A Bit of the Old “Ultra-Violence” (Warning: very gruesome images and descriptions ahead)

Oddly enough, the movie from which that title quote originates isn’t really all that violent as it is simply disturbing in its subject matter. There’s beatings, fights, murder, a guy getting cut, and even a rape scene, but Kubrick generally refrains from getting ultra-graphic. The rape scene is (mostly) off-screen, as is Alex smashing the sculpture on the cat lady’s head. In fact, those watching the film solely for its “ultra-violent” reputation might actually be slightly let down. Me not being one of those people, I more appreciate the movie’s visual artistry and Kubrick’s ability to disturb without getting over-the-top gory and bloody. Without a doubt, the rape is the most disturbing scene in the movie, with Alex and his “Droogs” treating the whole thing like a game and forcing her husband to watch, as well as the juxtaposition of “Singin’ in the Rain” with the horrific content. Nevertheless, if you are looking for in-your-face graphic violence, where can you turn?

A (very brief) History of Violence

Violence in visual media goes back far. Painting and sculpture have obviously gotten rather disturbing throughout the years. And even in the days of Shakespearean drama, the theater had some clever ways to simulate violence. One example would be the use blood-filled pig bladders hidden under actors’ clothing that would burst upon sword contact. Gore effects, all the way back in the 16^th century. Fast forwarding to the film era, we see that explicit violence was generally discouraged (generally), though the silent era wasn’t perfectly clean. In particular, there is Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin and its famous “Odessa Steps Massacre”, which would have been quite shocking at the time, even featuring someone being shot through the eye.

Moving to the sound era, King Kong may be the codifier of the “big action movie with a body-count”. There’s people getting chomped by dinosaurs, chomped by Kong, stepped on, dropped from great heights, a Stegosaurus being shot in the head, a Tyrannosaurus having its jaw torn apart accompanied by a cringe-inducing cracking sound (as well as blood pouring profusely from its throat), and the log scene where we actually see the falling men hit the bottom of the canyon, their screams abruptly silenced, somewhat disturbing even today. From there, movies could keep getting more violent in creative ways. Psycho broke new ground with its famous shower scene (which contains no actual gore, though the use of editing and sound effects almost tricks the viewer into thinking there is), making way for the ever-popular (at least for a while) slasher genre. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch also really took violence to new heights with the bloodiest gunfights ever seen up to that point. Violence pervades multiple film genres and comes in different shades. It can be sanitized, stylized, realistic, campy, etc. Now would be a good time to recount particularly violent movies that I’ve seen and come to a conclusion about the place of violence in our entertainment.

Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino is perhaps one of the directors best known for violence, with it practically being his trademark. Before this class, I’d only seen two of his movies: Inglourious Basterds and Pulp Fiction. We’ll be watching Inglourious Basterds fairly soon (or have already done so depending on when you read this), so that should refresh my memory on how violent it really was (I will say that the climactic scene ends up being a very meta commentary on film violence). Pulp Fiction has a shock-factor to its violence, like with Samuel L. Jackson’s scary, loose-cannon behavior or John Travolta accidentally blowing a man’s brains out all over the inside of a car. There’s also a rape scene (male-on-male) that is somewhat more graphic than the one in A Clockwork Orange.

The first Tarantino film we watched in class, Reservoir Dogs, while not quite as violent as I was expecting, still mostly delivered. Almost right from the beginning, we have Mr. Orange slowly bleeding to death after being shot in the stomach, panicking and struggling to breathe, showing quite realistically how horrible it would be to actually get shot. Though the movie does drag out the affair to an absurd degree as the blood pool keeps getting bigger, to the point that he should have been dead a long time ago, or at least even less functional than he was shown being.

And of course, who can forget the infamous torture scene set to “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealers Wheel, where Mr. Blonde performs a series of heinous acts upon a captive police officer for no real reason (he admits he doesn’t care whether or not the guy actually knows anything) other than his sick amusement? I’d heard about the scene even before seeing the movie, and I was expecting the absolute worst (which inspired me to do this subject for this post). Surprisingly, it was relatively short, and the worst part (the ear cutting) happens off-screen. Still, the scene manages to be disturbing in its execution more than in simple gruesome visuals. You can really sense the cop’s fear, and the casual, remorseless way that Mr. Blonde goes about the business doesn’t help. There’s also the nonchalant little “plop” of Mr. Blonde dropping the severed ear on the floor that somehow manages to be so incredibly disgusting.

The last film we watched, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, finally delivers on really piling on the violence, but goes in a very different direction, trading realistic brutality for a gloriously absurd (mostly) live-action cartoon. The flagrant disregard for the laws of physics and the actual amount of blood contained in a human body show that this isn’t meant to be taken overly serious (ironically, the animated portion seems like the most mature part of the movie, and not just because of the violence). For God’s sake, there’s a literal hose-spraying sound effect when one character gets her arm sliced off (and some minutes later, is somehow both still alive and not a pale wreck). It’s the height of cathartic action violence, though we still get those scenes of surprise brutality, particularly the brief flashback demonstrating Gogo Yubari’s craziness where she coerces a drunk guy into saying he wants to screw her, and then disembowels him for it (we see a waterfall of blood and a quick glimpse of his intestines).

 

 

Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was another film I expected to be super violent that ended up being more understated. It slowly builds up to a big, gory climax rather than being violent all the way through, but the wait is… “worth it” the right phrase? I don’t want to seem sick. Anyway, Travis finally acts out on his violent urges (at least taking them out on a more deserving target than the politician he was originally planning to assassinate) when he slaughters everyone running the child prostitution ring along with one of their “clients”. The guy getting his hand blown off must have been unbelievably shocking at the time, and the effect still holds up. The Hellish lighting and tense atmosphere make it all the more disturbing.

Goodfellas (which I finally watched for the first time last Monday) is another Scorsese film known for its violence, and shows early shades of Tarantino-esque shock factor. As Pulp Fiction would do four years later, the movie constantly catches the viewer off-guard with shocking displays of raw brutality. The opening scene has a helpless, bleeding man in a car trunk getting brutally stabbed to death by Joe Pesci, headshots are done very casually and involve a lot of splattering, and the many beatings leave the victims looking truly broken, in contrast with A Clockwork Orange. Ironically, the most unpleasant scene might be near the beginning, when Henry’s father confronts him about his truancy and suddenly smacks him before proceeding to brutally wail on him with a belt. That this movie was regularly parodied on Animaniacs is a true wonder.

 

 

Paul Verhoeven

Another director known for in-your-face horrific violence is Paul Verhoeven, of Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and Starship Troopers fame. Like Tarantino, he imbues it with an over-the-top camp factor, though Verhoeven is less stylized and more bluntly brutal. As briefly mentioned in my very first post, I saw Robocop for the first time when I was eleven, though it strangely didn’t bother me all that much. I was surprised to learn how legendarily horrifying the scene of Peter Weller being shot up is considered, which makes me want to see it again to find out if it’s really that bad (in addition to it just being a great movie). Besides that, there’s the early scene where the ED-209 robot malfunctions and brutally guns down an innocent guy during a demonstration (which is actually played for laughs), Robocop shooting a rapist’s dick off, a guy getting stabbed in the throat with copious blood spurting, and of course, the one poor thug that gets soaked in chemicals and begins to slowly dissolve alive before being mercifully finished off by a car (and splattering into nondescript chunks of goop).

It’s debatable whether Total Recall outdoes Robocop in terms of violence, though it still provides a hefty dose. People get shot up in ridiculous detail during the many gunfights, and there is much creative use of improvised weapons, like a guy getting a bolt rammed through his neck and another getting a crowbar through his nose and out the back of his skull (the poor guy flails about like his nerves are all scrambled), as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger ramming a drill through a guy while delivering one of his signature one-liners.

IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THIS FUCKING AWESOME MOVIE YET, I’D STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU GO DO THAT BEFORE WATCHING THIS VIDEO AS IT BASICALLY SPOILS EVERYTHING

 

 

Sam Raimi

Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead wasn’t advertised as “the ultimate experience in grueling terror” for nothing. While most of the horror comes from its atmosphere, it still makes creative use of violence, probably being the first “splatter film”. It would soon be outdone by its own campier sequel, Evil Dead 2, which takes the first film’s absurd gore and doubles down while using it to more comedic effect. I don’t even want to give much away about these movies simply due to how good they are. Just go see ‘em some time. For now, here’re some pics.

 

 

Peter Jackson

Sam Raimi would later be outdone by future The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson in 1992’s Braindead (available at the NIU library under its North American name Dead-Alive), which is commonly considered the goriest film ever made (I believe it actually holds the record for the most fake blood ever used in a movie for the infamous lawnmower scene alone), though the slapstick comedy tone helps balance things out and prevent you from getting too disturbed. I finally got to watch it last summer, and by God did it exceed every conceivable expectation I had. I can’t even do it justice here, I’ll just let James Rolfe take it away.

 

 

Cannibal Holocaust (I’m not even going to include images)

Finally, we come to a very difficult topic. The kind of violent movie about which there is nothing conceivably “fun”, what might be called “the test of endurance” category of film, into which 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust squarely fits. Like Birth of a Nation, this was a movie I knew I’d eventually have to see, but wasn’t exactly going to enjoy. The granddaddy of the “found footage” genre (although the “found footage” is contained within a normal narrative film), it tells the story of a film crew who commit a series of atrocities against a cannibal tribe deep in the Amazon jungle (such as herding a number of them into a hut and lighting it on fire) all for the sake of getting interesting footage. This comes back to bite them (a massive understatement) when the natives finally get fed up and exact their brutal revenge. The movie exposes us to such sights as a ritual punishment involving genital mutilation, the film crew raping a native girl, the female member of the film crew getting gang-raped and beheaded, a guy getting mutilated and castrated (the sight of his penis just… falling off, done so realistically, will probably haunt me forever), and of course, the film’s most infamous image, a woman impaled on a spike from rectum-to-mouth. The violence was so realistic that it led to the director being arrested on suspicion of having made a snuff film. To clear his name, the actors had to come forward and prove that they were in fact alive and well, and it had to be demonstrated in court how the impalement scene was faked.

Unfortunately not faked were a series of genuine animal deaths used in the film, which traumatized me more than anything else, despite being prepared for it. These include a coatimundi having its throat slashed, a turtle getting decapitated and then having its shell broken open, a monkey having its face chopped off (even worse, they actually went through two monkeys, due to the first take not coming out right), and a piglet being kicked and then shot. All of this is inexcusably reprehensible, regardless of how good (or not so good, depending on your point of view) the rest of the movie is.

Within all the ungodly horror, I do think the movie manages to send an important message (even if it may have been entirely unintentional), namely that the mere fact that a culture does atrocious things does not license you to go and commit atrocities against them. The natives may be cannibals with warlike ways and brutal customs, but they are still ultimately people, people who are products of their culture. That doesn’t mean it’s okay for them to be cannibals (believe me, I fucking hate moral relativism* more than anyone else), but it also doesn’t mean they deserve to be exploited. The film crew clearly think that they are entitled to take advantage of the “barbarians”, and more or less get exactly what they deserve for it. I think it’s especially relevant in this day and age when we still have people trying to justify the actions of Christopher Columbus or the conquistadors by claiming that the native Mesoamericans were “bad people”. Don’t get me wrong, the human sacrifice and shit needed to be stopped, but that didn’t justify the acts of rape, pillage and genocide that the European explorers committed. Imagine if some time in the late 18^th/early 19^th century, some other country invaded the United States, saw that we condoned slavery, and decided that that justified going in and killing everyone (and don’t even get me started on the shit-heads who try to justify American slavery and claim that it “wasn’t that bad”, or that the Africans were “better off” being enslaved). Years later, some of the descendants of the people who exterminated us would probably shrug the whole thing off as “well, they had it coming for owning slaves”. Hell, imagine if today, aliens came down, judged us to be immoral in some way, and decided that that made us fit for extermination. Whenever anyone tries to claim that genocide is ever okay (and I can’t fucking believe how sad it is that people like that exist), it raises a whole bunch of problems that are going beyond the scope of this article.

*By “moral relativism”, I’m referring to the ultra-simplistic idea of “it’s a different culture, therefore we have no right to judge it”. I do understand that there are certain situations in which circumstances must be taken into account and exceptions to normal rules must be made, but it’s a much more complex and nuanced subject than simply declaring, say, “Of course it was okay for George Washington to own slaves! It was the 18th century!”

I watched Cannibal Holocaust last summer, and to say the least, it left me feeling like my very soul had been violated. I even tried (with partial success) to cheer myself up by watching some Sesame Street clips afterward. It probably took two days (during which I was legitimately worried the film had ruined my ability to pass summer school, and possibly even ruined my life) for the initial shock to wear off, and maybe a week or two to fully recover, but recover I did, and now the experience is like little more than a distantly remembered nightmare. I doubt I’ll ever watch it again. I’ll embed the movie below for anyone who’s honestly curious.

I SERIOUSLY WARN YOU, THIS MOVIE WILL PROBABLY LEAVE YOU DISTURBED FOR A MONTH, CONTAINS IMAGES THAT WILL HAUNT YOU FOREVER, AND COULD EVEN CHANGE WHO YOU ARE. I REPEAT, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Conclusion

So, those were some examples of violent movies. There’s plenty more I could talk about, but this is getting overlong as is. Now comes the central question: what purpose does movie violence serve? Well, for one, there’s the catharsis factor: the morbid curiosity many of us have to see the worst the universe has to offer while also having the comforting reassurance that what we’re seeing isn’t real, as well as the simple satisfaction of seeing bad things happen to bad people. It can also serve the narrative function of raising the stakes, such as to show how nasty the villain is. It can also be used to convey messages that perhaps couldn’t be done justice any other way. Having already discussed Cannibal Holocaust, I think it would be fitting to close off this article talking a bit more about A Clockwork Orange. That movie is violent, but it doesn’t use violence for the sake of celebrating it. The deplorable acts committed by Alex and his Droogs in the first half of the film are meant to establish how terrible they are, not to serve as a geek show for the audience’s sick amusement. Then we have the tail-end of the movie featuring the now helpless Alex’s sadistic treatment at the hands of the people he’s wronged. There is much we can read into this. It may partly be a metaphor for how often ex-cons will try to make an honest living only to be screwed by society until they have almost no choice but to slip back into their old ways (it is debatable whether Alex actually tried to be good. He did give some change to the old bum, but that might have just been an attempt to avoid getting his ass kicked. It’s also unclear whether his injury at the end caused the Ludovico treatment to wear off or if it just wore off on its own). This sequence also shows how people who have been victims of violence can quickly become violent themselves when they know they’re safe from retaliation (also note the hypocrisy of how the old writer is perfectly willing to treat Alex with kindness despite knowing that Alex has done terrible things to other people… right up until he figures out that Alex has wronged him personally). Ultimately, we are all violent beings deep down, and it’s good that we have art as an outlet to keep those tendencies in check.

 

 

Bonus: Just For Fun

If all of this has made you depressed, allow me to cleanse your palette with some German puppet violence (then again, this might just make you feel even more depressed, depending on your sense of humor).

This fucker is basically a little, orange Alex DeLarge.