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), or the shock effect of the sliced eyeball in Luis Buñuel's and Salvador Dali's Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929).

BEGINNINGS

Since its inception, American cinema has been fascinated with violence. A breakthrough film in the development of narrative was Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903). Filmed in New Jersey, this proto-western suggests the appealing, deeply embedded nature of violence in the frontier experience and the American civilizing process, and the rather spontaneous way that the attendant violence appears in the earliest developments of cinema. The film's final image, of a mustachioed gunman firing a revolver directly at the camera/spectator, became iconic on several levels, not least of which was the assault on the audience effectuated by the violent image. The film's explicit idea—that one takes what one wants with the use of guns—has been said by various directors and critics to be a controlling idea of the American cinema. Martin Scorsese (b. 1942) concludes GoodFellas (1990) with an image of the actor Joe Pesci firing at the camera in a manner replicating the final shot of The Great Train Robbery.

While regional censorship as well as internal industry monitoring had some impact on the amount of violence in the early cinema, film at its inception contained startling scenes of graphic violence. D. W. Griffith's (1875–1948) Intolerance (1916) is notable not only for its baroque parallel narratives, but also for its scenes of decapitation, dismemberment, and stabbings. A conservative populist, Griffith surprises contemporary audiences with the "Jenkins Mill" sequence in Intolerance, which is a loose reconstruction of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in which the National Guard and hired goons gunned down striking coal miners opposed to the brutal labor policies of the Rockefeller family. A director of great contradictions—most obviously in his racist rendering of the Civil War, The Birth of a Nation (1915)—Griffith was among the early American filmmakers who believed that the portrayal of violence must be uncompromised to show its consequences for humanity. Other works of the early American cinema such as Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924), based on the novel McTeague by Frank Norris, offered a gritty portrayal of a rapacious society, culminating in a famous grueling scene in Death Valley in which the protagonist pistol-whips his pursuer to death before expiring of heat exhaustion.

The relatively free use of violence in early American film narrative did not go unnoticed by various bodies that saw Hollywood culture as a "new Babylon," and its films as depraved renderings of human civilization. In order to fend off increasing calls for government censorship, the Hollywood industry worked out an arrangement to police all in-house productions. In 1922 the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) was constituted. It was chaired by former postmaster general Will Hays (1887–1937), hence it was commonly referred to as the Hays Office. The Hays Office developed within ten years an enforcement arm with a rigid and complicated set of rules known as the Production Code Administration (PCA). The monitoring of films in production by the PCA eventually was effected by an agreement worked out between the industry and two representatives of the Catholic Church—Daniel Lord, a priest, and Martin Quigley, an ultraconservative writer and publisher. As the Catholic Church played an increasing role in the monitoring of Hollywood, the industry balked at restrictions placed on their creativity, and this conflict led to the establishment of the Studio Relations Committee, whose intent was to negotiate differences between the studios and the PCA. The PCA focused not merely on violence but especially on all forms of sexual expression outside of heterosexual marriage—which itself had to be presented within strict and rather absurd guidelines (for example, married couples had to be depicted as sleeping in separate beds). As the industry complained, the Catholic Church took renewed steps to pressure filmmakers by forming in 1934 the Catholic Legion of Decency, which put in place a rating system that could "condemn" or render "morally objectionable" films seen as indecent. The Legion had a powerful influence not only on the Catholic audience but also on general public perception of Hollywood fare. Joseph Breen (1890–1965), a Catholic known for rabidly anti-Semitic views, became head of the PCA in 1934; the office and its policies were often referred to as the "Breen Code."

Despite the increasingly rigid policing of films from within and without the industry, film directors tried to subvert the Code. Images of violence could be portrayed so long as they fit within the moral and political precepts of the PCA. Three popular films of the early 1930s, released before the Code took hold, Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), and Little Caesar (1931), popularized the gangster film, in part due to fascination with small- and big-time criminals as rebel figures during the Prohibition era and the first years of the Great Depression. These three films were in many respects test cases for later violations of the Production Code. While all three contained scenes of shootings and acts of sadistic violence, they presented themselves as public-service films aimed at addressing conscientiously (rather than glamorizing) the image of the criminal, and at debunking crime as a form of social rebellion. Public Enemy, Scarface, and Little Caesar all conclude with the demise of the "villain" (who actually is the most charismatic figure in all three films). But because this basic moral point—that crime doesn't pay—is hammered home in these films, the Code rules that were violated—including one that forbade the depiction of a gunman and the person being shot in the same frame—were violated with impunity.

Censorious intervention on the subject of violence sometimes had disastrous and counterproductive results, as is so often the case in matters of censorship. A key example is the treatment of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931). The horror film was seen as an inherently low-brow and immoral genre by church groups and other authorities, and it came under even greater scrutiny than the crime film in regard to the rendering of violence. In an important scene in Frankenstein, the monster, brilliantly played by Boris Karloff, encounters a little girl playing with flowers by a pond. The monster, who behaves like an overgrown child, joins the girl in her game of tossing flowers on the pond to watch them float, then innocently throws the child onto the pond to see if she too will float. When she drowns, the monster becomes alarmed and flees into the forest. Regional censorship boards preempted the Code and demanded that much of this sequence be removed, so instead of seeing the monster's innocence in his play, and his panic when the girl drowns, we only see the monster reaching for the child, then the film cuts to an image of the girl's father, in a state of shock, carrying his dead child through the local village, the girl's stockings around her ankles. This edit of the film remained in circulation as the standard version of Frankenstein for more forty years. The audience is led to imagine all sorts of images of child molestation and murder, and the notion of the monster as actual victim, scorned and persecuted by his creator/father, is turned upside down in service of a perverse, simpleminded morality.

WORLD WAR II AND AFTERMATH

World War II brought the War Information Office, a collaboration between the US government and Hollywood that produced not only newsreels that functioned as propaganda for the Allied effort, but also a variety of fiction and nonfiction films that portrayed the Axis powers as monstrous while overlooking entirely the economic origins of the war. War films such as Bataan (1943) were allowed a surprising amount of sanctioned and savage violence because they demonized the evil "Jap." Postwar films such as The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) portrayed violence as rather bloodless and painless as they lionized sacrificial violence and heroism; at the time, this was Hollywood's standard approach to the subject. The war years saw changes within other genres too, such as the crime film. Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941) took on the PCA by portraying the gangster as a hero of the people who sympathized with victims of the Great Depression. The gun violence of the alienated gangster in High Sierra was tolerated since he is brought down by the police at the end, although it is clear with whom the film's sympathies rest.

World War II was a transitional moment in Hollywood's portrayal of violence, as the industry and the nation began to think through the implications of the war and what instructions it offered about humanity. Crime films such as Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947) and Walsh's White Heat (1949) focused on the criminal psychopath, suggesting the influence of Freudianism on mass consciousness as well as the more general notion that social ills could not be attributed to a few "bad boys," as in previous renderings of criminal violence. Kiss of Death features a scene showing the crazed hoodlum Tommy Udo (Richard Widwark) shoving a wheelchair-bound old woman down a staircase; Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in White Heat brutally dispatches his enemies, and ends his own life in an apocalyptic gun battle that results in a Hiroshima-like explosion at an oil depot. Again, a touch of crime-doesn't-pay moralism allowed these films to be screened. Psychotic menace and catastrophic violence became emblems of an increasingly unstable society showing signs of the trauma of the Depression and the war years.

Despite the ostensible conservatism of the 1950s, portrayals of violence became more graphic, as if to complement the darkened and uncertain mood in the United States. During this period the Production Code was steadily weakened by increased public demand for more realistic cinema; at the same time, the Hollywood studio system began to decline due to court challenges to Hollywood's monopoly practices, the demise of studio bosses, and the selling off of parts of the system itself. The circumstances provided a favorable backdrop to films noir such as Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) and Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The noir thriller, influenced by the bleak vision of German expressionist cinema, was filled with acts of sadistic savagery, such as a villain throwing boiling coffee into a young woman's face in The Big Heat, or Kiss Me Deadly's nominal hero slamming a helpless man's hand repeatedly in a desk drawer as the camera cuts to the hero's grinning face. Kiss Me Deadly and Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) also conclude with massive explosions that recall the A-bomb, emphasizing the pervasive anxieties of the age.

The 1950s saw a reevaluation of history that became manifest in the rendering of violence. The westerns of Anthony Mann, including Winchester '73 (1950), The Man From Laramie (1955), and Man of the West (1958), contained often grueling scenes of violence that seem part of a general assessment of the conventions of the genre, in particular its function in portraying the hero's hidden psychological motives and the real underpinnings of the American expansionist process. The war film also took part in generic reevaluation, with films such as Aldrich's Attack! (1959) showing shocking violence (in one scene a man's arm is crushed by a tank) within narratives that questioned the military command structure and the reasons for war. To be sure, such films were answered, in a fashion, by flagwaving fare such as To Hell and Back (1955), a biopic about Audie Murphy (1924–1971), the most decorated soldier of World War II, who plays himself in the film. Films with such conservative agendas tended to gloss over the effects of violence rather than show its consequences, or the reasons for warfare and other violent conflicts in the first place, while also challenging PCA standards.

THE 1960s AND AFTER

The 1960s brought significant change to the rendering of film violence long before the US assault on Vietnam registered in the public mind via the mass media. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) took the horror film in a new direction with his portrayal of serial murder, in particular the film's famous shower scene wherein the ostensible heroine is stabbed to death, her blood running down the drain. Three years later, the same director's The Birds (1963), another venture into the fantastique that was a fable of the disintegration of small-town life, pushed the disintegrated PCA further with images of maddened birds pecking out people's eyes and tearing their flesh. The film included fairly unprecedented scenes of violent attacks on children. By the late 1960s, with the studio system gone, the PCA was replaced by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which produced a ratings system that assigned a letter to films on their release to designate their appropriateness for specific audiences: G ("general") for audiences of all ages, PG ("parental guidance") for adults and adolescents, R ("restricted") for adults and young people accompanied by adults, and X for adults only. The MPAA system closely mirrored the categories of the Legion of Decency, although it also allowed greater creative freedom to the filmmaker, dropping in-house regulation and leaving the decision making to the audience.

ARTHUR PENN
b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 27 September 1922

Although his contribution to the depiction of film violence in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was indeed startling and groundbreaking, Arthur Penn, like Sam Peckinpah, should be seen as something other than a filmmaker preoccupied with bloodshed. Arthur Penn is a skilled dramatist who, like other innovators in screen violence, offered moral and other lessons about the prominence of violence in American life.

Beginning in television directing productions for Philco Playhouse and Playhouse 90, Penn moved to Broadway, winning a Tony for The Miracle Worker (1959), about the lives of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan, which he also brought to the screen, earning Oscars^® for actresses Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in 1962. The Miracle Worker and Alice's Restaurant (1969), Penn's tribute to the 1960s counterculture, are among his more revered works. Still, Bonnie and Clyde is no doubt the film most associated with Penn, for it was a landmark in American cinema. At first, Bonnie and Clyde was dismissed by critics, who were shocked by the film's violence, particularly its sudden and very bloody ending, wherein Clyde (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) are ambushed by lawmen as they drive through the countryside, as well as by the sudden shifts in tone from violent to comic. Their bodies are jolted repeatedly by rifle fire as Penn shoots the sequence with several cameras, the scene recorded with the combination of slow-motion and rapid editing that Peckinpah would expand on many times over in The Wild Bunch (1969).

The notoriety of Bonnie and Clyde tends to overshadow Penn's other accomplishments in the depiction of film violence. The Chase (1966) is an uncompromising portrayal of the disintegration of American life in the 1960s, symbolized by the chaos that overtakes a small-minded, greedy, bigoted small town in the Southwest. Toward the film's conclusion, a group of perfectly middle-class citizens savagely beats the town sheriff (Marlon Brando) to gain favor with a local land baron (E. G. Marshall). The film brilliantly portrays the rage simmering within Middle America, a theme also explored in Penn's crime film Night Moves (1975). Penn's first film, The Left-Handed Gun (1958), explores both the legend of Billy the Kid and the allure of the myth of banditry. A later western, The Missouri Breaks (1976), is a scathing portrayal of the American frontier as the site of a struggle of the poor against the rich and ruthless, with some jarring moments of violence perpetrated by a mercenary in the employ of powerful financial interests.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Left-Handed Gun (1958), The Miracle Worker (1962), Mickey One (1965), The Chase (1966), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Alice's Restaurant (1969), Little Big Man (1970), Night Moves (1975), The Missouri Breaks (1976)

SAM PECKINPAH
b. Fresno, California, 21 February 1925, d. 28 December 1984

Sam Peckinpah is widely regarded as a director who made significant innovations in the portrayal of violence in cinema in the 1960s. A volatile alcoholic, Peckinpah was the archetype of the determined film artist trying to exist within a commercial system that labeled him l'enfant terrible. He had a distinguished beginning in television, cocreating one TV western, The Rifleman (1957–1963), and creating another, The Westerner (1960). Then began Peckinpah's extraordinary but troubled career in the cinema.

Ride the High Country (1962), only his second western, is a melancholy meditation on the fading of the American West's heroes and villains, a topic that was a Peckinpah obsession. Major Dundee (1965) was Peckinpah's first attempt to bring to the screen, in the form of a gritty post-Civil War western, his hard-bitten sense of the violent world of men. The film made him a Hollywood pariah for several years. He returned with The Wild Bunch (1969), his most famous film and his bloodiest. About a gang of aging outlaws fighting a last stand on the Texas-Mexico border at the outbreak of World War I, The Wild Bunch made full use of Peckinpah's interest in a realistic portrayal of screen violence. Peckinpah photographed battle scenes with multiple cameras at various speeds; in the final edit, the film's violent scenes clearly owe a debt to Sergei Eisenstein. Yet Peckinpah's emphasis on the explosive squib to simulate a bullet's impact on the body was fairly unprecedented, as was his sense of the chaos and madness of warfare.

Peckinpah soon became known as "Bloody Sam" and Hollywood's "master of violence." Perhaps too self-conscious of the labels, Peckinpah's next major film, Straw Dogs (1971), seems a strained essay film on masculinity's inherently violent nature. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) marked his return to the western. Like The Wild Bunch and The Getaway (1972), Pat Garrett shows sympathy for the underclass as well as the criminal outsider, and, like Major Dundee, it was hurt by troubles with producers and the studio, and by Peckinpah's increasing personal problems. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) is Peckinpah's gruesome, quasi-surrealist tribute to one of his influences, Luis Buñuel. Peckinpah's last major film was Cross of Iron (1977), a World War II epic about the German retreat from the siege of Stalingrad, and a compelling meditation on the male group. While his career may have been compromised by his lifestyle, Peckinpah brought to the cinema not just new techniques for the portrayal of violence but also a new sensibility, one far more conscientious than that of other directors who have tried to render violence before and after the Production Code.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), Straw Dogs (1971), The Getaway (1972), Junior Bonner (1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Cross of Iron (1977), The Osterman Weekend (1983)

The post-Code era brought a number of epic Hollywood productions whose violence would have been unthinkable during the studio era, most notably Francis Ford Coppola's (b. 1939) films about the mafia, The Godfather (1972) and its sequel, The Godfather II (1974). Both films contain scenes depicting the machine-gunning of people at close range, garrotings, stabbings, the exploding of cars (one of which contains a young woman), and various other forms of bloodletting. Stanley Kubrick's (1928–1999) A Clockwork Orange (1971) was viewed during its time as another breakthrough in screen violence, but Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's novel about a dystopia overrun by youth gangs was seen by some critics as bloodless on various counts, an overly stylized and emotionally icy view of humanity that is a representative example of the director's cynicism.

The 1970s and the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate brought a phase of film violence that exploited middle-class rage over the collapse of confidence in government and other institutions. Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971), William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971), Michael Winner's Death Wish (1974), and Phil Karlson's Walking Tall (1973) endorsed to varying degrees police or civilian vigilantism again the criminal underworld, which was frequently associated with the youth counterculture. Dirty Harry and particularly The French Connection portrayed rather uncritically the police as dangerous psychopaths who too often use gun violence to restore civil society. These portrayals of police violence conveyed a level of cynicism not seen in US cinema before the 1960s.

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1975), loosely adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), offered to post-Vietnam society an intelligent meditation on violence in America. The film's tale of a lonely, deranged cab driver (Robert De Niro)—whose search for identity concludes with a bloody massacre in a brothel—captured much of the malaise of the 1970s as the American social fabric disintegrated in the wake of Vietnam even as new waves of reaction approached. The 1970s also saw the phenomenon of the disaster film, whose origins can be traced to some of the early silent epics and films such as San Francisco (1936). The 1970s disaster films partook of a spectacularization of large-scale destruction that seemed to speak to the nation's crisis in confidence. The Towering Inferno (1974) and Earthquake (1974) invited the audience to enjoy the destruction of middle-class life and of the nation itself, either in microcosm (the burning of an immense skyscraper in Towering Inferno) or macrocosm (the collapse of Los Angeles in Earthquake). These films featured little outright bloodletting and nothing in the way of meditations on the nature of violence in the manner of The Wild Bunch or Taxi Driver. Instead, they suggested the apocalyptic temperament then prevalent in mass culture and the film industry that would reappear by the end of the century in films such as Deep Impact (1998), Armageddon (1998), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). The sensibility of the 1970s disaster cycle is marked by a feeling of nihilism and despair that sees no point to political or social reform, preferring instead the solace of wishful fantasies of self-annihilation. In their favor, the 1970s disaster films at least offered a few consolations about the regenerative nature of society.

The 1970s brought a delayed examination of the Vietnam War in films such as The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979); the former saw the war in terms of the wounds to the national psyche while demonizing the people of Vietnam, the latter viewed the war as a gross, horrific spectacle that signaled the end of the American process of conquest. The war has been revisited numerous times in films since, most notably in Oliver Stone's (b. 1946) Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), films whose graphic violence focused

principally on the wounds suffered by US veterans who were seduced into service by a deceitful government. But reactionary retellings of the Vietnam War accompanied the government of Ronald Reagan. The Rambo films starring Sylvester Stallone, in particular Rambo II (1985), took advantage of the "deceived veteran" theme but also tried, in effect, to rewrite the history of the war. Not coincidentally, these films and those starring former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger (b. 1947) reintroduced a cartoonish approach to violence in which blood-letting had little or no tangible consequence as they foregrounded the hypermasculinity of barechested, muscular men wielding large machine guns. Schwarzenegger helped establish a new form of painless, absurd violence in James Cameron's The Terminator (1984), which spawned two sequels (Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991, and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2003). The Terminator films, like many similar movies, took the portrayal of violence several decades backward as they invited the audience to enjoy a spectacle of urban destruction that caused little or no real suffering for the films' characters, a trend of the latter-day disaster films.

In the reactionary turn of the millennium, the commercial cinema undertook a valorization of military violence and US involvement in various wars in films such as The Patriot (2000), We Were Soldiers (2002), Black Hawk Down (2001), and especially Saving Private Ryan (1998). Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan makes use of the graphic bloodshed effects introduced in the 1960s by Peckinpah and others while diluting or obliterating the moral lessons of Peckinpah, Penn, and others. The graphic violence of Saving Private Ryan serves a simpleminded celebration of national identity. Unlike the films of Peckinpah, Saving Private Ryan shows little ambiguity about the uses of violence; indeed, it celebrates warfare as a rite of national identity.

Yet the 1990s also saw a reevaluation of screen violence similar to that undertaken earlier by Penn, Peckinpah, and others. Actor and director Clint Eastwood (b. 1930), whose career was established by the violent Italian westerns of Sergio Leone (1929–1989) such as Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966) and by Dirty Harry (1971) and its sequels, undertook a major revision of the western in Unforgiven (1993), which tries to reassert the terrible consequences of violence within a narrative that questions the mythologizing of the western genre. Several rather philosophical interrogations of media violence appeared in the 1990s, most notably Oliver Stone's ambitious but unfocused Natural Born Killers (1994), which is distinguished by a Brechtian, presentational style. While apparently concerned with the relationship of the media image and film violence to violence in American society, the film veers into a reflection on violence within the American character that makes the film confused and overwhelming.

The postmodern style of the 1990s cinema brought several "hip" comments on film violence that seem little more than pastiche exercises, or compilations of various tropes and conventions from earlier films with little added critical focus. The most notable maker of these films is Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963), whose Reservoir Dogs (1991), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), and Kill Bill films (2003 and 2004) made him in the minds of some critics and audiences the new "master of violence." His films are alarmingly cynical and empty of any specific notion either of cinema violence or of violence in American society, and merely overwhelm the audience with hyperbolic bloodshed.

The period since the 1980s might be termed the "era of the bloodbath" in that the new freedom allowed filmmakers has made violent scenes omnipresent, and steadily more graphic, as directors try to one-up each other in their uses of onscreen violence. (Tarantino will no doubt continue to be the representative model for pseudosophisticated uses of violence that reference the films of the past without their moral or political lessons.) Filmic violence has become pointless, boring, and rather shameless, lacking the moral force and shock effect of films

such as The Wild Bunch. While there are exceptions to this rule, the overall tone of the new Hollywood violence is one of cynicism and contempt for humanity, perhaps a reflection of increasing despair as economic conditions worsen and America loses the respect of other nations in the new globalized world order.