The Poetics of Film Violence

3
The Poetics of Film Violence
Violent entertainment feeds on a certain paradox. Although violence

is generally thought to be something frightening and horrifying, for a
significant if not major part of the population its representations award
pleasures of sorts. In an aesthetic context, those negative primary reac-
tions can give rise to a variety of meta-emotions as a way of coping
with, even achieving a kind of quasi mastery over, the concerns and
anxieties the very thought of violence evokes in most of us.1 As was
argued above, due to certain patterns of responding to things that are
thought to be horrific or which entail the idea of loss, aesthetic detach-
ment also allows us to experience violence and our own responses to it
as something almost involuntarily fascinating. This affective structure
can be exploited by certain narrative and more specifically cinematic
means to create a variety effects ranging from laughter to shock. Often
these are based on appealing to prevailing notions about good and evil,
treated either in an entertainingly simplistic fashion or with the aim
of exposing their underlying complexities. Poetics is the study of how
works of art generate certain responses in the spectator, possibly with
the aim of influencing his or her norms and notions concerning the
real world. The purpose of the poetics of film violence is to explore how
violence can function as an element of a film as an aesthetic whole.
Aestheticizing violence
In popular fiction violence appears frequently as a fundamental narrative

element. First, violence disrupts the equilibrium of the life of an indi-
vidual or a community. This generates action which leads to new violent
confrontations. Failures and successes in these give the action new direc-
tions and serve as lessons to the characters leading to a final shoot-out or
86
H. Bacon, The Fascination of Film Violence

© Henry Bacon 2015
Poetics of Film Violence 87
some other form of combat. This brings the story to a conclusion which
a spectator who has followed the arc of the story is likely to find satisfac-
tory both narratively and morally. He or she is enticed to sympathize
with the protagonists and to hold the moral exemplified by his or her
attitudes, motivations, and behaviour to be acceptable and perhaps even
laudable within the narrative context, if not exactly universally valid
in real life terms. This reaction is strengthened by the understanding
that henceforth the main characters and their community will continue
their normal, presumably less violent way of life.
The communal aspect is important because it lends support to the
justification of counterviolence. This connects with the question of the
supposedly realistic motivation of representing violence: it is plausible
that violence generates a reaction that makes the victim of violence or
whoever assumes the task of defending him or her to assume action. From
this there is only a very short step to accepting the implied justification
of such action. In popular fiction, resorting to counterviolence is rarely
depicted poisoning people’s lives. When it does happen, representing
counterviolence might actually function as a critique. This need not make
the violence appear any less fascinating. Many structural elements in a
film function by virtue of creating strong psychophysical reactions in the
spectator. Shocking violence can create visceral tensions that are released
as the story reaches its resolution as the criminals are finally eliminated.
For many of us, going through this process is inherently pleasurable.
Strong affects created by violent outbursts can also detach the spectator
from the constraints of realism and conventional moral norms. This is an
integral part of the way violence is represented in order to produce certain
generic effects. Devin McKinney has launched the notions of strong and
weak violence.2 Weak violence does not show the effects of violence and
is therefore not likely to cause strong averse reactions. Strong violence is
used to shock either with the purpose of making people become aware
of the brutal reality of violence or with the intention of exploiting the
emotional reaction to which it gives rise for purely commercial gains –
and very often the two cannot be clearly distinguished. Weak violence
might appeal to our fantasies of being invulnerable, while the strong
may serve as a reminder of our vulnerability. Weak violence also makes it
possible to treat violence in a comic fashion, and more generally, repre-
senting violence purely for the purposes of entertainment. Combining
invulnerability and even stupidity with violence can conceivably have
an empowering effect on the spectator. The most vulnerable characters
are usually little animals, children, and young women. The way they
behave in popular fiction can be innocently thoughtless and pathetically
88 The Fascination of Film Violence
helpless, allowing for the spectator to feel superior as he or she can

imagine being more observant, intelligent and resourceful, or even
emerging as a heroic protector. Narratives with such vulnerable and
helpless characters give rise to fantasies of altruistic and heroic rescuers.
One extreme case is the humanoid Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) in The Fifth
Element (Besson 1997). Her character is possibly conceived as a caricature
of an immature male fantasy of a woman as a childlike pure soul, a super
slim baby-faced female creature in constant need to be rescued by the
male protagonist. As the help of the hero, Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis),
is once again requested with the statement, “Leeloo is in trouble,” he
replies, “When is Leeloo not in trouble?” But only Leeloo can release the
divine light needed to save the earth from the Great Evil.
Counterviolence appeals to our primitive sense of justice. The foun-
dation of how we expect it to be narratively represented may well be
in the pattern of altruistic avenger described by Flesch. The innocent
have suffered and we can’t wait to see the evildoers punished. A tension
has arisen which can only be released through the restoration of a just
state of affairs. Yet, as eager as we are to see that happen, we also derive
pleasure from any narratively ingenious postponement of the release
of tension that that restoration provides. The overall aesthetic effect is
largely based on the way the violent scenes are spread throughout the
film. The spectator is not supposed to become insensitive to it but rather
to experience ever stronger reactions finally leading to that pleasurable
release as the long desired final climax is reached. Until that, the tension
increases our interest in what we see happening – and enables us to be
fascinated by violence and atrocities. But above all, traversing this narra-
tive arch prepares us to enjoy and – at least within the confines of the
story world – to accept the way the restoration is achieved. The hero
probably resorts to violence only as the last means at his disposal. This is
justified by depicting his or her adversaries turning out to be extremely
cruel and unscrupulous. All this is required to maintain a sense of moral
high ground which the spectator can share through identifying with
the hero. It works out in close conjunction with dramaturgical require-
ments. Because the spectator knows, on the basis of generic expecta-
tions, that there will be a final shoot-out or the like, delaying it increases
both a tension and a release effect thus giving strong visceral support for
the satisfaction provided by the moral conclusion. This is the psycho-
physical basis of so-called catharsis. It is one of the chief factors that can
make the aesthetic depiction of violence an enjoyable experience even
for those of us who in real life would not approve of counterviolence.
Apparently the scenario in which evildoers are defeated appeals to a
fundamental fantasy that can temporarily override the more cultivated,
critical and mature attitudes that most of us possess. Perhaps this kind
of narrative patterns work out because our mind works on two levels,
one which is prone to respond to immediate sensations without much
concern for the wider implications of the matter, the other tending
to work much more slowly in bringing to our attention those impli-
cations and their moral consequences.3 This is what allows us to eat
our cake and then moralize about it, brushing aside the inconsistency
of such behaviour and allowing us to go through the same pattern
again and again. It is probably the same mechanism which makes
it all too easy to capture the imagination of people and their parlia-
mentary representatives by simplistic notions, say, about an “axis of
evil.” In the broad sense of the word, this kind of rhetoric functions
as an element of narrative justification for the use of nation’s military
might by assigning definite, morally loaded roles to different parties
in a conflict. Most popular fiction exploits the same patterns but in
an aesthetically more focused way, with the principal aim of evoking
immediate off-line reactions. However, there is likely to be either an
intentional or symptomatic ideological agenda lurking behind, and we
may well ask does constant exposure to such fictional narratives condi-
tion people to be more tolerant of violent real-life narratives together
with their moral and political implications. Aestheticizing violence is
thus intricately intertwined with questions about the nature and ethics
of violence, as well as with an understanding of the ability and need of
certain audiences to treat the problem of violence by narrative means.
The way each and every one of us relates to fictional violence, the
degree to which we tolerate or are fascinated by it, obviously varies a lot.
To even begin to discuss these issues we have to hypothesize an ideal
spectator who reacts to what he or she sees in the way the filmmakers
have intended. The reactions of an actual spectator will then be more
or less alike those of the ideal spectator. Apparently the experiences of a
great number of real spectators do come close to those of ideal spectators
as even the most brutal violence seems to find its audience. The amount
of violence and the way it is depicted and justified – in as much as any
justification is deemed necessary – is calibrated with a certain target
audience in mind, to suit their supposed sensibilities and their more or
less conscious need to be shocked – off-line, of course. Those spectators
whose attitude towards fictional violence is not in accord with that of
the ideal spectator for a given film can get so upset that there is no possi-
bility of even any kind of morbid fascination, not to speak of enjoyment.
Instead, the experience might give rise to debates about the justification
and effects of fictional violence, which, when targeted against individual
films, usually only increase their commercial success. It might be more
fruitful to address the more general issues concerning how different ways
of representing violence address different kinds of sensibilities.
A core question of the poetics of violence is whether physical violence
is depicted explicitly or implicitly. The issue has always been pertinent
also when violence has been depicted in stage drama. Different cultures,
periods, and genres have varied considerably in respect to whether
violence has actually been shown on stage or whether it has been merely
referred to verbally. The latter can actually be a very powerful means of
creating a strong emotional effect. In Ancient Greek tragedies, bloody
deeds usually took place off-stage. According to the stage directions of
Aeschylus’ Oresteia we only hear Agamemnon’s cries for help as he is
murdered. As the palace doors are opened, we see him “dead, in a silver
bath, and wrapped in a voluminous purple robe.”4 In Euripides’ The
Women of Troy, a chain of atrocities takes place as the Greeks exert their
revenge on their vanquished enemies. The emotional effect is not dimin-
ished even though we, together with the captured Trojan women, only
hear about these as related by a Greek messenger. Towards the end even
the messenger almost falls speechless because of the burden of what he
has to say.
In the theatre of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, violence could
be depicted in much more straight forward manner. Torture, maiming
and imaginative ways of killing people could be depicted on the stage.
Shakespeare emerged from this tradition. In his early Titus Andronicus,
13 murders, 4 mutilations, and 1 rape take place. But then again, its orig-
inal audience could occasionally see real brutalities of this kind at public
executions. Probably such scenes in the theatre were depicted at least
in a relatively stylized manner, but that does not necessarily make the
experience any less shocking. Closer to our own age, in performances of
Peter Brook’s legendary 1950s Titus Andronicus production, people often
fainted, according to the legend on one evening as many as 20 people.
The effect was produced mainly by sound: as Titus’s hand was cut off
no blood or representation thereof was seen, but in the wings a piece of
bone was being sawed.
Debates about media violence often focus on explicit representations.
But if the concern is about the anxieties that representing violence
might cause, this might be rather misleading. As the Brook production
exemplifies, the idea of horrifying acts taking place can be all the more
shocking when visualization is left to take place in the mind of the
spectator. In Greenaway’s Baby of Mâcon (1993) we follow a staging of
a grotesque miracle play attended by a noisily participating crowd. The
lines between what is supposed to be play and what within the context
of the story could be assumed to be real are constantly blurred. The film
surreptitiously situates the spectator in the same position as the sadis-
tically voyeuristic audience of the perverted miracle play. Eventually
this gives the impression that something horrible that is supposed to
be mere make-believe is actually taking place. Within the miracle play,
the female protagonist (Julia Ormond) is ordered to be deflowered by
being raped 208 times. But she discovers to her horror that within the
drapery of a huge bed she actually will be raped as many times. Within
the film no narrative framework is left within which this would be mere
representation. As the camera withdraws away from the bed, we only
hear her screams, but they are some of the most shattering ever heard
from behind a screen.
Paradoxically, the rape scene of Baby of Mâcon actually gained power
from Greenaway’s post-Brechtian, anti-sentimental, and distancing style
which in an amoral fashion seems to deny the horror and humiliation
of the rape. Although the spectator is again and again reminded of the
many-layeredness and artificiality of the representation, what happens
to the woman turns the idea that “it is only theatre” on its head and
makes the alienating effect appear callous and cruel both in respect of the
fictional character and the spectator who sympathizes with her plight. In
a sense this is an act of violence against the spectator as he or she is made
to witness something much worse than he or she could possibly expect.
But although implicitly represented violence can be as shocking as
this, it is explicit violence that has dominated the debates and that has
actually had a guiding effect on the stylistic development of mainstream
cinema.
Some of the core issues of the poetics of violence are:

● On what background assumptions and moral norms is the fictional repre-
sentation of violence based, and how do these function in a given film?
● On what kind of general narrative and visual or specifically cinematic
conventions and norms is the representation of violence based?
● How is the use of violence motivated in the diegetic world? Is the spec-
tator led to accepting or to assuming a critical stand in respect of the
explicitly stated or merely implied moral norms?
● How is the spectator otherwise led to react to the violence seen in the
film?
● How is cinematic violence made tolerable and even enjoyable?
● How does violence function aesthetically? Is it represented
● in a comic or series context?
● explicitly or implicitly?
● realistically or in a stylized fashion?
Realistic violence in Hollywood cinema
A good, if by no means undisputable, argument can be made in favour

of realistic depiction of violence on film. It is generally agreed that art
should help us to encounter the real world in an honest way. Artists may
respond to social problems quite spontaneously, but many filmmakers
actually see it as their duty to make statements about topics such as
violence as it appears in contemporary society.
The Prohibition era (1919–1933), particularly towards its end, became
a significant period in the formation of the opinions of Americans
regarding maintenance of law and order. As the political commentator
Walter Lippmann wrote:
We find ourselves revolving in a circle of impotence in which we

outlaw intolerantly the satisfaction of certain persistent human desires
and then tolerate what we have prohibited. Thus we find ourselves
accepting in their lawless forms the very things which in lawful form
we intended to abolish but with the additional dangers which arise
from having turned over their exploitation to the underworld.5
Proscribing bad habits tends to increase their appeal. In the case of

the prohibition this was exploited not only by those who catered to
the need to consume alcohol, but also the entertainment industry.
Bootlegging turned out to be a profitable topic for Hollywood. For
quite some time, many people thought that gangsters had merely
assumed the task of offering a service for which there was a consider-
able need among the population. The attitudes started to change in
the beginning of the 1930s as the more ruthless side of gangsterism
became more apparent. During the recession, the entire United States
was in dire straits and there were fears of the collapse of law and order.
Against this social reality, gangsters began to appear like a threat to
the society as a whole.6 Law and order appeared to gain the upper
hand when in 1931 Al Capone was finally convicted on charges of tax
evasion. The common opinion had turned against him partly because
he was suspected for having organized the so-called Saint Valentine’s
Day Massacre, an incident in which gangsters dressed as policemen
killed with machineguns seven of Capone’s rival gangsters. All in all,
Capone’s life was extremely colourful and a great source of material
for popular culture. Elliot Ness, whose long term activities led to the
capture and conviction of Capone, got his share of the glory. A whole
series of gangster films were made depicting more violent criminal

activities than had seen before, but in which law and order neverthe-
less eventually prevailed. Filmmakers started really pushing their limits
in putting brutal violence on screen.
The reception of the gangster films was mixed. In the 1930s, it was
the ungrateful task of the self-control system of the American movie
industry to argue in favour of depicting violence against the opinions
of the censorship boards of certain states and Canadian territories.
Jason Joy, who was man in charge of the enforcement of the self-
censorship rules issued by Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of
America (MPPDA),7 tried to persuade the Vancouver Board of Censors
that Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931) was very much against
violence and gangsterism. To the New York censor board, he explained
that it was necessary to depict the brutality and ruthlessness of the
main character and his gang so as to make the point of how impor-
tant it was to do something about such people: “the more ghastly,
the more ruthless the criminal act of these gangsters are shown on
the screen, the stronger will be the audience reaction against men of
their kind and organized crime in general.” In other words, showing
violence and brutality was presented as necessary in order to carry the
message through, and all forms of censorship would actually “reduce
and even destroy the moral value of the picture as a whole.”8 Similar
arguments, above all the maxim “crime does not pay,” were repeated
again and again in connection with ever more violent films. Hawks’s
Scarface (1932) opens with the text:
This picture is an indictment against gang rule in America and of the

callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing
menace to our safety and our liberty. Every incident in this picture
is a reproduction of an actual occurrence, and the purpose of this
picture is to demand of the government: “What are you going to do
about it? The government is your government. What are you going
to do about it?”
According to MPPDA’s head administrator Will Hays, the film could

even be “a great preachment which will help corral public support for
the efforts of policemen to stop the sale of guns to hoodlums.”9 There
clearly was a need to defend this pioneering film: a whole series of
films were being made featuring more violent shooting scenes than had
been seen ever before. And although depicted as a social evil, the novel
stylistic features employed insured that the fascination of explicitly

depicted violence was exploited to the full. As Stephen Prince points out
in connection with Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931): “Of course, the
film’s stylistic accomplishments taught a somewhat different lesson –
that screen violence was seductive and exciting, an attention gener-
ating flourish, and that could mobilize the most eloquently expressive
powers of cinema.” Representing violence has such a prominent role
in the “amplification of style” in the development of American cinema
that Prince thinks of this as one of the fundamental truths about its
development.10 The intensified style inevitably led to a degree of glam-
orizing. Eileen Percy, an actress turned a columnist, wrote about these
new films:
Our gunmen are presented to us in such a manner that we find

ourselves pulling for them in spite of ourselves, due to the subtle
persuasion of the drama ... We want gang pictures. But we want them
as propaganda against rather than for. We should have our main
figure villified in such a manner that we can settle down to a pleasant
evening of hating him right royally for the cowardly thing that he is,
and cheering lustily when he is finally knocked for a loop.11
The idea that criminals should be represented as cowards emerged almost

as a moral norm and eventually became a Production Administration
Code (PAC) guideline. Jason Joy was worried about the scripted ending
of Scarface, in which the main character is defiant to the very end. Joy
demanded that in the final scene he should be shown as a cringing
coward. The theme of the film was to be that “the gangster is a great
man as long as he has a gun; once without a gun he is a yellow rat.”
Thus the final message of the film would be “not to let criminals get
possession of guns.”12
The major aim of the film industry was, in the words of Richard
Maltby, to “negotiate a strategy of representation, by which a trans-
gressive spectacle could be contained with a repressive narrative
structure.”13 The film industry did not want to enter into a conflict
with censors who were worried about this development. Because of
this, American cinema did not at this stage reach the kind of ultra-
violence that was to completely change the nature of violent enter-
tainment towards the end of the 1960s. But Scarface did suggest what
cinematic violence could be like: not just theatrical, stylized fallings,
but something much more gripping.14 It left both those guarding the
interests of film industry and censors certain how the effects of violence
should be depicted. For some time the idea of honouring the human
body remained the norm: it was not thought to be proper to show the
effects of violence realistically. This led into a practice Stephen Prince
has called clutch-and-fall:
The victim takes the bullet with little or no physical reaction, even if
the shot is fired at close range. Rather than responding with pain or
distress, or with an involuntary physical reaction such as spasms that
wrack Scarface when the police machine-gun him, the clutch and fall
victim falls into a trance, or seems to fall asleep, and then sinks grace-
fully and slowly out of the frame.15
But even if within such confines criminals could be shown to die,

Policemen dying from gangsters’ bullets were not be seen on screen.
The death of policemen had to be indicated indirectly for example by
showing the next day’s newspaper headline.
MPPDA also sought to calm down people who were worried that
people might learn criminal practices from films. Carl Millike assured
in a letter addressed to the Mayor of Louisville, who had demanded
stricter censorship, that the film industry was aware of its responsi-
bilities in this respect. The MPPDA even hired an international expert
on the incidence and causes of homicide, Frederick L. Hoffman, to
explore how “to secure the impression of reality and at the same time
guard against the dispersing of criminal technique.”16 Perhaps this
kind of thinking was also behind the rule forbidding the showing of
machineguns. But it could happen that whatever firearms the charac-
ters on screen were holding, the sounds of automatic weapons were
heard.17 The main exception to such rules were of course war films. It
was thought that this topic was a sufficient excuse for displaying more
brutal violence than was otherwise acceptable. But gradually this led
to a change in the norms of presenting violence so that eventually also
in other genres the drastic effects of bullets on the human body could
be shown.
Prince lists four practices that guided the representation of violence
in Hollywood films: spatial displacement, metonymies, indexicality,
and emotional bracketing. With spatial displacement, he refers to the
convention of not showing the victim at the decisive moment: we see at
that point the shooter rather than the person shot at. Sometimes violence
takes place just off-screen, sometimes there is an object which hides it.
It was also possible to only refer to it happening. Prince mentions as

an example 13 Rue Madeleine (Hathaway 1947), in which the protago-
nist is tortured by the Nazis, in the words of another character, by “the
cruellest means the Nazis can devise.” Visualizing those means was left
to the imagination of the spectator. As Prince points out, the sounds of
whipping might not quite satisfy the expectations to which the dialogue
gave rise.18
In metonymic displacement, the violence is seen causing destruction
mainly to inanimate objects in way which suggests a parallel with what it
can do to human bodies. In indexical pointing, the effects of violence are
to be seen, but as was pointed above, Hollywood cinema did not venture
very far in this respect in the 1930s. One variant of this – which is also an
instance of spatial displacement – is to show the reactions of bystanders
to violence and its effects. This is particularly effective when the charac-
ters turn away in horror. This supports the idea that violence has meaning
in human affairs: “It suggests that in violence there is a depth of meaning
that is terrible to behold and which transcends the most evident layer of
experience visible to eye and camera.”19 Emotional bracketing is a some-
what stronger way of gauging this dimension. There is a calm passage
in the narrative that allows the spectator to recover after a violent scene
and to think over its moral implications. According to Prince, this kind
of passage functions as signs of the filmmakers having a moral goal and
there being a commendable point in depicting violence.20
The filmic devises Prince discusses evolved mainly in the 1930s and
created the basis for the classical poetics of cinematic violence. The next
major change took place in the 1960s. That violence in the movies at
that time became much more explicit has been explained by factors
such as the brutalities of the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and
the increase of street violence. These provoked fierce debates about the
role of violence in American society.21 MPAA director Jack Valenti stated
that he thought it was weird that film critics accused movies for being
too violent at a time when television offered every night scenes from the
battle fields of Vietnam. On the other hand, the assassinations of Martin
Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968 made Valenti encourage the
exercise of restraint and avoidance of “aimless cruelty and senseless
brutality” in films. This was agreed upon in principle, but in practice
the development could not be stopped.22 Gradually also cinematic
violence came closer to people’s daily lives. Violence no more occurred
just in wars in distant lands or shootouts between gangsters, it could
take place even in the suburbs. MPAA revised its stand and declared that
people who complain about obscenities and violence in films have not
understood that “films have changed to reflect our changing culture.”23

From this it could be further argued that even extreme forms of violence
could be justified both in art and entertainment.
The beginning of ultra violence in Hollywood cinema is quite clearly
marked. The turning point was the releases of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie
and Clyde and Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, both in 1967, and
Samuel Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch a couple of years later. Both Penn
and Peckinpah argued that the traditional Hollywood way of depicting
violence and its effects was deceptive. They stated that they saw it as
their ethical duty to treat the role of violence in human life honestly.
Peckinpah in particular saw as his almost messianic task to use striking
cinematic means to depict the shocking reality of violence. As Prince
explains, “Peckinpah aimed to stylize his material and ... this styliza-
tion proceeded from his conviction that it was the only way to wake
up people to violence in a culture – late 1960s America – whose convul-
sions, he believed, had anesthetized them to bloody death.”24 It appears
that he genuinely thought that stylized violence could wake up people
from their stupor and make them understand the role of violence in
human affairs. This called for new technical means. Squibs – at first
condoms filled with fake blood – were concealed in actor’s clothing and
burst so as to simulate bullet strikes and blood sprays thus visualizing in
a shocking way the impact of bullets on the human body.25 Very few of
us are capable of assessing how well the effect corresponds to reality, but
the experience can be all the more shocking.
Phil Feldman, the producer of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, stated
amidst the uproar these films gave rise to, “The entertainment industry
has a right and a duty to depict reality as it is. If audiences react against
the reality that is shown, it may prove therapeutic.”26 It was also argued
that such representations could help us in finding constructive solu-
tions or at least to cope with the complexities of real-life violence.
Unfortunately, it is not very clear how representations of violence are
supposed to serve this purpose. Perhaps Feldman’s response to the
results of the preview were symptomatic. About 60 percent of the audi-
ence reacted negatively, but about 20 percent thought it was excellent.
The latter group consisted of 17- to 25-year-olds. This was and still is the
biggest target group of cinema goers, and so it made more economical
sense to reach the majority of them rather than try to make a film that
would appeal to a wider age group.27
The film industry was convinced that the new kind of violence would
find its audience, correctly believing it to be all the bigger because of
the uproar that the increasingly explicit depiction of violence caused.
Clearly, the main attraction was not heightened realism. Much more
significant was the bold stylization of violence that made it aestheti-
cally much more enjoyable than anything that had been seen before.
The final scene of Bonnie and Clyde, in which the main couple are killed
under machine gun fire, was a turning point. Multiple camera shooting,
slow motion at different speeds, and effective editing created a tension
between “the spastic and the balletic.”28 The result was horrifying but
in some strange way – some people might say, in a perverse way – beau-
tiful. Predictably, the new style did not appeal to everyone. According to
one critic, Bonnie and Clyde encouraged to laugh at sadism and murder,
but “eventually [it] repels you, and makes you angry or ashamed at
having had your emotions manipulated.”29 Many critics were shocked
by the fact that the story was told from the point of view of the crimi-
nals. But the film did suit well the counter culture of the 1960s: the
Latin American revolutionary leader Che Guevara was shot a couple of
months after the premiere, as was Huey P. Newton, a leading figure of
the Black Panthers. And predictably, many young people found the main
couple very attractive. They were played by the gorgeous Faye Dunaway
and Warren Beatty, and they were presented as charming, beautiful and
stylish. The fashion wave to which Bonnie and Clyde gave rise still hasn’t
subsided.
Doors had been opened to radically more explicit film violence.
Peckinpah saw in this the possibility of carrying further the techniques
that Akira Kurosawa had developed in his samurai films of the early
1960s. The violent scenes in The Wild Bunch follow each other in a care-
fully calculated rhythm in order to maximize both the dramatic effect
and visceral impact. In the final sequence, Peckinpah considerably
expanded the cinematic devices Penn had developed. As Prince points
out, the impact emerges from skilful manipulation of time. The effect of
slow motion in these scenes is probably based on creating a sensation of
a weird moment before death when the body is still animated although
consciousness is quickly receding or already extinguished.30 The slow
motion is integrated into a complex montage sequence of several lines
of action and flash images. All this creates an intricate aesthetic and
psychological texture.31
Peckinpah was a serious director who sought to develop aesthetic
means with which to treat violence in a fashion that would be more
honest than what had been seen in earlier Hollywood films. He always
claimed that his aim was to fight against glorifying violence by showing
its true effects. He believed that catharsis would strengthen this effect
and even purge the spectators from their aggression.32 On the other
hand, Peckinpah was also influenced by the anthropologist Robert

Ardrey, who thought of animal aggression as a basic fact of life on which
culture could only give a thin veneer.33 The reception of The Wild Bunch
as well as Peckinpah’s subsequent films suggested that he was in effect
exploiting this trait. The huge energy of the montage sequences turned
out to be fascinating rather than repulsive. An anecdote was told about
Nigerian soldiers who after the film shot at the screen and announced
their wish to die like the characters they had just seen. Peckinpah
stated, “I heard that story and I vomited, to think that I had made that
film.”34
Catharsis may be a strong experience but research has not been able
to produce any evidence that it could actually make people any less
aggressive. What is more significant is that Peckinpah did not glorify
his violent characters. Instead, he emphasized their moral numbness
and spiritual vacuity. Straw Dogs (1971) has sometimes been branded
as a depiction of a masculine rite of passage: David, a nerd professor
of mathematics (Dustin Hoffman), resorts to violence as he defends
his Cornwall summer cottage against violent intruders. The initiation
aspect was emphasized by advertising slogans such as “the knock at
the door meant the birth of one man and the death of seven others!”
According to Prince, David is at no point presented as admirable. On
the contrary, he appears presumptuous and arrogant. But then again,
Peckinpah’s vision of the villagers is cynical to the extreme. Everyone
seems to look down on everyone else, and no one appears to be genu-
inely sociable. Against this background, David does not appear particu-
larly unpleasant. His wife, Amy (Susan George), is frustrated with their
relationship because he wants to concentrate on his work and does not
respond to her need for sex and companionship. When Amy’s child-
hood friend Charlie rapes her, through her mind flashes images of David
coming to make love with her. This is crosscut with images of David on a
hunting trip, to which he has been lured so that he would be out of the
way. The sequence is by no means unequivocal. Although Amy at first
resists as much as she can, towards the end of the rape she appears to be
begging for tenderness. Apparently Peckinpah did not intend to suggest
that Amy wants to be raped although in two earlier scenes she, presum-
ably inadvertently, provokes the men sexually. So perhaps Amy after the
rape is only momentarily distracted into asking from Charlie the kind
of tenderness that her husband denies her. But then a second man rapes
Amy as Charlie watches from aside. This seems to have no other func-
tion than to shock the spectator. From a psychological point of view,
more significant is the way Peckinpah in a later scene uses montage to
depict the traumatizing effect the rape has had on Amy. It has destroyed
her cheerfulness and isolated her from other people.35
Prince thinks David does not appear the least bit more heroic after
having survived the attack on the cottage. His marriage is ruined and
he has not learned anything about himself, even if he does appear to be
shocked by the violence to which he himself has resorted.36 But it could
be argued that he has overcome his earlier temerity and courageously
defended his home against a bestial attack. Prince also fails to mention
that David protects a retarded man whom the villagers would like to
lynch. Towards the very end, he appears to feel at least a bit of pride for
having completed an apparently overwhelming task. And as his oppo-
nents have been presented as a brutal mob, the spectator is likely to side
with him despite his shortcomings. This pattern is further strengthened
by the last attacker being killed by Amy as David is about to lose the
fight. Thus, in the last instance, husband and wife work together to
overcome the enemy. The spectator is highly likely to wish very strongly
that David will succeed in vanquishing the brutal invaders and to feel
great relief when he eventually succeeds in this – with the help of the
woman with whom he is still bonded.
In Peckinpah’s moral universe, resorting to violence is often unavoid-
able if one does not resign to being helplessly beaten, raped, or killed by
bullies. Even if the (more or less) innocent prevail, the results are in any
case devastating. Violence gnaws everyone who resorts to it, whatever
the excuse. They become alienated and often end up in self-destruction
of one form or another. Prince emphasizes that Peckinpah’s view of life
is melancholy through and through. This trait is often not present in the
films of his followers.
Penn’s and Peckinpah’s films broke barriers, were extremely popular,
and radically changed notions about what could be shown in films as
well as how it could be shown. According to a Time critic, “In the wake
of Bonnie and Clyde, there is an almost euphoric sense in Hollywood that
more such movies can and will be made.”37 Younger directors naturally
sought to exceed everything that had been previously achieved, and for
both better and worse, the results are now part of film history. A few of
them did seek to do this in a way that was in accord with Penn’s and
Peckinpah’s attempts to comment on the human condition. One of the
most successful of them has been Martin Scorsese, who showed what
he could do in the climactic shooting scene of Taxi Driver (1976). But
whereas in Peckinpah’s films, resorting to violence destroys both sides,
in this film the protagonist Travis, having just missed his opportunity
to assassinate a presidential candidate, becomes a tabloid hero as he
singlehandedly eliminates a bunch of criminals because they prostitute

a teenage girl (Jodie Foster). He certainly has not learned anything about
himself or his community. In contrast to David of the Straw Dogs, he is a
simple person who does not have the potential to develop anything but
certain practical skills. There is an element of satire in him becoming a
one occasion celebrity.
Also, Scorsese claimed being embarrassed about how strongly the audi-
ence reacted to the violence in Taxi Driver. But as Prince points out:
Viewers who whoop with approval at ultraviolence are often intu-

iting the filmmaker’s own pleasure in creating such scenes. It is not
simply that the design elicits the response. Rather, the viewer grasps
the filmmaker’s own relationship to the materials, the sensuous
pleasures that a Penn, Peckinpah, Scorsese, or Tarantino has derived
from the audiovisual design of graphic violence and is manifesting
through those designs.38
Scorsese’s claim does indeed appear somewhat spurious considering

how meticulously effective he has made the grand shooting scene. After
Travis has promptly killed the pimps one by one by dexterous use of a
variety of weapons, the scene ends with a majestic overhead shot and
a montage sequence displaying the scene of the massacre. Evocative
music gives the sequence a sublime aura. What was Scorsese aiming at
if not to cater a maximally strong experience for his audience? Is it even
possible to depict horrific violence in a way that would not be poten-
tially fascinating?
The core question of the poetics of violence is how can the spectator
be drawn into the whirlpool of fictional violence thus awarding him a
big experience, yet maintain enough distance for the experience not to
be so overwhelming that it blurs critical awareness? In his analysis of
violent movies Prince discusses how certain directors have aestheticized
violence in order to make it both realistic and sufficiently distanced so as
not to produce too adverse a reaction at least among a sufficiently large
part of the audience. One good example of such strategy is Saving Private
Ryan (Spielberg 1998), in which the desaturated image produces a mildly
surrealistic effect allowing the audience to assume an emotionally and
cognitively slightly distanced stand to the furious fighting thus depicted.
Another solution is to create a violence effect by hectic montage rather
than actually showing explicit violence. As David Tetzlaff has pointed
out, although in contemporary American films there appears to be little
inhibitions about showing even extreme violence, the camera usually
does not linger in it but rather hurries to show ever new action.39 One
extreme point is the hyperkinetic aesthetics of Oliver Stone’s Natural
Born Killers (1994): a dazzling concoction of film materials manipulated
in different ways and shown at various speeds creating what has been
called an effect of “deranged energy.”40
Stone defended the excessive violence of Natural Born Killers by
defining the film as a satire of the culture of violence that American
media shamelessly celebrates. However, the claim about the correlation
between fictional entertainment and the violence that actually takes
place in society needs some clarification. Michael Medved has strictly
denied the explanation according to which violent films would reflect
social reality. He points out that extremely few of those who have not
experienced war have actually seen a person being killed. Yet, anyone
watching television regularly can hardly avoid a stream of fictional kill-
ings. The entertainment industry offers a grossly distorted image of the
amount of violence that takes place in peace time circumstances.41
Medved is right in that at least in the United States as well as many
other Western countries crime rates have actually gone down over the
past couple of decades while the amount of violent entertainment has
increased. Similarly, when film noir style of films brought new kind of
violent imagery to American screens, the number of murders recorded
had for quite some time been declining after a brief increase in the
1930s – which in turn occurred much later than the cycle of gangster
films at the beginning of that decade.42 Moreover, neither the amount
nor the “styles” of murder correspond to actual violence in post-war
American society. Murder rates, which had risen sharply during the
1930s, declined in the early 1940s and remained relatively low until
the mid-1960s.43 It would thus appear that to some extent representa-
tions of violence are found to be more fascinating the smaller the prob-
ability of actually having to encounter violence. This may be related to
our limited ability to deal rationally with small but fascinating risks:
the fear of a sensational bad thing happening can grow totally out of
proportion to the probability of it actually taking place. Even a person
fully aware of the statistical probabilities might find it difficult not to
be afraid of small but affective threats.44 Again, discrepancy between
the affectively felt and rationally known appears to be at the root of
the fascination that makes violent films in non-violent times attractive
enough to command considerable financial interests. But even if the
great amount of fictional violence available at a given time would have
an inverse ratio to violence actually taking place in the society, there can
nevertheless be adverse effects. In the United States many researchers
have concluded that people who watch a lot of television have a greater
tendency to think that the world is a bad and violent place than people
who consume less television.45 But even the nature of this correla-
tion is far from obvious. It may not be merely a question of television
brainwashing people and leading them to assume false notions about
violence. It should also be taken into account what other kind of behav-
ioural tendencies, affective biases, and cognitive traits correlate with
watching television in great quantities. It is extremely difficult to pursue
this kind of study systematically because there are so many factors that
influence human behaviour.
We should also be aware that the question of representation of violence
is not limited to what might be thought of as irresponsible production
of popular culture. John Fraser points to the irony that Penn derived
most of his attitudes and strategies from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless
(1959). Watching this film, it is all too easy to forget that the protago-
nist, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, is a cop-killer. Fraser emphasizes
the correlation between “the killer’s moral indifference and the vision of
the movie as a whole.” The murder, which takes place at the very begin-
ning of the film, appears almost like fiction within fiction, a scene from
a B-movie that the protagonist seems to enjoy, and the policeman is
further dehumanized by the general stereotyping of policemen seen later
in the film. The killing simply does not appear to matter in the least.46
Fraser sees as Godard’s aesthetic strategy in the 1960s the depiction of
“violent situations in which intense feelings are normally involved and
demanded ... and then refusing to feel strongly about them himself or to
create characters who do so.”47
Also this is an instance of aestheticizing violence, not by making it
beautiful, but by using it as a narrative element in a way that distances
it from the reality of violence even more than the sanitized violence of
Classical Hollywood cinema. Obviously, things are not quite so clearly
cut. One counter example is Godard’s The Little Soldier (1963), which
was censored in France for a couple of years because of its torture scene.
Despite its neo-Brechtian distancing it was shocking simply because
the torture takes place in a laconic manner with everyday items: water-
boarding, burning with a cigarette lighter the wrist of a man tied to a
bed, producing electrical shocks with a small hand operated generator.
At the time of the Algerian war, such means were a delicate issue in
France, although the official reason for censoring the film was that these
activities might too easily be imitated. Godard’s way of representing
violence was very different from that of his American colleagues and
thus also questionable in a completely different way.
Comical violence
Aestheticizing violence by cinematic means makes it possible to use

even quite extreme material as an attraction: horrible or even repulsive
things can be made to appeal at least to certain sections of the audi-
ence. By indicating that the real, long term or permanent damages to
the body will be ignored, it is even possible to use violence as a comic
element. Exploiting this trait has a long cultural history, including major
theatrical traditions such as the Italian folk theatre known as commedia
dell’arte and the English Punch & Judy puppet theatre. Slapstick originally
referred to a commedia dell’arte prop, a club consisting of wooden sticks
that produced big noise but little damage when used to hit a fellow
actor. Later on, the term was extended to denote theatre and film genres
in which the humour is based to a great extent on excessive, unrealistic
physical violence. The victim only suffers momentary pain and humili-
ation. Plenty of examples can be found from the early years of cinema.
This was partly because the prime models at the time were circus and
variety acts. James Agee, a leading film critic in the 1940s, has described
the effects of a knock on the head in a typical early film comedy:
The least he might do was to straighten up stiff as a plank and fall over
backward with such skill that his whole length seemed to slap the floor
at the same instant. Or he might make a cadenza out of it – look vague,
smile like an angel, roll up his eyes, lace his fingers, thrust his hands
palms downward as far as they would go, hunch his shoulders, rise on
tiptoe, prance ecstatically in narrowing circles until, with tallow knees,
he sank down the vortex of his dizziness to the floor, and there signi-
fied nirvana by kicking his heels twice, like a swimming frog.48
Clearly, this kind of burlesque violence could not be taken at all seri-
ously. When the context is playful, the characters caricatures, and
the violence hyperbolic, the effect can only be comical – even if not
everyone will be amused. It could almost be said that criticizing this
kind of display of violence is a sign of a lack of competence, or at least
a lack of understanding of its possible functions. The laughter to which
burlesque violence gives rise can be liberating as the fearful thing is made
to appear ridiculous. Slapstick often combines with acrobatics, so the
spectators can enjoy the additional delight of fabulous performances.
Buster Keaton’s physical comedy is made breathtaking by our knowl-
edge that he performed all the stunts himself. In more recent cinema,
Jackie Chan has gained a similar aura with his kung fu skills.
Live-action slapstick began to disappear over the 1920s as masters such

as Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd turned to more subtle
comedy. After sound film made its breakthrough, the most important
style of comedy in Hollywood was screwball, based on snappy dialogue
and social satire. But slapstick soon found new life in animation. The
characters created by Tex Avery and his colleagues were mainly anthro-
pomorphized animal figures rather than anything resembling too closely
real people. They can survive being driven over by a steamroller, a load
of bricks falling on them, or dynamite explosions, all of which only
leave them momentarily with a bedazzled expression on their face ... and
the chase continues. Similar examples can be found already in early
live-action cinema, but in animation, the speed and the effects can be
taken to extremes. Children appear to be highly amused by this kind
of violence perhaps because they generally are terrifically amused by
things being somehow excessive. The context just has to be humoristic
or fantastic, as authors of fairy tales have always known.49 But even in
such contexts violence targeted on children or animals can be too much
for young spectators.
Also, contemporary live-action films contain lots of examples of
quite drastic violence employed to comic effect. One of the most
famous examples is the scene in The Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg
1981) in which an anonymous opponent makes a magnificent display
with his sabre thus challenging Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) to a duel.
Indiana, exhausted after having just rushed all around after men who
have kidnapped his girl, with an exasperated look on his face, just takes
out his gun, shoots the sabre master and continues his search without
further ado. At least on the first run, the scene could trigger an explo-
sion of laughter in a full auditorium. The effect seemed to work out
almost mechanically. There was nothing that would have inhibited it as
the masked opponent was not given even the slightest individualizing
features. From a narrative-ethical point of view, he was non-person. It
is much more difficult to make violence appear funny when the victim
is a psychologically rounded character, who obviously fears and suffers.
When this does succeed, the effect is uncannily conflictual.
Quentin Tarantino has achieved astonishing effects by giving natural-
istic violence a comic twist. Perhaps the most extreme case is the killing
of Marvin, a young African American (Phil LaMarr) in Pulp Fiction (1994).
Although he has not been given much screen time, the fear we can read
from his face and body makes him a real person. On the other hand,
the snappy dialogue of the two killers, Vincent and Jules (John Travolta
and Samuel L. Jackson) has created a weird aura of black humour. At
this stage of the film, having followed the various plot lines of the film
as a whole, the spectator has already encountered a lot of both repel-
lently violent and genuinely funny elements. Violence has taken place
mainly between fairly equal opponents or has been targeted on other
extremely violent, even sadistic and perverse, characters. The spectator
probably has been delighted by the story development constantly skip-
ping from one narrative thread to another. In addition, the slightly
fantastic atmosphere has just been increased as Vincent and Jules have
miraculously survived bullets shot at them at fairly close range – leading
them into a debate as to whether it was an instance of “divine inter-
vention” or not. When Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin as their car
happens to hit a bump, the gangsters are not in the least bit shocked by
the killing – “Oh man, I shot Marvin in the face” – they just keep on
ranting at each other. Marvin’s death poses a purely practical problem:
how to get rid of the body and clean up the bloody mess. At this point,
Marvin is not shown anymore, we only see the spilt blood. As is the case
with most Tarantino’s films, many people simply hate this scene. The
spectator may be offended not just by the young man being killed, but
by a relatively individualized character being treated just like the non-
individualized Arab in the Raiders of the Lost Ark. The spectator may even
experience this as an attack on his or her sensibilities, having been delib-
erately mislead and made to experience something dreadful for which
he or she has not been properly prepared.
Justifying violence
In fictional narratives violent actions which in real life are experi-

enced as unpleasant, frightful or horrific can create a titillating tension
between the repellent and the fascinating. This is typically achieved by
motivating violence in ways which enable putting aside serious ethical
considerations. The most common motivations are
● Revenge.
● Punishment.
● Restoration of a just state of affairs.
● The need to resort to violence in order to avoid something worse
happening
These motivations tend to intertwine, which further increases the sense of

justification. Revenge often masquerades as punishment, even the resto-
ration of a just state of affairs. In real life, social order and internalized
inhibitions tend to inhibit people from realizing their revenge impulses.

This makes them all the more prone to enjoy revenge occurring on an
imaginary level. Revenge exerted by an individual appears to be particu-
larly acceptable for the American mentality, ridden as it is by deeply
ingrained suspicions about the ability of any governmental body to
insure that “true” justice will prevail. John Fraser writes in his Violence in
Arts about the typically American dual attitude towards law and order,
“the general desire for order and resentment of laws ... [which] no doubt
contributes to making a lawful order harder to achieve.”50 People have to
defend themselves and their beloved, sometimes even the communities
to which they are attached and the sense of values which they embody.
In westerns, maintaining the sense of a moral universe usually required
depicting the Native American population as so wild and beastly that
they clearly do not have the right to the land they happen to inhabit.
It is the duty of people who represent civilization to take it with all its
riches away from them and then systematically cultivate and exploit it.
In certain more mature westerns, a degree of criticism of this kind of
attitudes begins to emerge. In John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) Ethan
(John Wayne) is rather condescending about Martin (Jeffrey Hunter),
a young man who is one eighth Indian. Ethan does allow Martin to
join him as he goes out to search for Ethan’s little niece, who has been
captured by Indians after killing all her family. The search lasts for years,
and meanwhile, the little girl grows to be an adult woman. Ethan seems
to think that she has grown into the Indian society, and that she has
thus been contaminated to the extent that she cannot return to live in
a white society. Martin suspects that Ethan is actually going to kill the
girl, and Ethan’s brutal eye-for-eye ethics makes this appear quite plau-
sible: he scalps an Indian whom he knows to have scalped Ethan’s sister
and her family. The basic pattern is once again based on the assump-
tion that redskins are brutal beasts. In addition to scalping, they have
committed atrocities that cannot even be mentioned, not to speak of
showing them in a 1950s western. And although there are peculiarities
in Ethan’s behaviour, his status as a hero is not in jeopardy at any point.
This is ensured by certain means that are quite common in mainstream
cinema. He is one of us, a good American, or anyone who cares to asso-
ciate with them, but also that much of an outsider that he is free from
the petty problems and intrigues of everyday life in a small community.
His mildly subversive attitudes and actions stand against the weaknesses
of the community, dangerously indecisive and incapable of defending
itself against external threats. Ethan himself does not allow any norms
to prevent him from doing what he thinks has to be done. And just like
a diamond is made to look bigger by surrounding it by smaller stones,

the John Wayne character is surrounded by good intending but comi-
cally incapable men who can’t be trusted to achieve important goals
with any degree of efficiency. Thus Ethan, even with certain brutal char-
acteristics, emerges as the quintessential American hero.
Making westerns has not remained the privilege of the Americans, but
the results have been stunningly different. In Once Upon a Time in the
West (1968), Sergio Leone used the theme of obsessive revenge as a moti-
vation for beneficial violence. Although the protagonist is driven by his
private loss, killing a totally callous gunman improves the prospects
for a better life at the frontier. This stone-faced angel of revenge is in
superb control of his instincts as well as of the situation as a whole. He
keeps violence in check and consequently not a shadow of doubt is cast
over the righteousness of his actions. The spectator must have a very
mature and tightly controlled outlook on the ethics of revenge in order
to impose a different view on his activities. When the activities of the
avenger are motivated by him having lost a beloved, he can go quite far
without the audience reactions turning against him to any significant
degree. In the most clear cut case, the righteous hero is seen avoiding
resorting to violence until being forced to do so in order to protect him-
or herself, or, more commonly and impressively, his or her beloved, the
community, or justice in general. In The Patriot (Emmerich 2000) the
protagonist (Mel Gibson), because of the cruelties he has witnessed in
earlier battles, at first tries to avoid participating in the American Civil
War. But after a ruthless British officer has killed his son and burned
his house, he at first in an immediate fit of frenzy kills all the British
who have participated in the killing and destruction and then begins to
organize guerrilla warfare. The way he turns out to be invincibly skilful
together with our knowledge of the American Revolution further justi-
fies his actions: he has a messianic duty. The spectator – irrespective
of his or her nationality – is likely to be thrilled to see the perpetra-
tors of evil deeds defeated and punished. As in so many war films, the
enemy leader is portrayed as cruel to the point of being near inhuman
and his minions as either immoral and despicable – or just faceless and
insignificant.
It is also possible that a film appears to criticize obsessive thirst for
revenge while exploiting this idea to the full. In Marc Forster’s Quantum
of Solace (2008), James Bond (Daniel Craig) appears to be driven on a
personal level by a need to avenge the death of his beloved as well as
an assassination attempt of his respected superior. Some critical light
is thrown on his motives, but his adversaries are depicted as extremely
ruthless businessmen who are speculating on Bolivian water resources,

thus leaving poor people without water. As the revenge theme is tied
with a social-ecological theme, exterminating the speculators and their
henchmen even in a sadistic fashion is made to appear, if not exactly
acceptable, at least deeply enjoyable.
Almost irrespective of the social and ethical views of the individual
spectator but very much dependent on his or her spontaneous reac-
tions when following the story, punishment can easily function as a
sufficient justification for counterviolence. Revenge entertainment is
made more palatable when those punished are nonentities (anonymous
evildoers, ordinary enemy soldiers), repulsive (psychopaths, un-human
or none-human), or extremely, even absolutely, evil. Although revenge
and punishment can be conceptually separated and the latter defined in
Girardian fashion as the task of institutional bodies, in practice, exerting
punishment tends to also have an aspect of revenge. Often this takes
the form of altruistic punishment of Flesch’s description, thus making
it appear more justifiable and thus in a sense also more satisfactory. But
depicting punishment for crimes or misdemeanours without making the
target at least unpleasant easily backfires. Particularly in American gang-
ster films of the studio era,51 the main character could be quite charming
and even sympathetic, but the “crime does not pay” ethos necessitated
his downfall, often even death at the conclusion of the film. Before that
he could live to the full and enjoy all the comforts and pleasures life
can possibly offer. Feminist research in turn has pointed out that it was
necessary for a sexually liberated woman to be given a symbolic punish-
ment of some sort. No doubt the moralistically correct conclusion did
not always accord with the deeper feelings of the audience, but before
that sad point in the story was reached, the spectators would be catered
with highly appealing fantasies of a fervent and luxurious, emotionally
and sensationally loaded way of life.
As was pointed out above, in mainstream cinema punishment is at
least on a symbolic level connected with a restoration of a just state
of affairs. This seems to cater to our need to believe in the possibility
of such things actually happening. As we in our era tend to be cynical
about “human nature,” we seem to be unable to imagine that a just
state of affairs could be reached without resorting to violence. There is
a limit: at its most repulsive, punishment takes the form of lynching,
reminding us that proper punishment must take place according to the
strictures of law. But seeing the death penalty take place is not very likely
to create a cathartic experience even in fiction. The strict protocol of an
execution can make the criminal look pitiable as he helplessly walks
towards our common fate. Even the serial killer in Changeling (Eastwood
2008) appears almost touchingly pathetic as he cracks down just before
being hanged.
In genre films, punishment is usually made desirable by strong polari-
zations of good and evil and by those punished appearing somehow
different from normal people, “us.” This strategy is taken to extremes in
war time propaganda films. The enemy may be shown to be on such a low
moral level that the entire nation and all its subjects must be punished
for the very notion of justice to survive. As the atrocities that had actu-
ally taken place during the Second World War were gradually revealed,
it was easy to make peoples of the nations that had committed these
crimes to appear perverse and mendacious or just blindly obedient. In
Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) people who have survived on a lifeboat after
their ship has been torpedoed by a German submarine pull out from the
sea a German from the submarine that has also sunk. He shows no signs
of gratitude; on the contrary, he hides a water bottle he has. While the
others are almost dying of thirst, he rows the boat towards an area where
he can expect to find his countrymen. But Hitchcock is not entirely
uncritical about “us” either. When the ploy of the German captain is
revealed, the way the other people on the boat kill him is nothing sort of
a lynching. On a certain level, this brings out the way moral norms and
decent behaviour collapse in the dehumanizing conditions of war.
Quentin Tarantino has scored staggeringly also in this field. In his
Inglourious Basterds (2009), the Germans are depicted as so utterly despi-
cable that they fully deserve to be not only killed but also scalped. If the
situation demands that they be allowed to live, they are marked with an
incised Swastika on their forehead so that they will never be able to hide
their true nature. In terms of the norms of mainstream violence, the
scalpings and the incising are shown quite explicitly. The almost jocular
attitude of their leader (Brad Pitt) brings all this some way towards comic
violence. Obviously, it is not possible to take seriously a film which ends
with the entire Nazi leadership being eliminated in a Parisian cinema.
One could even think that Tarantino is treating the “demonizing of the
enemy” and “retributive justice” scenarios in a heavily ironic fashion
in order to exploit to the full the way it allows for depicting excessive
counterviolence.
By contrast, when watching Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001), we
should perhaps appreciate the way the enemies are not given a face and
personality. Thus, at least they are not demonized. They appear simply
as an undifferentiated mass – or should we say, an anonymous mob. In
the final credits, it is stated that in the real operation on which the film
is based, about 1000 Somalis and 19 Americans died. The names of the
latter are then listed. During the film, Americans have in a very explicit
fashion been shown getting wounded. As regards the question why they
are there in the first place, it is only pointed out that one cannot really
explain the profession of a soldier. In a sense, this is going back to the “I
only obeyed” ethos, familiar from the Nazi trials. Responsibility is always
thrown to an upper level or some dubious sense of mission. This has
become a standard narrative device in more recent American war and
combat films. The reasons for going to war or into battle may be dubious,
even totally trumped up, as the protagonist (Matt Damon) of Green Zone
(Greengrass 2010) begins to realize as he serves in the Iraq war. But the
honesty, solidarity, and bravery of the American soldiers – the occasional
rotten apple apart – is beyond question. They are not to be blamed, what-
ever the consequences of their actions. The ethos in The Kingdom (Berg
2007) is very similar. But at least this action film located in Saudi-Arabia
ends with a gesture which questions the wisdom of the revenge opera-
tion carried out by a group of American soldiers: we see in a flashback
how the leader of the team of US agents promises to a person who has
lost a friend in a terrorist attack that all those responsible will be killed;
this is cross cut with a little boy who has lost his family members in
the revenge operation being promised that all those responsible will be
killed. There is no Girardian institution of justice which could possibly
assume the burden of punishing and thus put an end to the spiral of
revenge, as neither side acknowledges any such authority.
Many spectators might see Kingdom as a representation of tragic neces-
sity: both sides adhere to the same code of honour which interlocks
them in a never ending combat in which there is no further criteria
of right and wrong. In such a situation, a character has to make moral
compromises and resort to violence because something truly important
to him is in jeopardy. He has to make choices in a situation in which
all the alternatives are morally unacceptable. In war films, this can be
done by foregrounding the fact that even ostensibly justifiable military
operations almost inevitably cause collateral damage; in vigilante films,
even altruistic avenging can appear spiritually destructive. It is part of
the ethos of this kind of films that choices have to be made and respon-
sibility carried. It can also be found at the core of many Greek trag-
edies and it is an integral part of Western way of thinking about military
affairs – inasmuch as this does not apply to all organized societies. This
way of thinking can, of course, also function as an excuse and a way of
running away from responsibility: if the damage could not be avoided,
given the task, how could anyone be held responsible?
At times, this line of thinking leads into blatantly conspicuous

brushing aside of major moral issues, both in real life and in fiction. In
William Friedkin’s Rules of Engagement (2000) US Marine Colonel Terry
Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) faces court martial because during a rescue
operation in Yemen he ordered his men to shoot at a crowd of people,
killing 83 civilians and wounding some 100 others who had been
protesting in front of the U.S. Embassy. In the trial, the crucial question
is whether according to the rules of combat Childers has been justified
in ordering his men to shoot at the crowd. A national security adviser
sees it politically fit that Childers be found guilty and actually destroys a
security camera videotape that would prove that among the crowd there
really were armed men shooting at the Marines. Childers is defended
by Lt. Hays Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones), whose life Childers saved in
the Vietnam War by killing a prisoner of war in order to intimidate a
North Vietnamese colonel to call off an ambush in which Americans
had been caught. Hodges travels to Yemen and realizes that the incident
really has led to the killing of a large number women and children.
But he also discovers evidence which proves that the crowd had indeed
been extremely hostile towards the United States and proceeds to prove
that Childers has been made a scapegoat. The prosecution then invites
the Vietnamese colonel to give witness to the effect that Childers really
would shoot unarmed prisoners against the rules of engagement. Hodges
cross-examines the colonel and gets him to admit that in a similar situ-
ation he would have acted in the same way. Childers is acquitted of all
the heavy charges, and as the film ends with the American flag hoisted
up, he and the Vietnamese colonel salute each other.
At the time of its release the film, was accused of being anti-Arab and
racist, but this is really beside the point. The crucial issue is rather that
according to a universal code of military honour, the number of civilian
casualties, however large, can be simply brushed aside and that all that
matters is that soldiers have impeccably done their duty and accom-
plished their mission. The real villains are the corrupt men of the civil
service who do not back up and who even plot against fighting men.
The American military presence in Yemen is justified by explaining that
maintaining order and the security of foreign diplomats belongs to the
Yemeni Security Forces, but as they have failed to perform their duty, the
marines have to go in to do some “babysitting.” Flamboyant cinematic
realization boosts the idea of U.S. technological, military, and moral
supremacy going hand in hand. That unity can only be jeopardized
by corrupt Americans who put their political agenda ahead of military
necessities.
Throughout millennia, tragic necessity has been the classical excuse for
weighing wars. Often the presumed necessity is questionable to say the
least and strictly tied to certain ideological assumptions. Such ideology
is held up by notions about honour that the audience is presumed to
accept or at least understand: sacrifice for the sake of the country or one’s
fellows in arms. As Torben Grodal has pointed out, this kind of narrative
patterns appeal to rituals of bonding. Discussing Yimou Zhang’s Hero
(2002) he observes that
On the story surface, the protagonists’ submission to the king does

not make much sense; the king is a cruel dictator, and they have no
ideas about a future powerful Han China. Only at the level of innate
dispositions to provide counterintuitive power to social exchange by
sacrifice and innate dispositions for submission to tribal values does
the film make sense.52
Such tribal bonding can be found in all sorts of social configurations.

Notions about honour are not circumscribed to projects justified by the
prevailing social order. It is equally important for criminals to main-
tain their internal code of honour. Jean-Pierre Melville is the great poet
of this kind of honour mysticism, and in Hong Kong cinema, John
Woo has had a very similar role. In the films of both of these directors,
the code of honour leads to situations in which the criminals must
commit acts of violence that in one way or other have tragic conse-
quences also for themselves. They seem to accept this state of affairs as
fate, as from their own point of view they have had no choice. They do
not appear to be any worse than soldiers who are depicted fighting in
a war the purpose of which is beyond them as well as the sphere of the
story as a whole. While in the case of Hannibal Lecter we can, in the
words of Murray Smith, talk about “perverse allegiance,” here we could
refer to “perverse sublimity” functioning as a narrative justification for
violence. Within this scheme the targets of violence actually have to be
shown as human, otherwise the sense of tragic necessity would vanish
into thin air.
Why do people choose to join groups that set themselves above other
people and their norms to the point of eliminating them becoming
not only justified but honourable? Many recent films that have treated
terrorism have offered quite fine-grained depictions of how normal,
sympathetic people can become terrorists. In Hany Abu-Assad’s film
Paradise Now (2005), we follow two Palestinian men preparing for a
suicide mission that is to take place in Tel-Aviv. On their way to commit
this act, they are separated from one another, and one of them, Khaled
(Ali Suliman), begins to have second thoughts about the wisdom of the
operation. In this he has earlier on been encouraged by Suha (Lubna
Azabal) who has lived abroad and gained a more distanced perspective
to the Palestine situation. At first, Khaled has replied to her criticism by
explaining how living under occupation is a fate worse than death. As
the story evolves, what seems to be even more to the point is that the
men don’t really feel they are free to make moral choices. In the last
instance everything is in the hands of Allah. But something else seems to
be at issue. Abu-Assad gently satirizes the rhetoric by which the suicide
bombers try to convince others as well as themselves about the purpose
of their mission. Just before leaving for his mission, Khaled recites with
conviction his martyr’s manifesto to a video camera. But as he finishes,
the cameraman notices that the camera has not functioned properly.
The second take reveals in an embarrassing way the performance-like
quality of reciting the manifesto. As other people munch their provi-
sion during the recording, the suicide bombers look like slightly dumb
victims who have to die just for the sake of a rhetorical effect. They are
casually promised, as if as a bonus, that at the moment of death they
will be fetched to Paradise by two angels.
Moral issues may haunt also the opposite side in the Palestine-Israel
conflict. Spielberg’s Munich (2005) follows how the Israelis after the
massacre at the Munich Olympic Games launch their revenge opera-
tion. They are not motivated merely by the need to exert revenge, but
also by what they see as the pragmatic need to punish the terrorists at
whatever cost in terms of collateral damage. The Israeli prime minister
Golda Meir says, “Every civilization recognizes at times the need to
negotiate its own values.” In passing, it is mentioned that there were
also those who thought that there were reasons to negotiate with the
terrorists. But in the context of this film that does not emerge as a
genuine option. The point is made effectively as the brutal terrorist
acts are revealed in flashbacks as if visions of the events imagined by
Avner (Eric Bana), the man in charge of the revenge mission. Although
the flashbacks function as an excuse for the Israeli activities seen in the
film, they also create a parallel between the violent acts committed by
the two sides of the conflict. It becomes quite clear that the methods
the Israelis employ put them morally on a par with the Palestinian
terrorists. In the last instance, the two sides of the conflict are help-
lessly entangled in a fatal spiral of revenge. For quite long, the men
assigned to the mission simply obey the orders they have been given.
And even as members of the group die, there are always new recruits
eager to join in. All this inhibits at least partly the pleasure the audi-
ence might feel inclined to feel seeing revenge take place. Spielberg
deserves praise for depicting the logic of violence in a way that makes it
possible to see the main characters either as tragic heroes or as callous
and tormented people, who in terms of their moral qualities can hardly
be distinguished from the terrorists.53
Fear, pleasure, and fascination
In order to understand the appeal of violent fiction in general and film

violence in particular we have to explore how it appeals to needs and
desires such as:
● Processing fears.
● Experiencing great sensations and big emotions.
● Fascination of extreme reactions.
● Sadomasochism.
● Maintaining faith in justice.
● Indulging in the sublime quality of destruction and suffering.
These factors tend to intertwine to the point of becoming

indistinguishable.
Representations of violence have an important role in processing fears.
We appear to have a need to practice coping, not only with the objects
of our fears, but with our fear reactions. This can be achieved in a
playful fashion as in fantasies or fiction thus allowing us to safely, even
enjoyably, experience sensations related to our object of fear. Modern
post-industrial societies enable their members to live in relative safety.
However, many people do not feel very secure even in these conditions.
We have the most diverse fears related to our physical safety, health,
social relations, and success in working life. We may also be ridden
by fears of otherness: things or people that do not appear familiar are
easily experienced as threats. The criteria of otherness can be nation-
ality, ethnicity, religion, class, sex, sexual orientation, or disability –
almost anything that can be used to classify people. The basis of the
fear of otherness lies in a weakness of the sense of self. The need to
boost one’s own ego can take the form of disparaging other kinds of
people, often leading to the assumption that they constitute a threat
to the prevailing moral or social order. These fears are, as a rule, irra-
tional and it is difficult to challenge them by reasoning. But for the
rhetoric of evil, fears of otherness offer a fertile breeding ground. From
an evolutionary point of view, such fears derive from the early stages of
mankind, where anything unfamiliar could constitute a threat for the
survival of the community. In a globalizing world, such archaic atti-
tudes constitute a major problem. The global entertainment industry
can either contribute to the problem or offer remedies: depict otherness
antagonistically in order to justify counterviolence or to present over-
coming of fears and prejudice as a narrative solution.
In Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) and its two sequels, there are two
groups of mutants endowed with fantastic abilities. The central theme
is tolerance, how different kinds of people and anthropomorphic crea-
tures can live together. The mutants are feared, and the United States
Congress is planning measures against them that hardly differ from
the forms of racial discrimination that were enforced in Nazi Germany.
Some mutants are seeking to create ways of life that could bring humans
and mutants together; others are preparing for a decisive confrontation.
Just like in real-life conflicts, the leaders of all these factions exploit fears
of otherness among their number in order to justify resorting to violent
means. Only the smaller group of mutants is inspired by the prospect of
communality which would transcend differences. By contrast, ordinary
people appear to be morally weak and easily led into supporting racist
measures. The activities of the US Government are show as blatantly
aggressive and stupid, resorting to state terrorism based on false evidence
and cultivating fears among people. Overcoming prejudice is presented
as highly desirable but unachievable, thus allowing for wallowing in
staggering images of violence and destruction. Particularly in the second
sequel, Magneto (Ian McKellen), the leader of the mutants in favour of
violent measures, is so blatantly arrogant and cynical that the good-evil
polarization emerges in every bit as trivial as fashion as in innumer-
able films with lesser ethical pretensions. Once again counterviolence is
justified because the opponents are even more aggressive and immoral
than the heroes. The fact that the mutants rather than the humans
are the good guys does not make identifying with them problematic.
With their moral strength and fantastic abilities, they serve well as ideal
projections.
The enjoyment of great sensations is much more safe and in some ways
even more pleasurable when it arises from carefully shaped fiction rather
than from real life. We have a need to experience certain big emotions
which are either socially proscribed or just a bit incommensurable with
our daily life. Reactions to emotionally engaging fiction are partly based
on the mental schemata that have developed through our social evolu-
tion but mentally labelled as not real.
Throughout our cultural history, certain forms of popular entertain-

ment have drawn crowds by offering a glimpse of the morbid. We are
also easily impressed by seeing someone experience great emotions, and
watching a person in a fit of extreme rage can be mesmerizing. This
belongs to the sphere of melodrama, but the context of a horror film
allows for penetrating much further into the sphere of uncanny experi-
ences, even to the point of turning conventional patterns upside down.
In Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999) a sweet young woman who has been
exploited by middle-aged men symbolically exerts revenge on all over-
ripe males who have been chasing young girls by merrily sawing off a
defenceless man’s hand and feet with strip of steel wire. It is possible
to experience even this as comical, in the same way as the overblown
horrors of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper 1974) can reputedly be
enjoyed as comedy. In the spirit of camp, at least certain members of the
audience can relish even the most grotesque depictions of violence with
a combination of shivering and laughter.
The comically grotesque may appeal in a playful way to our sadomaso-
chistic traits. In a paradoxical fashion not untypical for us humans, this
may combine with quasi moralizing overtones: as feminist scholars have
pointed out, in slasher films, violence is primarily targeted at girls who
have frivolously engaged in free sex. Some audiences actually cheer at
the sight of a psychopathic killer attacking the pretty, silly, and defence-
less girl. Then, when the slightly androgynous and resourceful “last girl”
finally defeats the killer, the same audiences may become even more
excited.54 This kind of reactions may occur because the fantastic quality
of the violence neutralizes the horrors. By contrast, the brutal deadpan
violence in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (McNaughton 1986) takes
place in such a plain naturalistic environment that it can be much more
disturbing than fictional violence usually is.
The most extreme and ethically dubious material that is meant to deliver
shocks is mainly distributed through underground circuits. But every now
and then some such stuff also reaches commercial distribution. Somewhat
provocatively, one could mention The Passion of the Christ (Gibson 2004),
which at times is as grotesque as to verge on the comical, but which
people of a certain religious persuasion have experienced as a deeply reli-
gious work of art. Torture has seldom been shown as explicitly and at such
length as in Christ’s flogging scene, but then again, this is in line with the
traditional Catholic passion mysticism – a point emphatically made as the
women are seen lovingly collecting Christ’s sacred blood.
The question of sadomasochism connects both with the story world
content and the way the spectator is treated. In the best of cases, this
parallelism leads the spectator to question the sensations the film evokes
in him or her, but it can also be ruthlessly used in justifying the public
screening of this kind of material by claiming that only through a degree
of our own emotional experience can we come to truly understand this
kind of phenomena. However, although displaying violence in fiction
can all too easily be explained away by defining it as an examination of
these topics, such exploration tends to slip to the side of exploitation.
The possibly quite genuine wish to take a stand on important issues does
not always lead to unequivocal results. The motive behind making The
Accused, (Kaplan 1988) may well have been the wish to improve under-
standing of why a group of people end up gangbanging a woman with
others cheering them or why other people just stand around watching it
happen. But as was pointed out in the introduction, the possible noble
aim has not inhibited the filmmakers from fully exploiting the rape
scene as the sensational climax of their film. The scene is likely to be
highly unpleasant even for most male viewers, but it may nevertheless
appeal to their sadistic impulses. They are, in effect, offered two contra-
dictory viewing positions: that aligned with the perpetrators and inciters
on the one hand, that of an outside observer on the other. This structure
is supported by the music. For most of the time, we hear thumping disco
music which is in accord with the frenzy of the men encouraging others
to take advantage of the victim, Sarah. Only towards the end of the
scene is it replaced by a mournful background music which expresses
the profound sadness of the situation. Thus the male spectator can both
have his hardly acknowledged sadistic pleasure and feel moral superi-
ority as he vehemently abhors the abuse.
Lukas Moodysson succeeds in his Lilja 4-Ever (2002) much better in
exploring the psychological consequences of sexual violence. The way
he depicts a teenage girl being reduced to a sex slave is unrelentingly
atrocious. In the most disturbing sequence, we see a series of images of
rather unpleasant looking men satisfying themselves in a mechanical
fashion on Lilja, from whose point of view the sequence is shot. Lilja
is not shown during the sequence, but afterwards we see close-ups of
her face, which express only utter numbness. The point of view in both
literal and figurative senses is strictly restricted to that of the callously
exploited girl. From the ethical point of view, the interesting thing is
that the repulsive effect is created by mildly stylized means whereas the
Accused adheres to standard Hollywood realism. It must be appreciated,
though, that it is probably downright impossible to depict rape in such
a fashion that no one could find sadistic pleasure in it. Genuine psycho-
paths apart, the expression “guilty pleasures” applies most appropriately
to this kind of pleasure to which the sensation of guilt awards its own
distinctive flavour. The paradox of violence is extremely difficult to
overcome on a point like this. No doubt there are spectators who simply
do not have the ability to sympathize with the experience of a rape
victim, to understand her predicament and appreciate her as subject –
in parallel with Lilja’s pimp, to whom she is merely a means of making
money, beaten to obedience at the slightest indication of resistance.
Even the most extreme screen violence can potentially be subli-
mated by claiming it to be a depiction of retributive justice, even when it
takes place in ways that we might find unacceptable in real life. Vivian
Sobchack has explored the possibility of violent films functioning as a
kind of pseudo therapy against the fear of becoming a target of random
violence: stylistic means can be used to give an aura of fatality to such
a thing happening.55 This is an instance of a purely aesthetic experi-
ence which is not very likely to be of any use in real life. There is some
evidence of representations of violence helping in controlling violence
related fears, but as is generally recognized, it is extremely difficult to
explore these issues systematically in a scholarly fashion.
One idea deriving mainly from Christian tradition is that suffering in
itself can have an edifying function. This idea appears in the early Passion
films, but also in depicting ordinary people who resign in the face of
suffering and rise to a higher spiritual level as the pains of the body
become intolerable. One of the most clear cut figures in this respect is
William Wallace (Mel Gibson, who seems to specialize in this theme)
in Braveheart (1995). Pascal Laugier in turn exploits passion mysticism
without the slightest pretension of conviction in his Martyrs (2009) (this
will be explored in more detail in the next chapter).
Tragic necessity can function as an edifying device on its own. At its
purest, this happens when a peaceful person has to resort to violence
and pays a high price for it. In addition to concrete losses, it is likely to
lead to the staining of one’s own moral purity. And as was pointed out
in discussing films about terrorism, the presumed necessity is often tied
to questionable ideological assumptions.
It is possible to reach an edifying effect purely by means of audio-
visual aestheticization. Penn and Peckinpah paved the way with their
first ultra violent films. One factor behind their success is the fascina-
tion that images of destruction evoke in us. Edifying violence calls for a
degree of distancing from the agony and suffering of the characters. This
can be achieved, for example, by means of pyrotechnics which offer
great possibilities for making destruction look astonishingly spectacular.
During the closing credits of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), we see
the camp of Vietcong guerrillas and American deserters being bombed.

At this stage, none of the characters are seen and thus the violence is
totally distanced and aestheticized. In this day and age, digitalized ultra
violence and apocalyptic story worlds, staggering settings and visual
effects, breathtaking camerawork and shocking montage, awesome
soundtracks and imposing music, can all be used to make brutal violence
appear sublime.
The sense of the sublime emerges from the combination of staggering
beauty with something inexplicably horrible. Edmund Burke in his cele-
brated study A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757) associates the sublime with pain and danger,
as well as with everything that can create paralyzing astonishment and
horror to the extent that reason cannot govern this sensation.56 In his
aesthetics, the sublime emerges as our reaction to the greatness of nature
and its immense powers. Human capacity for destruction – and self-
destruction – may well serve a similar function. This allows for enjoying
the most powerful emotional experiences through the representation
of things that we would absolutely not want to encounter in the real
world. Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) tells about human weaknesses and follies
that grow into tragic proportions in the whirlpool of a power struggle in
which all moral norms collapse. In the grand battle scene, we see masses
of people drenched with blood and piles of maimed bodies in the final
throes of death. The scene is absolutely horrible, yet the effect is sublime.
This is achieved above all by the diegetic sounds almost fading away
and Toru Takemitsu’s sombre, elegiac music emerging to the foreground.
This change in the balance of sounds distances us from the atrocities of
the battle scene and creates an edifying effect by transforming it into
a vision of the human condition, of how pettiness, greed and lack of
vision can lead into massive, all-consuming destruction. It is difficult to
think of a better justification for depicting extreme violence in a film.
Conclusion
The poetics of fictional violence encompasses first of all narrative strate-

gies by which violence is justified by appealing to norms that are more
or less accepted in real life and that are narratively shaped so as to bring
those norms into sharp focus – often sharper than is possible amidst the
complexities of real life situations. This can be used to bring a critical
perspective to different forms of violence, but more commonly it is used
to allow us to indulge in moral fantasies that reflect our moralistic sense
of justice as well as ideologically bound notions about relations between
different kinds of people. Secondly, as fictional narratives may be coded

for example by genre traits and easily recognized stock characters so as
to detach them from the constraints of realistic motivation, they allow
for the treatment of violence in ways which makes it possible to explore
and exploit both our violence related fears and fascinations. Stylistic
devises such as mise-en-scène, framing, and editing can also be used
effectively in this process of shaping and delimiting so that we don’t
really have to encounter the reality of violence and can thus enjoy it as
a fascinating, comical or even edifying spectacle. This aesthetic distance
also allows for fluctuating partial identifications between victims, perpe-
trators, avengers and onlookers. The spectator response is manipulated
not only in terms of how sympathetic or unsympathetic the characters
in standard narrative schemes are made to appear, but also in relation
to our more or less acknowledged concerns and desires which the char-
acters act out. Equally important is the use of violence as a structural
feature, which not only begins, sustains, and closes the narrative, but is
also catered in way so as to maximize spectator involvement by evoking
visceral reactions which bypass our everyday sense of norms. Thus the
aestheticization of film violence has biocultural bases: narrative organi-
zation and stylistic devices appeal to our biologically based reactions
to violence in a way which may surpass culturally established norms
even as they appeal to them. Such narrative practices have their own
cultural history which reflects the constant negotiation between instinc-
tive responses and the need to keep aggression under rational and insti-
tutional control.

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3

The Poetics of Film Violence

Violent entertainment feeds on a certain paradox. Although violence

In popular fiction violence appears frequently as a fundamental narrative

H. Bacon, The Fascination of Film Violence

helpless, allowing for the spectator to feel superior as he or she can

Some of the core issues of the poetics of violence are:

Realistic violence in Hollywood cinema

A good, if by no means undisputable, argument can be made in favour

We find ourselves revolving in a circle of impotence in which we

Proscribing bad habits tends to increase their appeal. In the case of

series of gangster films were made depicting more violent criminal

This picture is an indictment against gang rule in America and of the

According to MPPDA’s head administrator Will Hays, the film could

stylistic features employed insured that the fascination of explicitly

Our gunmen are presented to us in such a manner that we find

The idea that criminals should be represented as cowards emerged almost

But even if within such confines criminals could be shown to die,

It was also possible to only refer to it happening. Prince mentions as

understood that “films have changed to reflect our changing culture.”23

hand, Peckinpah was also influenced by the anthropologist Robert

singlehandedly eliminates a bunch of criminals because they prostitute

Viewers who whoop with approval at ultraviolence are often intu-

Scorsese’s claim does indeed appear somewhat spurious considering

Aestheticizing violence by cinematic means makes it possible to use

Live-action slapstick began to disappear over the 1920s as masters such

In fictional narratives violent actions which in real life are experi-

These motivations tend to intertwine, which further increases the sense of

inhibitions tend to inhibit people from realizing their revenge impulses.

a diamond is made to look bigger by surrounding it by smaller stones,

ruthless businessmen who are speculating on Bolivian water resources,

At times, this line of thinking leads into blatantly conspicuous

On the story surface, the protagonists’ submission to the king does

Such tribal bonding can be found in all sorts of social configurations.

Fear, pleasure, and fascination

In order to understand the appeal of violent fiction in general and film

These factors tend to intertwine to the point of becoming

Throughout our cultural history, certain forms of popular entertain-

the camp of Vietcong guerrillas and American deserters being bombed.

The poetics of fictional violence encompasses first of all narrative strate-

different kinds of people. Secondly, as fictional narratives may be coded

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