Violence: Cool or Merely Amusing?

Oh, heavens, what a fruitily provocative post heading! But Abe Goldfarb, honored guest-blogger, merely jests. Nevertheless, it provides a sincere doorway into a serious topic. I shall try to avoid dry didacticism. A friend of mine recently told me that he no longer finds violence funny. In films, specifically. This is no knee-cap busting tough gone soft, but a liberal film-fan like myself. The conversation concerned Tarantino's Kill Bill films.

"I no longer find violence funny. What disturbs me is that I don't think Tarantino does either."

This gave me pause. Is it really only the confidence, nay, arrogance of youth that allows us to chortle over death and dismemberment? Following my rather handsomely contemplative pause, I laughed the comment off, being pleasantly off-balance from a few pints of stout. One serving of pork lo mein slathered in sinus-strafing hot mustard later, I was in a cab home.

I'm directing Titus Andronicus this fall, and my friend's comment is something that, at first subconsciously, informed my thinking about it. The common wisdom is that Titus is a travesty, a melodrama of such excess that it can't NOT be played for laughs. I've never seen a production that really thought about each act of violence in it as part of a cumulative tragedy. What we're watching, really, is the very slow demise of a man, mind, soul and body. Imagine a production that didn't invite the audience to laugh at the sheer proliferation of beheadings, dismemberments, murders, rapes, acts of cannibalism, etc. Imagine a production that took the textual humor at face value, likewise the horrors.

This sounds like self-promotion, alas, but it surely isn't. While I can watch the films of Takashi Miike and hide my eyes, laughing at the sheer bravado of a director who shows us, in close-up, a man cutting off a quarter of his own tongue, I can't help thinking that this is, really, a touch horrific. I shudder to think I'm acquiring complexity (I've run from it all my life) or, even worse, going conservative, one tongue at a time. Perhaps the time has come for a new wave of art that considers violence, rather than merely showing it. Nihilism is the most worthless artistic attitude, hopelessness the least desirable audience response. Say what you will about Michael Moore, his recent films contemplate the bottomlessly horrifying. If you're left feeling that there's nothing you can do, well, the film has failed. Calls to action, boots to the anus of complacency, are always more compelling than manifestos of despair. I believe LaMama's doing a festival of the latter, I'm not sure.

For all this, my friend did qualify the above statement by stating that he could find violence "cool," and on this we can agree utterly. Even if you can't laugh at the the sight of a blonde wraith in a Bruce Lee Game of Death tracksuit slicing through an ocean of Kato-suited lackeys, we can agree that it kicks an awful lot of ass.

So. What do you think? Responses, please, in the usual fashion.

Comments

[Isaac Butler]

Good points all.

I believe that violence can be funny, but just that people have to work harder (or do something newer with it-- a la the claymated early sequence in "Happiness of the Katakuris") if you want me to find it funny. Otherwise, it's horrific. Some amount of alienation on my part has gotten lost lately, because I usually have trouble getting over that someone has just died.

Tarantino gets me over this in the final act of Kill Bill I (still haven't seen 2, don't kill me) by abstracting the violence to the level of dance and having The Bride NOT KILL SOMEONE FOR ONCE and instead engage in C-grade slapstick humor. My personal read is that the violence in Kill Bill I isn't supposed to be funny until right when Lucy Liu chops that guys head off. It's supposed to be a horrible viewing experience, where you see the cycle of violence perpetuate itself in ever more awful ways.

I also find that I'm finding graphic violence in video games a little more disturbing than I used to. I don't think it should be banned, it just gets to me in a way that it didn't before.

Maybe this is post 9/11 thinking, or maybe this is just growing up.

I think your ideas for Titus sound solid, it's certainly an interesting and bold artistic risk, to say "here's this stuff that even Julie Taymor wouldn't take seriously because it's so over the top, but I'm going to investigate it, delve into it, see what there is there both for the Jacobian time and our own"-- that's a great thing. I also think that you'll find that your audience is going to laugh-- it's just a question of what kind of laughter you're provoking.