What tends to go unspoken is the absolute poison that is Wrath being just as prominent. In fact, I would say it is just as big an issue as the other two, especially today. Dehumanization is rampant, as is dehumanizing the dehumanizer and vice versa, in reverse, upside down, and even in the mirror. It is as if everything must be torn down--except the fault itself.
Many who act on such passions try to camouflage it as righteous anger or injustice. Anything to avoid taking the blame for their own faults. I would know, as would you. We've all been there. Justification of falsehood is the first step to avoiding truth.
A lot of this gets pushed on our entertainment as projection from those who very much have issues with Wrath. As a result, the modern view of violence has been completed twisted. It has been twisted by those who misunderstand the roots of their own disorder.
But I do think much of this disordered passion comes from misunderstanding the difference between Wrath and Justice. This goes a long way to describe the modern state of art and entertainment. Actual Justice isn't about me and it isn't about you. It is blind because it transcends the individual and the group to encompass us all. It is real, and it scares a lot of us.
And a lot of people, really really don't like it. You can tell that by the way violence in storytelling has been treated. The history of critique in this area, I have to admit, is straight up abysmal to nonexistent. It still is, unfortunately. Nothing has ever changed.
For about as long as I've been alive I don't think there has ever been a time violence in media has ever been understood correctly. To this day, even by those who should know better, violence is considered the lowest form of entertainment, made for those sick individuals who like blood and guts and mindless carnage. And this goes for both people who enjoy the stories just as much as those who don't. How this happened is a mystery to me, aside from it just straight up being projection.
Don't get me wrong, there are times when violence, like everything else in fiction, can go too far. You can say this about most anything, however. This issue comes from a lack of self-control or misplaced priorities in regards to fiction. However, it isn't quite as common as you've been told it is. In fact, if anything, most modern creators are far worse with sex (from basic appearance to the very act itself) than they are with violence.
Then you get complaints that the violence in fiction glorifies these horrible acts, such as wanton killing or malicious torture (though the latter is more of a complaint centered on horror) and suggests these as valid solutions to our problems. Such complaints, however, are often given my those who don't understand the purpose of storytelling to begin with or are projecting their own fears onto others. And yet they somehow control discourse over the subject. This really does explain a lot.
So what actually is the purpose of violence in fiction? It varies depending on who is speaking, though usually dependent on how much blood churns said critic's stomach, most agree it is unnatural, unlike the very natural subject of sex, which means it has little value in most stories. Sex should be celebrated, violence should be shunned! But this is like the "realism" argument (post)modernists tend to make: it completely misses the point of fiction to begin with.
At the same time, some psychoanalysts have gone so far as to shove sex into the equation even further by comparing violence in fiction with the sexual act itself. Everything is sexual! This should go a long way to explain how misunderstood storytelling itself has become over the decades, especially from perverts obsessed with sticks and holes.
In other words, much of violence's place in storytelling has been obscured by people who have never liked it or seen value in the subject to begin with. How this misconception came to be the predominant view on the subject to this day is a bit beyond me, but much of it must have to do with the miscategorization of bothWrath and Justice.
Let us start with the most obvious elephant in the room, and the one we are going to have to start with before we get anywhere: What actually is the purpose of violence in fiction? To talk about this objectively, we have to cut out the modern jargon, degenerate fetishes, and (post)modern deconstruction that has utterly demolished all discourse on the subject for as long as most people reading this have been alive. Essentially: why does violence exist to begin with? Why have it in a story at all? Shouldn't all stories be "natural" and "healthy" instead?
The answer is that violence has a very potent purpose in fiction in that it is the strongest form of tension release possible in a story. The writer builds up a threat the protagonist has to stumble through only for the stakes to ratchet up to threatening his very life and soul. The easiest way to show this is through physical altercations.
By the end of the story it is between the hero and the villain of the plot: who is correct in their struggle? Who will make it out with their values intact? This is the underlying tension in all adventure stories. Which one is ultimately correct on a moral level? We find out through the final confrontation where all stakes are on the line.
The most intense way to show this is with a physical clash that ends with the ultimate result of two titans dueling: the death of falsehood and the victory of Truth. Through this peak battle, both sides are revealed for what they are and the story ends with the most powerful climax possible where it all comes to a head. In essence, and ideally, the rougher the violence the more intense the participants beliefs are and the more willing they are to fight for or be killed for believing. It is the ultimate confrontation of men, and it is why the story is so universal.
Of course, however, there are those that completely misunderstand such obvious things. They instead twist it around backwards.
The above clash often gets misinterpreted by perverts to equate to the sexual act. This is as deep as it gets for them, as they will willingly brag when speaking on the topic. The reason is that they cannot think outside of base pleasures or their own shallow and juvenile views. They are prisoners of lust, and quite proud of it.
You heard it all the time if you were around back in the day. Shirtless men showing off their muscles is not meant to intimidate the enemy or cause the audience to nod at the protagonists chances in the ensuing threat--it is actually about sex. That's all!
A serial killer's butcher knife is actually a penis substitute which means every murderer in history has exactly, and only, one motive. The final action sequence is akin to a sexual climax because . . . they share the same name I suppose. Do you get it? It's all about sex!
What such interpretations do is lead to boring and very sterile fiction that hasn't aged well at all. If all you see is pornography in everything you read then you're eventually going to burn your brain out. Not everything is so juvenile as that.
None of this new, either. I recently quoted Sam Lundwall's description of sword and sorcery, and he took the most shallow view possible. Because that is what Fandom does.
"The more exclusive variants of sex like sadism, masochism, necrophilia, fetishism and so forth can be found in ample measures in the Sword Sorcery Heroic Fantasy. Despite the cries from some advocates of this type of entertainment that it is pure and virginal and clean, there is sex to be found everywhere; sublimated in various ways, but still there, and in fact the overshadowing ingredient. There is sex—but an immature, infantile sex where the copulation is the sword-fight and the orgasm is the death of the opponent. Women are invariably beautiful, desirable and, beneath their exquisitely sculptured bodies, completely sexless. The symbols of sex (breasts and so forth) are there, but sex itself can be found only in a grotesquely sublimated form. Like in the Wild West story, the sex urge has been transformed into violence and death in the manner of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch."
"The hero's sword-penis is used a lot, although mostly on other males."
If your literary analysis is the exact equivalent to the 13-year-old chuckling at Sam and Frodo hugging in the Lord of the Rings because lol! then you might not be quite as smart as you think you are. And you might not be mentally equipped to analyze fiction or themes.
You're also probably a degenerate who should expand your mind beyond base subjects. I suggest adventure stories: they are far more wholesome for the mind.
But then again, those with baser interest on storytelling always seem to enforce their own shallow interpretations on everyone else. As you can tell with the state of criticism, it's more or less a dead art. This, unfortunately, isn't a new problem at all.
Take the emergence of vigilante films during the 1970s. Many of these were made to counteract the nihilistic evil of movies like Chinatown that were running rampant during the decade. Were you to look at the #1 complaints of these vigilante movies, starting mainly with Dirty Harry and Death Wish, you would see that many people, usually those who don't understand the purpose of narrative violence, were attempting to tell those who actually do understand it, just what they really believe about the subject. You better listen up and learn about yourself from people who don't know you. Sound familiar? That's because things haven't changed at all since then.
You see, you enjoy movies like Death Wish because you like to see people shot to death and you want to shoot people to death. Possibly even innocent people! You think everyone should be free to distribute their own brand of justice, regardless of what the government says about such things. You're a fascist and dangerous! These were the very things being banded about back during the 1970s. You can read the old reviews, and the same stupid charges are still being shouted out today.
The truth is that a story is a story. This is what many wannabe moralists disguised as critics forget. A true and proper story is one that reflects the innermost desire of the soul. The reason people like things such as vigilante movies or revenge films is because they embody and enforce something the modern world doesn't understand at all: Justice.
It doesn't really have to do with loving to see bad people die without a fair and impartial trial, it has to do with wanting to see Justice played out on the unjust and the innocent saved and their suffering vindicated. And, believe it or not, the law as it is does not always work to do these things. Sometimes it is up to the architect who lost his family or the rogue cop who watched his partner be murdered in cold blood to be the one to make sure no more harm comes to innocent people, and also that the evil of the antagonist is stopped before it flowers into an even more poisonous plant. Stories give us hope and remind us that Good is always Good and Evil is always Evil. These tales of Justice are very necessary.
These movie promote the opposite cause of Wrath and very frequently argue against it. Paul Kersey in Death Wish struggles against the taking of life, but does it because he feels he has to and that there is no other choice. His emotions do not overwhelm him--what he does is very calculated and reasoned out. Whether you think he is right or wrong in his methods is where the discussion comes from, not whether murders and rapists deserve what they get from him.
As you can tell, there is more to these types of stories than mindless carnage and death. But that is rarely the sort of side we see discussed in the wider culture. Mostly we just seem to be endlessly fascinated with the most boring topic of all: sex. And we project it onto everything.
It must be said that if you giggle because your sex-addled brain sees a gun as a penis and the villain as a potential sexual partner then I have to say that these stories probably aren't for you. Also, I would suggest cutting out the pornography. It is obviously damaging your brain.
Next we turn to horror, another genre quite misunderstood, though its biggest fans certainly don't help with that impression. There is more to the genre beyond slaughter. One simply has to look at it from the right angle, and not the debased one so common in our modern culture.
In horror stories the point of violence can be the same as the above, but it is also used to emphasize the level of the threat being dealt with. The protagonists are facing an unknown evil, after all. It's a matter of scale and proportion. Those who break the rules usually don't live long afterwards. How badly a fate they suffer should, theoretically, have to do with the nature of the horror itself. Who will get through the night and who will fall to the darkness? I don't know--but you can bet they will never open that door ever again. And that is the point of a good horror story. Coming from a storied tradition of fairy tales will do that.
For instance, in the film An American Werewolf in London, the plot starts out with two young college students wandering the Scotland moors. Seeing the world and enjoying everything they can before going into the working world. It was a big pastime for kids at the time. These two are told specifically to not use a shortcut at night through the moors or else they will regret it. Of course, the two young fools don't know any better and do not heed the wise warnings of the natives. To summarize what happens next, they both die in very horrific ways and the movie is about the gruesome result of their choice from the beginning of the movie and how it rolls over onto everything to come. Essentially, it is a morality tale.
The same tends to go for even slasher movies. There is a reason the chaste tend to last to the end of the film while the others die along the way. The ones that are slaves to their passions and baser desires are the ones unable to think clearly or see the forest for the trees. In a way, the slasher is the representation of what befalls those who break the rules for selfish gain.
There is purpose here, though it has gone ignored for many years by critics and perverts with far different agendas than expressing universal themes and connecting the audience to the art.
This ties into another complaint about violence. You don't see it as much these days, at least from mainstream types, but it still remains nonetheless. That gripe being that there are many who consider violent stories inherently nihilistic and evil.
If you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s you probably heard this charge a lot. How so many people die pointless deaths and audiences cheering over corpses mean we have become morally depraved and have lost our way as a culture. It should be mentioned that many of these same people would stand up and cheer for movies like Pretty Baby or that terrible Dakota Fanning movie about Elvis music from a few years back, but let's not bother addressing that elephant in the room. The point is that these people see stories in one very myopic way and believe such a shallow view is universal.
When someone dies in a story, the audience needs to analyze the circumstances that lead to their death. In every story, as in life, there is a reason everything happens even if it is not so clear to us at the moment it is occurring. Looking into things deeper always reveals a pattern. This is also invaluable to being a better writer.
There is always a reason for everything.
For instance, I recently viewed 1976's The Tough Ones, also known as Rome Armed to the Teeth or Roma a Mano Armata in the original language. This is a poliziotteschi film, a crime movie, a genre which blew up in the 1970s and '80s in Italy. This happened for a very good reason. What the Italians have never been scared of is portraying violence for what it is, when even Hollywood shied away from it during the supposed unbridled and "Golden Age" of the 1970s. I have a feeling Italians are so good at it because has to do with their heritage, but that is neither here nor there.
The Tough Ones is essentially Italian Dirty Harry only a lot less shy in showing the results of the evil the criminals perpetrate or the violence the spurs from it. Protagonist Inspector Tanzi is a cop who has to deal with an amoral and collapsing society the cares more about rules and base pleasure than what is right or what must be done. The villain even uses the fact that he's a hunchback to garner support in the media against Tanzi because he is being bullied and abused by him. The freaks are always misunderstood and hated, for no reason! However, we the audience know this psycho is guilty, as is the gang he runs with, which is terrorizing the city. But no one will do anything about it. Inspector Tanzi takes on the role for himself. Chaos, of course, soon follows in his wake.
The entire film is about Inspector Tanzi being the agent of Justice that is inevitable in a world that has forgotten out. When the characters in the movie don't act with Justice in mind, someone ends up paying the price for that decision. Whether it is innocent people suffering from inept law enforcement letting scum roam the streets, to showing mercy to someone who has no intention to repent, those who fail in their duty end up suffering the consequences, or it rolls out onto the innocent. As such, you are cheering when the villains actually do die. Not because they are dying, but because they have been stopped and Justice has been served. The world has been set right again. Justice always wins, in the end.
Most would call such violence nihilistic, but there is a point to everything that happens. Every decision has a consequence--and this truth is what makes such a story tick. As far as storytelling devices, violence is an invaluable one which remains because it is so potent and raw. It isn't quite as blatant as message fiction is, but it's a fairly obvious theme for those paying attention. Or, really, you'd think it was.
Compared to the topic of sex, which has a very limited use and can stop a story dead in its tracks, violence very rarely slows anything down. If anything, it exacerbates the pacing, which is something a lot of modern stories suffer from in their bloated lengths. The fact of the matter is that the hotblooded violence flows out from the passion behind the story conflict itself. When the unstoppable force hits the immoveable object, one will break. This is the tension of an action story that often goes unexplored. It also goes a long way to showing why today's bloodless violence is so often cold and flaccid. Conflict is about more than pretty words and idealistic speeches.
Without that old school pulp energy you're just left with a bunch of thunder and bluster signifying nothing. And that is exactly where we are right now. All this because we put things in the wrong place.
Now, don't get me wrong. You can use violence incorrectly in storytelling. You can find no shortage of examples in modern stories from "shock" (the worst possible reason to use violence) to outright gore fetishism. One who has to rely on either is engaging in pornography, not entertainment. They merely want to see violence for the sake of watching blood be shed, and not for the storytelling itself.
An example of this would be the Saw franchise. A gaggle of good-looking Hollywood actors playing normal people are kidnapped and put in elaborate death traps. They have to squirm out, possibly suffering bodily mutilation, and engage in horrific acts, including betrayal, or face violent and painful death. There is nothing else to this aside from wanting to see how people will die in miserable and pointless fashion.
If you took out the deaths, what story would there actually be? What would be the goal for the villain beyond bloodthirst or the protagonist beyond escaping pain? You can't muster sympathy for such characters outside of a base level so what are you supposed to feel towards them? And with an ever-rotating door of protagonists to slaughter you also cannot get a feel for who you are supposed to root for. Partially because none of them matter, in the end. It doesn't matter who lives or dies, as long as we the audience get to watch someone die horrifically.
And what critics see violence in fiction as being is pretty much what Saw actually is. There is absolutely no nuance to them.
The only way you confuse a movie like Saw for The Tough Ones is if you don't understand violence at its very core. One has a belief that human life is worth nothing but the organs and flesh we are composed of; the other believes that lives have inherent value and should be protected from the evil that seeks to destroy them. As a complete coincidence, the latter type has all but been removed from OldPub and Hollywood and replaced with safe superhero fare where upholding the Status Quo comes before all else. True Justice doesn't really exist in mainstream art and entertainment anymore. Just its store brand counterparts.
The issue is that if you look at a lot of reviews from the decades many of these works came out you will find critics absolutely oblivious as to the audience's interest in it. Not just oblivious, but outright hostile. That fact is that decades after its heyday, the highest selling genre of vintage Blu-ray releases is 1980s horror--the one considered the most worthless and most degenerate by said critics when they were around. Now how can that be? I was assured these movies were completely depraved and amoral. Aren't they getting this exact thing out of Hollywood right now? If so, then why is Hollywood product not selling as well as it used to? Perhaps there is more to this than what the critics believe.
The thing to keep in mind is that we live in an era where pornography is everywhere, and free at that. Meanwhile, re-releases of those old beach movies and erotic skin flicks don't do all that great in contrast to horror. Why is this? Don't they offer the same thing? Clearly not. This should be a good hint that the reason people buy those movies isn't quite for the titillation or depravity, especially when they can easily get that for no cost elsewhere on the internet. There are whole sites dedicated to misery and porn, after all. Yet horror still sells. Therefore, this tells us that these older generations of critics completely missed the boat.
People desire more from their entertainment than mindless pleasure or indulgence. The repeated success of pulp-style adventure in popular culture despite its constant burying by the industry is proof of that. The audience always knows what they really want, even when they can't get it. The critics? Not so much.
Those in charge of your tastes have their values backwards. They substitute Justice for Wrath, replace Love for Lust, and mistake Virtue for Sin. This is why their critique's only ever get the surface level details right. When it comes to any of the above topics, they are like a fish flopping around the side of a creek. Completely lost and without a clue.
Without Justice we will fall to Wrath, and this is something the critics will never understand. Not as long as they stubbornly refuse to put things in their proper place. But people like that have always existed, and they always will. We just have to get around them.
They might wish to dictate to the audience what they should consume, and sometimes we might need a little nudging ourselves, but for the most part we know exactly what we want even if we can't describe it quite well. At least we know better than they do. If one thing about the failed social experiment called the 20th century should stick it is that the audience isn't as dumb as some of their "betters" think they are. They might not even see it themselves--but they know it internally. Everyone does. That's just how it is.
At the end of the day, that's all we need to understand. Art is connection, for artist and audience, and without that shared understanding we are both left adrift in the ether lost in our own worlds of madness. It's not about one group over the other or a battle to the death between them. We should hopefully get this by now. None of us are kids anymore--we can easily be on the same page when we have to. And it is about time we do so.
Because despite what OldPub or Hollywood pushes in their misplaced arrogance and mindless greed, art is a team effort. We can get through this together, and we will. Such a thing might be difficult in an era that so overwhelmingly focuses on ego and the self over all, but it is very much possible to accomplish.
All it takes is a little imagination.
Delete after reading: "wonton killing" I started laughing. Kung fu fighting!
ReplyDeleteIt is a good essay, and I will post something sensible in another comment
Glad I could cause a reaction!
DeleteYes, one can tell good stories centered around sex, but that definitely has not turned out to be the case for a very long time. Mostly because they focus on pornography over all else. It has grown so warped you no longer even see basic intimacy in modern OldPub or Hollywood works because they believe a male looking at an attractive female will cause them to . . . disrespect women or something. It's entirely bizarre and based on misunderstandings about attraction.
ReplyDeleteRomance stories remain big sellers for a good reason. Adventure stories would also, had they not been completely demolished by the suits.