Mel Gibson’s latest film Apocalypto, like his last film The Passion of the Christ, is coming in for criticism due to its excessive violence. Here is Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, in an excerpt from his review that he read with considerable indignance on NPR last Friday:
Gibson unblushingly intends “Apocalypto” as a clarion call warning modern man to watch his step or risk following the Mayas into decline and near-extinction. To this end he opens the story with a famous quote from historian Will Durant about the fall of Rome: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”This is all well and good, but the reality of “Apocalypto” is that this film is in fact Exhibit A of the rot from within that Gibson is worried about. If our society is in moral peril, the amount of stomach-turning violence that we think is just fine to put on screen is by any sane measure a major aspect of that decline. Mel, no one in your entourage is going to tell you this, but you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. A big part.
This review resonated with me because I saw Martin Scorcese’s lastest film The Departed last week. (Reviewed by Mike here) The amount of violence in this film had me flinching throughout, and at times I turned away from the screen and looked at the wall. I thought about walking out. I came close to cancelling dinner with a friend afterward because the grim, excessively macho and violent film left me feeling bleak and depressed, and I felt the urge to go home and read some Jane Austen or William Wordsworth to purge this awful world from my mind.
And yet, I don’t recall hearing anything but plaudits for Scorcese’s latest. To his credit, Turan also calls The Departed macho and excessive, but look at the difference in the tenor of his words:
But even though it has a lot that’s worth showing off, “The Departed’s” florid determination to be showoff-y, to take pride in bravado, is periodically worrisome. Though a story like this has to traffic in excessive violence and unsettling language, it’s not essential to flaunt those elements. Unlike Clint Eastwood in “Mystic River” (a similarly dark story with the same Boston locale), Scorsese has a need to periodically go over the top that will either be to your taste or not.
Either to your taste or not? I’d say the numerous close-up shots of people inflicting serious physical harm on others in The Departed are not to my taste. I’m reminded of this Michael Ignatieff quote from Mike’s post here:
“A necessary evil cannot really be an evil at all, since it is a characteristic of evil that it is not necessary but gratuitous.” (page 17, The Lesser Evil)
Is violence in the service of a Martin Scorcese film less gratitious than violence in a Mel Gibson film? In the context of the Ignatieff quote, is it is more necessary? And how does one define necessary: necessary within the context of the film, or necessary in relation to its effect on the moral sensibilities of the viewer?
I’m open to hearing the experiences of others when watching violent films, and alternative thoughts on the justifications for violence. Personally, I’m tempted to chastise violence more as lazy film-making than anything else, equivalent to having a woman take her top off instead of taking the trouble to craft an erotic scene. A degree of de-sensitivization is required to watch these kinds of violent films. This detachment makes it harder to see characters as real people with real motives and feelings, and I can’t but help think that this is a negative thing to do when experiencing art. But I could just be soft.
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First, I do not consider The Departed exceedingly violent, but really par for the course of Scorcese, so I suppose this has something to do with where each of us come from with respects to our viewing habits. I personally have little interest in the slasher horror genre, even despite my perhaps sadist interest in death and mortality. To me ‘violence’ is something rendered realistically, and I guess I never took the violence in The Departed as realism, it was a hockum gangster story that worked as pure entertainment. The characters were archetypes, violence to archtypes does not resonate with me as ‘violence’, if there is no real psychology behind it. Same goes for sex… I have a huge problem with much of pornography because of its lack of intimacy, its lack of psychological presence in the acts.
I am not sure how familiar you are with Scorcese’s work… I am typically not a big fan of his, although I do like the staples, Goodfellas and Taxi Driver. I would say violence has a real function in those films because they are exploring in a voyeuristic way extreme realms of masculinity and, in the case of Taxi Driver, nihilism. In The Departed the violence is something of an homage to the Scorcese trait, done in a world that is far more hyperrealistic than the director is prone to doing. Also the film owes some of its attention to violence to the Asian film it is a remake of, and Asian cinema often has a somewhat pathological interest in violence. The Departed is total pantomime, or Kabuki theater. I guess for me it did not register as ‘violence’ due to this acknowledged context, the equivalent of seeing a play fight and knowing no real harm is being done.
Now with regards to Mel Gibson, I am one of the few people who considered Passion of the Christ to be more then violence porn… with the exclusion of some minor problems, issues outside of the main story of Christ’s passions, I thought the film was a staggering assault to my senses with the express purposes of making visceral a concept of sacrifice that (lets not forget) Mel did not invent but is deeply situated in the fabric of Roman Catholicism. If you do not want to take that journey, if you do not want to situate yourself into a place of physical assault and be caught up in the psychological warfare that inflicts then that is up to each person, but for me I was shaken to my core both by the realism of the violence but also by the interplay of that violence with the message of redemption through love Mel deftly employed. I was battered into a feeling of compassion but it was a feeling that resonated… if it was just battering I would get annoyed and detach. Something genuinely worked in Passion of the Christ, amazingly as I am not a Roman Catholic, but I could feel the transcending significance of the acts as they pertained to my own moral sensibilities.
There is a time and a place for visceral assaults. Sometimes it is sadism, of which I have a passing interest being one obsessed with mortality, sometimes it is serves to incite immediacy (Passion of the Christ and Saving Private Ryan), sometimes it is used symbolically as almost another form of dance expression, particularly in Hong Kong action pictures (of which The Departed is a remake of).
When is violence in films exploitive? When it does not exist within a context that serves to render higher meaning for purposes of the narrative and thematic intentions of the work. I do not believe in a universally applicable mark of what constitutes as tolerable expression, almost anything can be expressed in cinema if the context is earnest. I believe in freedom of expression. And, as you did Nate, I believe in the freedom of turning away.
Also I do not agree with Kenneth Turan on the whole you can’t have your cake and eat it too rhetoric about violence in cinema. This to me just seems to be another arbitrary prescription by people who want to establish rules for aesthetics. It is along the same lines as ‘voice-overs is sloppy filmmaking so don’t use them’. It all depends on the context, on the use, and most importantly on the individual engagement of the work and how the totality impresses on one. The prescription presupposes something is wrong, and throughout history this sort of premeditated censorship has stifled the potentials of many people, and for what, the fanatic allure of reasoning.
Natural Born Killers was another film that was chastized for being overtly violent yet conveying a message of the vacuity of it. To me this is a silly argument, because the use of violence in the film serves to satiate the violent drive that perhaps lurks in all mankind, to bring it to the fore, and to have each person confront it not in the abstract, or in the theoretical, but in the flesh and blood. There is an expression in history for this sort of thing: morality plays… they tiltilate the sinful feelings while telling us how bad they are, and they leave of in a place of self-contradiction that a penitent individual would find revelatory. Mike Nichols’ ‘Closer’ is, I think, a brilliant morality play that again was criticized by some people in the media (Mark Kermode being one) for its lack of moral fibre, not appreciating or caring to appreciate the context of this sort of excess experiment.
As you can probably tell I am quite taken with this topic and have some more ot say about it.
One of my problems with Turan’s endorsement of limits on violence in cinema is its lack of perspective with regards to the human situation in the world: we are not exempt from any unspeakable violence, natural or otherwise, that could happen upon us, so why is it necessary to portray a manicured version of life onscreen, to put our head in the sands when it comes to those aspects of the world and to life that we find unsavory? To me the act of fullstop shying away from this reality is unsettling, it is more pathological than anything Mel may present us with.
Mel is dealing with a theme of civilization on the brink of annhilation, the realm of decadence, and I am of the belief a good way to embody that theme is to be explicit, the explicitness could shock us into an understanding of just what the spectre is about… far better than a camera turning away and giving us some composure. I find certain uses of explicit violence didactic, and the fear that Turan seems to endorse, the fear of wholesale avoiding this possibility makes the spectre of violence that much more distant, leaving us prone to fantasy and dissociative behaviour.
Very quickly:
Mike: “The characters were archetypes, violence to archtypes does not resonate with me as ‘violence’, if there is no real psychology behind it.”
Uh, my immediate reaction is to wonder how you can watch a living, breathing human experience horrific pain in a highly realistic simulation of the real thing and somehow be able to detach and see these people as archetypes?
For me, even watching a guy break a glass on someone else’s skull is painful to watch. I still am creeped out about the Trainspotting scene in which Robert Carlyle’s character throws the glass over the balcony and it shatters on a woman’s face. The film treats that woman an incendental, a prop to flesh out the wanton recklessness of Carlyle’s character, and I really dislike it when this happens.
I just don’t see how the violence adds to The Departed. The camera does not need to show such viciousness directly, it can be hinted at. I haven’t seen The Passion of the Christ, but given its subject matter I would be willing to tolerate more violence. The same goes for films about the Holocaust, or war, or serious subjects. I haven’t seen Natural Born Killers either, but if it is exploring violence and the violence is shown for a larger significance, I think that’s justified.
At present, I do think The Departed enters the realm of sadism, as does the latest Bond film when Bond is being tortured. There are ways to depict violence without turning it into pornography, in which some animal arousal is the only end. I’m not going to get on soapbox about this, but I would say the same about violent videogames and rap music. There is something about these violent things that I feel is not good.
(And as a tangential critique of The Departed, what’s with these guys who ace their SAT’s and quote Hawthorne yet break glasses on guy’s heads? I’m not buying it, nor do I buy the Matt Damon character quoting James Joyce. You’re working class or you’re a wonkish intellectual, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too.)
I was just talking to Perc about this… My old roommate had something of a phobia with respects to violence in films… I would sometimes glance over at him watching what was … honestly… pretty tame violence occuring onscreen and I would see him fidgeting and recoiling, and that was a bit revelatory for me about how different people can be with respects to their cinematic experiences. I suspect you would fall in with my roommate as having the same frame of reference with respects to your viewing experience of violence. You ask how I could watch living breathing people enacting violently… lets not forget I am a hockey fan.
But from my frame I truly do not see it on an immediate level as psychologically-affecting violence. These are actors, this is a performance, but more importantly there is very little in the characterizations of these performances to suggest depth of psychology. I can make that division in my head about the violence of play-acting and the violence of say a documentary image. These characters have become so far removed from anything mortal… I mean it is the cliche of the action film that people get shot so many times and keep coming, and to enjoy something like that you buy into the artifice, and for as much as I could I bought into the artifice of The Departed, and I guess compartmentalized my sense of true fear and revulsion at the violence, much the same way I gave no trembling lip heartfelt sensitivity to the love story… because it was not immediate but removed… it was framed differently, almost comic book-like.
I dont think this is something we will see eye to eye on, it fascinates me though. Perhaps this says something about your penchant for Phil Collins, this frame of reference which gives serious emphasis to… for lack of a better term… feelings of lower immediacy. There seems to be less nuance to your aesthetic tastes, you let the impulse guide you in and carry you through.
For better or worse, I compartmentalize in my aesthetics, I zone in on the context and adjust myself, as well as take an added pleasure in revelling in the tacit dimension of the experience, the accidentals of the art work and its broader context. I am not beholden to the art work, or to the artist’s intended message so much. Certainly the artist’s intentions are triggers I either recognize or not, but my experience tells me I do not just follow the trail the artist leads but richochet about the reality of the work, the infinite possibilities of granular meaning in it and draw upon my lived experience cache and experience it accordingly. I like a bit of chaos mixed in with my art, a largely controlled chaos, but still chaos. Because of this I am not a big fan of genre, and even though The Departed is big time genre, what I liked about it (and something I went on about in my review) is this element of chaos in it, this baroque frenzy of masculinity that it depicted. The original it was based on lacked this vitalism, and while some can say there are extraneous scenes of violence in it, for me, it was part of this momentum in the film, part of the stylized world of machismo, and I enjoyed it on that level, with my ‘real’ emotions of impending threat safely locked away.
That is one of the strange things about people, are ability to feign things… and the non-threatening cinema going experience is part of that, I feign emotions when watching films of ‘pure entertainment’, I play-act alongside the actors, I enjoy the escapism it brings. This may be another one for the language discussion… but I think emotions are far more nuanced than we on a day to day level concede to.
I find a certain contradiction present, in that films like the Departed use a very stylized, unrealistic depiction of human beings, and yet we are still supposed to somehow care enough to feel some kind of curiousity/suspense/empathy to keep watching. This goes beyond being able to appreciate archetypes.
A major part of the appeal of the film for someone like you and me is that we glimpse a more dangerous world than our own, and on some level we are mesmerized by the prospect of what we could be. I always wonder at some point during films with cops or soldiers or even James Bond whether my life would be more worth living if I had a more exciting job. But part of the reason I go to see films about these subject matters is because I don’t really want these jobs, and prefer to vicariously experience them on screen, basically cherry-picking the best, most romanticized elements. We see films about cops and not janitors is because on some level we want to connect to the thrill of this danger.
This connection is essential to enjoying the film: seeing just enough in a character to see myself in him, but enough different to let my experience a person I can only become from a distance. Here’s the rub: too much artifice, too much stylized violence, and my connection is severed.
This is not because I have an innate aversion to violence, even though that is true. It is because the integral part of the appeal of violence on film for me is its shock, its ability to startle and offer a glimpse of life that I constantly worry about but rarely confront. In a Scorcese film violence does not shock because it has been rendered pedestrian, prosaic. The characters in the films don’t seem emotionally grieved by the violence, but accept it as a matter of course. Violence for the characters in the Departed is stripped of all the sublime aesthetic, and since I accept the film on its own terms, I have to stop treating violence according to my own personal code. If the DiCaprio character breaks a glass on someone’s head and takes it in stride, I’m not going to insist he feel the same revulsion I do.
On some level, it’s like watching bad porn, in the sense that the characters, whether it is sex or violence, are not embracing the same attitude towards their actions that I do. It’s all going through the motions, and I might as well be watching a film about accountants or golf, since violence and sex have been reduced to such a level of casualness.
SPOILER AlertPart of the problem with the finale of The Departed is that I got the feeling that none of the people that died really cared that much about living, or they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place. I wouldn’t be watching the film if I did’t feel some empathy for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, but I also remember saying to myself at a certain point: “He obviously doesn’t care if he dies, so why should I?
The Farmiga character seemed totally out of place in this film. She had real emotions, which made no sense given the action going on all around her. She was like a real person in a world of cartoons.
In the end, it is a film in which violence and machismo become banal by the passive acceptance of violence and machismo. The transgressive element you speak of as appealing is, for me, crassly diluted into a world of people who don’t understand the power of violence in the first place.
By the way, I don’t see how Phil Collins is any less subtle, on a musical level, than Bob Dylan. Again, it is the language of literature that we can’t seem to get out of. I’ve got post-rock bands like Slint and Godspeed You Black Emperor on my ipod, Charles Mingus, Massive Attack, Radiohead. None of these bands are any more nuanced than the Phil Collins or Janet Jackson songs I have, which are just as musically layered and intricately put together. Lyrically, the latter may traffic in more familiar tropes, but the music isn’t any less profound.
Now that I have seen Apocaylpto I can give a bit more input on precisely what Turan is refering to.
Firstly, Apocalypto is a ho-hum affair, with the exception of a very nicely executed top of the Mayan pyramid sacrifice, there is really a whole lot of nothing in this film, and as Triflic rightly expressed, the movie operates on a base b-movie level, bordering on exploitation but really just a confused action picture. I was amazed at this because Gibson’s ‘Passion of the Christ’ did have a depth and an eye for the cinematic that this was lacking. The violence in Passion shook me to my core, and here, despite every conceivable means of inflicting pain on human beings (including giving birth underwater) there was not the faintest twitch of actual fear in me watching it. It was cartoon violence, and as my filmgoing accomplice Kent put it, a bit of the Monty Python to it. It was just silly… an example being when a jaguar attacks a guy, you get the typically establishing glimpses of the jaws burrowing into the flesh, and then after showing reaction shots, Gibson goes once more to the well and shows the guys face being torn off… now… I found this funny, and people in the audience laughed. There was a lot of this tacking on of mock-violent images, of hyper-reality blood and guts.
One of my favorite indulgences in the film is that there is more than one human sacrifice back to back… like one torn beating heart did not drive the message home that the Mayan’s were bad mofos… nope… for that one doubting thomas in the audience Mel virtually duplicates the scene for the audience. Now while there is some licence in the story for Mel’s exploration of violence, it is clear to anyone he is going beyond the purposes of need and for whatever artistic reason relishing in a fetishistic interest in blood. But I reiterate, it is silly violence, b-movie exploitative violence, violence to yawn at. Somehow Mel was able to make a human sacrifice less immediate than a lashed Christ. Oh and the Christian overtones in the film are worthy of a drinking game. It would seem the Mayan civilization disintegrated so the goodnees of Christian values could flourish.