A Writer's Thoughts
Violence on Screen
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I’ve been having an inner conversation with myself about this ever since October when my sister-in-law walked out of an episode of ‘Spooks’ because she found it too violent. This is fair enough; I often feeling like walking away from things on the telly (which is one of the reasons why we don’t have a licence). However, it made me ask a lot of questions of myself about whether I’ve simply become desensitised to violence and about what role violence should play on the screen.
In theory I have no problem with violence on screen being repulsive. In some ways, I wish more people did behave like my sister-in-law. Violence is not a nice thing. But it happens. I don’t have a problem with violence being portrayed as it is. Personally I’m a big fan of the new Bond films starring Daniel Craig; partly because the violence is unpleasant. Not that I’m glorying in the violence. But I’d much rather that than the Bond of yesteryear who happily killed left, right and centre, his victims looking cartoonesque. Real violence is not like that; it is horrible and any proper depiction of violence should repulse.
If people don’t want to watch that, I don’t blame them. But I don’t have a problem with violence being portrayed as it is; I have a problem with it being seen as something casual with no consequences (in the same way as I take issue with most of the depictions of sex on screen; something free and fun without any consequences, regardless of whom one sleeps with).
Obviously there should be some point to the violence. I would question why anyone wanted to see a film which consisted of nothing else.
To me one of the best portrayals of violence is, funnily enough, in ‘Spooks’ (Series 3, episode 5, I think). In it Danny, one of the MI5 agents, has to kill for the first time. The kill itself is very peaceful (he injects a man in his sleep) but the entire episode is taken up with the effects on Danny. We see his immense struggles to summon up the will power to carry out the kill, his inner battles as he befriends his victim and the awful realisation afterwards of what he’s done. I can’t think of a better depiction that I’ve seen of just what it means to take the life of another (except possibly ‘Gallipoli’, starring Mel Gibson). Yes, there’s violence, yes, it should be hard to watch, but you come away with a far deeper appreciation of just what life means; and of the dreadful consequences for the moral well being of those who take life callously.
This leaves me with an internal dilemma: ‘300’. It is not a good film. The storyline and characters are unimaginative. But the battle scenes are superbly done and I enjoyed watching them. They are bloody, they are gratuitous, but they were also, in the way they were filmed, beautiful. So why did I enjoy them, when I can be so repulsed by other violent scenes (I think of the scene in ‘Platoon’ where an innocent peasant’s skull is smashed open. You see nothing, it’s all out of shot, and yet it makes me want to be sick)?
Why? Because those being killed were, again, cartoonesque (To be fair, ‘300’ is shot as a graphic novel; the main thing it has going for it in my opinion). The violence isn’t ‘real’ so I don’t feel affected by it.
And that makes me uncomfortable. As uncomfortable as I feel when I take for granted that characters in films can hop from one sexual partner to the other without consequence. I simply accept the moral framework of the film (‘You aren’t meant to be thinking that hard about it, Tim’) and let things which should offend me slip by. In the moral framework of ‘300’ (as with the older Bond films) you simply accept that characters are cardboard cut outs to be blown away/decapitated at will.
Should that bug me?
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