Why Don’t We Think Twice About Violence?
American movie culture and rating systems are pretty squeamish about sex onscreen – so why do we readily accept graphic violence? Recently there’s been an increase in public litigation around how to navigate intimacy in TV and film, or whether we ever need these graphic scenes.
But it’s jarring that so much thought and debate is going into one taboo while another (violence) is beyond commonplace in American movies, shows, and games. There are entire genres marketed around excessive gore and violence has even long been present in content targeted toward our youngest consumers. And with CGI more sophisticated than ever, violence is getting ever more realistic and more immersive. Here’s our take on the sex and violence paradox, and what it says about our culture that we hold one to a higher account than the other.
How Violence Is Embedded In Everything
There’s a long tradition of our media culture showing violence as a heroic act — characters ranging from James Bond and Han Solo to the heroes from Westerns, cop shows and superhero movies are allowed to use violence because they are painted as the good guys, only enacting their violence on those who deserve it. It was this loophole that allowed some violence to get past the censors even back during the days of the Hays Code — if it could be justified as an act of self-defense, then the movie might just pass uncut. This was the case with the ending of Casablanca which was re-shot to have Captain Strasser pull a gun on Rick first. Meanwhile, when it comes to sex, the Hays Code never allowed such an exception due to a sexual event being deemed “moral” or “justified.” And even after the Code was lifted, sex was restricted — and still is mostly restricted to R-rated or NC-17 movies.
What this violence-for-good exception did was allow violence to become normalized across all of cinema, not just in more adult films. Home Alone, for instance, isn’t gory but still features a ton of violence and physical suffering, and also happens to be a beloved holiday classic for the whole family. Part of this is down to the fact that the violence feels in some way removed from reality — the criminals get injured in outlandish ways, and while they’re screaming in pain, they never feel like they’re about to die, so we can enjoy them getting hit with paint cans and slipping on ice with lower stakes. But we could also argue that the justification for Kevin McAllister’s violence is embedded in American culture. American laws granting citizens the right to stand their ground and defend their homes are upheld in Home Alone. While he doesn’t shoot a gun, the booby-trapping of his house is depicted as an extension of his second amendment right. Really, violence creates spectacle and is the result of bubbling over conflict, which every story needs to maintain interest. It creates stakes and consequences, giving fictional worlds a sense of totality and allowing viewers to walk away with some kind of impression or revealing takeaway. If a film is meant to sit with us, violence onscreen can be a means to an end.
The Overton window on sex has undeniably shifted over the years. If you look at music in particular, it’s hard to imagine something like WAP being a mainstream hit a couple of decades ago. But there is always a pushback against this. And with Me Too conversations dominating in recent years, concerns over safety and consent on set have given rise to creatives and audiences rethinking intimate scenes, especially pointless, smutty ones. Meanwhile, the Overton window on violence — and gun violence in particular — is shifting in the other direction for most of the public. In the wake of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Judd Apatow led the calls for filmmakers to be more mindful of how they depict gun violence and gun safety on screen. Aubrey Plaza deliberately omitted any depictions of guns from her thriller Emily The Criminal for similar reasons. Yet there are still countless mainstream films and shows that continue to glorify violence and indulge in pretty overt gun worship. Even The Last Of Us focused a lot on Joel showing his fatherly style love for Ellie by shooting a bunch of people to protect her.
When Violence Crosses A Line
Violence onscreen has come under fire over time, but in a far different way than sex onscreen. It’s only relatively recently that the idea of being “triggered” came into popular culture, but it’s interesting to see how and where that has intersected with depictions of violence. The website Does The Dog Die? began to gain traction in 2014, allowing people to check if a movie included violence toward pets — it has since expanded to be a more general directory of trigger warnings for movies, TV, and books.
There is a long history of people debating over the impact of violent video games especially, due to the young and impressionable age of so much of the audience, and a number of high-profile shootings by people who’d been into violent games. But the evidence linking video games to violence is a little mixed, and games can sometimes be a scapegoat that politicians point to in order to avoid more important steps like tackling gun control. So correlation isn’t necessarily causation, and really, the problem is far more complex.
There are many instances where violence is justified on screen to make a point or tell a story. Many powerful uses of violence in movies and tv underscore the horrificness and human toll of it, to make us feel just how terrible real violence is. Tarantino has always used violence for the sake of spectacle, hugely influenced by the highly choreographed and exciting violence of Hong Kong cinema. And in horror and slasher films, the violence is dialed up so high that is almost feels fantastical or hyper-real, spawning sub-genres like torture porn. So while the intent is to provoke fear, discomfort, or unease, there is a kind of social contract in which the audience knows that’s what they’re in for from the jump. In Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, he explicitly calls out this audience’s complicity by aping the home invasion trope, whilst occasionally breaking the fourth wall to directly address the audience through the eyes of the psychopathic killers. So the film manages to be violent and uncomfortable, but we see that there’s a deeper, more politicized point to it being there.
When It’s Important To The Story
There is an irony to the current litigation around sex scenes which is that, in truth, movies aren’t that sexy right now. In fact, Blood Knife’s RS Benedict correlates this lack of sex with an increase in violence, saying: “For the most part, though, today’s cinema hunks are never nudes. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is strictly PG-13, as one expects from a Disney product…Those perfect bodies exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others. To have fun is to become weak, to let your team down, and to give the enemy a chance to win.”
And yes, some intimate scenes can be gratuitous, but the same is undoubtedly true of violence. Likewise, some intimate scenes do communicate important pieces of the story. In the recent Oscar-nominated French drama Happening, which centers around a young woman attempting to get an illegal abortion in France, there’s a scene where she — pregnant at the time — hooks up with a guy at a club. It’s undoubtedly erotic, but it’s also a powerful act of defiance and agency from the character at a time when all that agency over her body has been stripped away. Park Chan Wook’s The Handmaiden contains several pretty graphic scenes, but the intent of them is to get us to focus on female pleasure in a society where that has been eroded, leading to a powerful, climactic moment in which pick-pocket Sook Hee destroys a library of pornographic books. So we see there’s a distinction made between certain kinds of graphic intimacy, and who it’s for.
Sometimes the intimate scenes are there expressly to make us feel bad about them. In Jennifer Fox’s The Tale, the graphic scenes are incredibly uncomfortable, as they are predominantly between an adult and a minor. However, the film is Fox telling her own story, processing her own trauma, and trying to piece together her fragmented memory.
Violence can be used the same way. The extreme horror of All Quiet On The Western Front fully immerses you in the brutality of the trenches of World War One, dispensing with any notion of winners and losers and instead forcing you to confront the reality of it. Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station culminates in a re-enactment of real-life police brutality enacted on a black man, but in doing so, we see just how violent that kind of policing is, and how endemic a problem it is. The reason we have such a strong response to depictions of sex and violence is because of how graphic they can be and how shocking they can feel. But in the hands of a skilled storyteller, when there’s real intention behind their use, the power of them is hard to replace.
Conclusion
What we see has the power to shape how we view the world – and it’s less a question of whether our media should include sex and violence, than how storytellers can thoughtfully reflect those aspects of human existence. As we’re re-evaluating intimate scenes on screen, how many we need, how to make them safe, and when they’re successful, we should apply that same critical eye to violence. Not as any kind of moral panic generated to serve a political agenda, but as a way to think harder about what we’re watching, and why we want to watch it.
SOURCES
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