thoughtcrumbs

Whoa, I just had a conversation about this with a friend last night. Although I was talking about Lord of the Rings, which isn't nearly as violent as what you described. We were talking about it because I have this intense longing lately to read the books and watch the movies, but the last time I did that was a little over a year ago, when I was thinking that I was only maybe a pacifist. So I wonder if I'll enjoy them as much now that I am fairly sure I am one.

The Lord of the Rings, for me, falls into the violence-with-a-purpose category. Tolkien's anti-nuclear war message is clear in the books, and like many grandiose war movies, the violence in the battle scenes on film is more diffuse, so perhaps a bit more palatable (if you ignore the fact that just because you can't see it doesn't mean that it's not worse, and in fact it is, given that it's happening to a larger number of people).

I think that Sin City was a style movie. Though it may have been about other things as well, its main thrust was to faithfully represent the noir comic genre, or even to be the ne plus ultra of that genre. It's very similar to the way Kill Bill strove for a sort of quintessence of the bloody revenge movie. Both used violence as a stylistic element, and both exaggerated the violence just as they exaggerated other elements of the genre in order to achieve a sort of purity. Neither could have created the atmosphere they strove for without a certain degree of explicit violence.

I think there may be a larger question here, about why there is so much violence in these genres, and in movies in general. If the violence is not a reference and it's not thematically relevant, what's it there for? I'm not completely sure. Portrayal of violence is often clearly an end in itself (e.g., in horror movies). Perhaps it's cathartic. Perhaps people want to explore the dark side. It goes back at least as far as greek tragedies. People seem to want unpleasantness in their art, even totally fictional unpleasantness with dubious moral value.

I think it's important to remember that for the most part we're talking about fictional characters with computer-generated injuries spewing the modern cinamatic equivalent of chocolate syrup. It's all for effect, and one of those effects might be that we question our feelings about violence. Personally, I'm far more disturbed by a film like Hotel Rwanda, with its implication of real suffering and death.

So, perhaps I'm just prejudiced against comic style; I don't care much for manga or anime, either, and only a couple of graphic novels have moved me (Maus, Jimmy Corrigan). Though I'm a designer, my preferences run toward psychology rather than aesthetics, and so I suppose my tolerance for movie violence lays along these same lines. Hotel Rwanda is outstanding in that someone was so abhorred by the current state of the world that he sought to spread the message, and did so with a measured use of violence in order to shock but not paralyze the viewers. It's compelling violence.

I agree that scence of violence can be cathartic and even funny (both psychological, rather than aesthetic, ends), and I'd really like to see Kill Bill for that reason. But the distinction between fictional CG characters and live actors portraying a true story doesn't really matter to me, either, except that the computer effects allow the director to go to extremes not capturable in reality. They're both bloody and trigger the same kinds of responses in the viewers.

Was the excessive violence any worse than the dialog or the story?

I didn't "get" Kill Bill like I "got" Pulp Fiction. Too much just random blood spouting all over the place: it was the Black Knight's flesh wound repeated a thousand times. Occasionally it worked, but most of the time it was just too ludicrous to be funny, disgusting, or shocking -- merely sophomoric.

I think this is a compelling argument with very violent tendencies (yes the subject is violent, but I am suggesting that the argument style itself is violent). Some may like to think that the world revolves on a pillow of love, optimistic innocence. Violence constructs every facet of our lives. The simple act of noticing a piece of garbage on the floor rips the innocent pre-conceived idea of what a floor should be apart. Likewise, cutting the limbs of elijah wood is not only violent in act but violent in our assumptions of what life is. To assume that the violence in “sin city” is “violence with out a purpose” is absurd (along with assuming that the only reason for the violence if the comic affect). Yes, visual decapitation can be a cheap thrill, but as far as I remember there is little footage of actual violence in “sin city” (mostly a montage of implicit violence).