Joshua Hinckley-Porter



Joshua Hinckley-Porter

ENG 105

Online

Dr. Beatty

Thrilling and Killing - Why So Often Synonyms in the Film Industry?

As we speak, there is a man holding a gun to the back of your head. The cold muzzle stings the tender skin of your scalp and blood trickles to the floor from where the handcuffs have cut into your wrists. Your heart, sensing death approaching, struggles in vain to slip through its cage of ribs and run screaming into the night, much like how the scream just behind your eyes makes your vision blur and muscles twitch spastically. But perhaps you know the man behind you. Does that make you more or less afraid? Perhaps there’s no man at all. Perhaps it’s you who’s holding that gun. Maybe that gun isn’t there either. Is such a thing possible? A loud BANG is your only answer.

Now you stand up, brush the flecks of popcorn off your shirt, and leave the theatre. Tomorrow, when you tell your friends that the movie was exciting, thrilling, and heart-stopping you’ll most likely be describing one thing - violence. Never mind the unanswered questions of identity; it’s the gun that made your heart race, the blood that made your hair stand on end. Does this mean you can’t be thrilled without violence? Certainly not. What it means is that violence does thrill. Aside from being a biological fact, it also happens to be one which filmmakers have learned to expertly exploit. When properly employed, almost any object or action can set the heart thumping and send a chill down the spine, but to do so requires greater-than-average skill on the part of writers, directors, and actors, whereas simple violence requires relatively little of these things. What motivates filmmakers to put in all that effort to replace a “cheap thrill” with a sophisticated one? Why do extremely talented writers and directors still take advantage of violence and its effects? The answers vary from genre to genre and film to film, but in essence boil down to one fact: violence is an undeniable and irreplaceable part of a faithfully told modern story. If a film attempts to be as “realistic” as possible, as many psychological thrillers do, it will more likely than not contain violence simply because violence is a part of our reality.

Just because a good psychological thriller does not necessarily require violence to be intense and suspenseful does not mean that violence is always an indication of trashy cinema. What discriminates between the instances where film violence is powerful and where it is just so much bloody fluff is the accompanying moral and emotional context. A journalist quotes author and film critic Stephen Prince as saying, “nearly all filmmakers are concentrating on the visual, physical aspects of violence and not on the emotional or spiritual dimensions of it” (Harris 2). A good question to determine the value of a particular instance of violence might be, “Is the violence a part of the story, or does the story exist merely for the purpose of exhibiting violence?” Most often, if the content is critically integrated into the story, the “emotional or spiritual dimensions” are being addressed to a far greater extent than if the story is simply a backdrop for cheap eye-candy.

A number of excellent examples of such “meaningful violence” can be seen in the movie Memento, written by Christopher Nolan. His screenplay opens quite bluntly, with “A POLAROID PHOTOGRAPH, clasped between finger and thumb: a crude, crime scene flash picture of a MAN’S BODY lying on a decaying wooden floor, a BLOODY MESS where his head should be” (Nolan 1). Graphic? Yes. Unnecessary? Absolutely not. As the viewer comes to discover, the picture is taken by Lenny, a man unable to form memories. Photographs and scribbles become his only means of remembering anything new, including his own actions, and even his own murders.

And Lenny’s murders are critical to the story. After his wife is raped and killed in a seemingly random crime, the crime to which his memory also fell victim, Lenny vows to find and wreak vengeance on the man responsible. Already we can see the plot is wrought with violence, yet it is not portrayed without serious emotional consequences (Klein 2). Because of his inability to make new memories, Lenny is constantly plagued by the never-fading phantom of his wife’s death, and is driven to seek revenge by his constant grief and pain. Lenny does not employ violence by choice – it is simply a step on the path toward what he truly seeks: relief from his suffering. Likewise, good psychological thrillers do not include violence for the sake of violence; they include it because it must be included in order for the story being told to be “true”. In this regard, most psychological thrillers do not (or perhaps more accurately, should not) suffer one of the major accusations leveled against other film genres that employ violence, which is that their portrayal of violence is unrealistic and potentially harmful to viewers.

As Prince says, “The lack of consequences is one of the damaging messages that get sent” by film violence (Harris 2). Psychological thrillers, rather than failing to show the consequences of violent action, often focus more on the consequences than on the action itself. In Memento the murder of Lenny’s wife (which is only briefly glimpsed during flashback sequences) brings his entire life crashing down around him, and his quest for bloody vengeance robs him of what little he has left, leaving him at the mercy of certain individuals of questionable morality. In Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise’s character lapses into despair and self-loathing after a car “accident” mangles his appearance. In Donnie Darko, much of Donnie’s sufferings are the result of an act of violence that he is fated to commit, although he and the audience are unaware of it for most of the movie. This focus on consequences serves to reinforce the films’ realism. As we all know a murder may take only a few minutes, but its consequences can last a lifetime.

One notable exception to this trend of realistic consequences is the movie Fight Club, and the exception has been well noted by fans and critics alike. While violence certainly plays a critical role in the story, its consequences come across as positive bordering on desirable. Even so, it tends to be overlooked that the film’s portrayal of violence remains “real,” which is why it is so effective. Punches produce black eyes, kicks produce limps and head-buts result in missing teeth. The dead are mourned by friends when they fall. This type of violence is blatantly different from the truly unrealistic and consequence-less types show in such movies as The Terminator and Triple-X. It is these types of violence that quickly produce the numbing effects that are forever debated in the media, not the types encountered in the psychological thriller.

I mentioned earlier violence in connection with realism (at least for the viewers and context of today), and this is of particular import when examining violence in psychological thrillers. In order to be effective, this genre of film must successfully merge the audience’s consciousness with that of the characters, which is at very best a daunting task. A psychological thriller that fails in this regard is doomed to forever sit on the back shelf of the video store, to slip through the cracks of the public’s fickle memory and fade away to make room for more appetizing big-screen offerings. This is where violence as a means to the end of realism comes in.

There are numerous strategies for securing a film’s place in the minds and hearts of its viewers, but realism seems to be by far the most effective. As Robin Wood, a scholar of Hitchcock’s works states, “We tend to select from a film and stress, quite unconsciously, those aspects that are most relevant to us, to our own problems and our own attitude to life, and ignore or minimize the rest” (Wood 102). The more the setting of the film looks like a place you know, the more the characters do and say things you might do or say, the more they find themselves facing the same fears that strike you when you hear the floor creak in the middle of the night, the more closely you will identify with them. Sadly, violence has become one of those things that we today are intimately familiar with. Even though many people don’t actually deal with violence personally on a daily basis, our exposure to other people’s violent experiences through news and entertainment media simulates the effect far too well. Telling a faithful story set in today’s society without violence consequently becomes quite difficult, and the rewards for doing it are relatively few (Piluso 1). Rather than avoiding violence and viewing it as a negative influence, many psychological thrillers have been able to use it (in combination with many other factors) to stir deeper emotions and on the whole create more engrossing films.

Let’s go back to Memento and see firsthand how realism and violence are used to enhance the character-viewer bond. The characters are all quite real, complete with flaws and weaknesses. They can’t be clearly categorized as being either “good” or “bad,” because like real people they have unique and personal motivations for their actions that often have little direct relation to Lenny’s story. Combined with the modern “anywhere, USA” setting, this sets up a good foundation for sympathy and identification but doesn’t go much further. The actual linking of character and viewer is accomplished through violence. Lenny has suffered a loss that many of us fear; the loss of a loved one while we are unable to do anything to help. It is not until we see the flashback where “the wet plastic shower curtain pulls taut across a gasping, thrashing female face” (Nolan 69) that we truly understand the horror and significance of his loss. Scenes such as this serve to merge Lenny’s viewpoint with that of the audience until it’s not just Lenny that wants to avenge his wife, but the audience as well.

As we’ve see in Memento, violence can help bring the characters and audience together, but this only works when certain other conditions are met. Problems arise that begin to hurt the effectiveness and significance of violence when the characters aren’t easy to identify with. Take for example Vanilla Sky, starring Tom Cruise as a millionaire playboy who happens to suffer a number of strange and life-altering changes after being the victim of a car accident. While this fits the mold of a Greek tragedy quite nicely, the characterization of the protagonist seems to be out of place in the modern psychological thriller. The film has received notoriously bad reviews, most likely because of this fatal flaw in characterization. The average audience will find it much harder to identify with “Citizen Dildo’s” (as Cruise’s character is referred to in the film) fall from economic and pretty-boy grace than to identify with someone like Lenny of Memento or the unnamed protagonist of Fight Club. Both of the latter examples are preferred by audiences for several reasons. Neither possesses much material wealth, neither is satisfied with their life, and both undergo intense internal struggles for control and meaning. When characters such as these lash out in violence we sympathize and understand, knowing that we might very well have acted the same way under such difficult circumstances. When the fallen-from-grace pretty-boy lashes out, however, he makes a far less sympathetic character for the reason that even in his fallen state he remains very different from most of us. Without proper characterization, then, violence loses its power and meaning and becomes something objectionable rather that something that’s a “real” part of the story.

We see from these examples that violence can be an effective and powerful tool when used in the proper context, so why is it only within the last 40 or so years of filmmaking that violence has come to the forefront? Social pressures had much to do with it; before Penn and Peckinpah, most “realistic” portrayals of violence, i.e. those including any sort of blood or graphic suffering were cut from scripts for fear of rejection by producers and audiences (Piluso 1). Writers of psychological thrillers such as Hitchcock had to work much harder to bring the viewers into the story while still maintaining a certain standard of visual cleanliness.

Hitchcock took what today might be considered a creative hindrance and created what Wood refers to as his first masterpiece, Rear Window (Wood 100). On screen violence plays a very small part in the film, and yet it still manages to be suspenseful through the expert use of other techniques. In a way, the exclusion of explicit violence is beneficial – the less that is shown, the more the audience has to guess at. We can also see in this film one of the first and best attempts to force the audience completely into the mind of the protagonist. “Rear Window is Hitchcock’s most uncompromising attempt to imprison us, not only within a limited space, but within a single consciousness” says Wood. He goes on to explain: “From the beginning of the film to the end, we are enclosed in the protagonist’s apartment, leaving it only when he leaves it. With one brief exception, we are allowed to see only what he sees, know only what he knows” (Wood 103). This confinement is a brilliant strategy on the part of Hitchcock, but while it may be an excellent example of character immersion without violence, it is less applicable to many films of today that need a broader scope to hold the modern viewers’ attention.

Penn and Peckinpah’s original intent for graphic violence based on the reasoning that “if films showed the actual results of violence, audiences would be cleansed of any urges in that direction” is no longer valid today (Harris 1). The film industry has been marketing graphic violence for decades, and most would agree that no such aversion to violence has been successfully created. Violence is no longer there to teach society a lesson; it is there because it has become a part of society itself.

Despite the rapid influx of thinly-disguised gore and profit orgies on the big screen, there remain a number of films (as small as that number might be) that are able to use violence in a beneficial way, both for the story and the viewer. This tends to happen more frequently in psychological thrillers than in other genres due to the greater return on the investment, in a manner of speaking. Since the quality of a psychological thriller is based almost entirely on its ability to immerse the audience in a character’s experience and since violence is such an effective way of doing so, the payoff in film quality of perfecting the reality of violent scenes is far greater than in most other genres, where character depth and audience immersion might not be as critical.

Violence in many of the films I have described is a good thing. To exclude it would be to empty out all the truth and turn these films into pale husks of lies of not much value to anyone. Violence is real, and thus has a place in any film attempting to portray modern reality. Whether or not accurate portrayals of reality are good for a culture is another matter entirely, but for the sake of the psychological thriller such portrayals are undeniably beneficial. Due to their very nature, these films act as a type of cultural mirror; they are forced to depict the type of events and atmosphere to which we, the audience can best relate. For people of today, violence goes a long way toward relating the fictional world of film to the real world, so violence in one will naturally lead to or reflect violence in the other. Who can say what the people of tomorrow will see as the defining factors of their reality? For now, violence exists in psychological thrillers because to us, it exists as a part of our very selves.

Works Cited

Harris, Sally. “Original Purpose of Escalating Violence in movies Backfired, Virginia Tech Film Critic Says.” Virginia Tech News and Information, Oct 1999. Mar 2004 .

Kelley, Richard. The Donnie Darko Book. Faber & Faber, 2003.

Klein, Andy. “Everything You Wanted to Know About Memento.” Arts Entertainment June 2001. Mar 2004 .

Nolan, Christopher. Memento: A Screenplay. Oct 1999.

Piluso, Robert. “Ah, Bloody Hell: Violence in Film”. Script Magazine Dec 2003. Mar 2004 .

Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited: Revised Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

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