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The Palgrave Handbook
of Violence in
Film and Media
Edited by
Steve Choe
The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media
 Steve Choe
Editor

The Palgrave
Handbook of Violence
in Film and Media
Editor
Steve Choe
School of Cinema
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-05389-4 ISBN 978-3-031-05390-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05390-0

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 Contents

Introduction: The Ambivalences of Violence 1

Steve Choe

Critical Models
Equality in the Face of Violence?—Diverging Paths of Moral
Speculation in Violent Fiction 13
Henry Bacon
Violent Corporeality in Cinema 37
Chang-Min Yu
The Power of Procedure: Systemic Violence in Popular
Narratives About Crime and War 55
Steffen Hantke
Force, Power, and Control: Functions of Video Game Violence 75
Patrick Brown
White Material: Michael Haneke’s Ethics of Violence 101
Asbjørn Grønstad

Histories of Violence in Film and Media

“Man’s Greatest Catastrophe”: Violence in the Films of Cornel
Wilde 119
James Kendrick
British Film Censorship in the Twenty-First Century 143
Oliver Kenny

v
vi CONTENTS

Surgical Strikes on Screen: Narrations of Terrorism

and Military Cross-Border Violence In Bollywood Cinema 169
Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh
Violence in the School Shooting Film 187
Karen J. Renner
When a GIF Becomes a Weapon: The Latent Violence
of Technological Standards and Media Infrastructure 207
Marek Jancovic

The Aesthetics of Aggression

Scratching the Surface: For a Reappraisal of Violence
in Contemporary French Cinema 229
Romain Chareyron
The Aesthetics of Asymmetrical Warfare: Cinema’s
Representation of Conflict in the Twenty-First Century 257
Kingsley Marshall
The Birth of Naturalist Violence in the Russian Chernukha Film 275
Sergey Toymentsev
Violence Framed: Remediating Images of Racialized Violence
in Film 297
Ana Cristina Mendes
Don’t Look Now: Ontologies of Off-Screen Violence 315
Siobhan Lyons

The Politics and Ethics of Brutal Media

White and Violent: Political Violence in Twenty-First-Century
European Cinema 331
György Kalmár
Getting Over the Fear of Murder: Video Game Violence
and the Ethics of Empowerment in The Last of Us 355
Se Young Kim
Unseeable Abuse: The Impossible Act of Visualising Childhood
Sexual Abuse in Digital Cultures and Technology 379
Bethany Rose Lamont
Re-staging Atrocities in a Post-historical World: Cold War
Violence, Mass Amnesia, and the Dialectics of Cinematic
Witnessing in Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look
of Silence 395
Man-tat Terence Leung
 CONTENTS vii

Politics and Aesthetics of Violence in the Videos of the Islamic

State 417
Giuseppe Previtali

Affected Audiences
Disgust and the Image: Documentary Film
and the Representation of Violent Extremists in Salafistes
(2016) 437
Maria Flood
“Does the Dog Die?”: Nonhuman Violence and Affective
Viewership in American Horror 457
Amber P. Hodge
Sadistic Laughter: A Case for “Non-ethical” Viewing 477
Aaron Kerner
Real violence: Jordan Wolfson, Virtual Reality, and the Privilege
of Allegory 493
Nicole F. Scalissi
A Personal Memoir of Death in Animation 509
Paul Morton

Index 523
 Notes on Contributors

Bacon Henry is a professor of Film and Television Studies at the University

of Helsinki (2004–). Previously he worked as a research fellow at the Finnish
Film Archive (1999–2004), where he also acted as a project manager in charge
of designing a national radio and television archive. His major research inter-
ests are transnational aspects of cinema, how audiovisual experience relates to
our perception and understanding of the natural and the social world, audio-
visual narratology, as well as film’s relation to other arts. He has also written
extensively on the history of opera.
Brown Patrick (Ph.D., Film Studies, University of Iowa) is a guest lecturer
in American Studies at the Technische Universität-Dortmund. His research
focuses on the relationship between play and media in both contemporary
and historical contexts. Recently, his work has ranged between and often
threaded together topics in the study of Weimar cinema, modernity studies,
game studies, media philosophy, and periodical studies.
Chareyron Romain is Assistant Professor of French at the University of
Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, Canada). He is a contemporary French and Fran-
cophone cinema specialist, with interests that also branch into Francophone
culture and contemporary French society. His research primarily focuses on
gender and sexuality, the representation of disability, and film genres in
contemporary French cinema. He co-edited Screening Youth: Contemporary
French and Francophone Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). His
current project is investigating the representation of disability in French
cinema.
Choe Steve is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema
at San Francisco State University. His areas of research include film and media
theory.

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Flood Maria is Lecturer in World Cinemas at the University of Liverpool.

She is a specialist of world cinema and political violence and has published
on French and North African postcolonial film, the aesthetics of cinematic
violence, gender and conflict, and terrorism and affect studies. She is the
author of France, Algeria and the Moving Image: Screening Histories of Violence
(Legenda: Oxford, 2018). Her most recent monograph is titled Moonlight:
Screening Black Queer Youth and was released by Routledge in 2021.
Grønstad Asbjørn is a professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Infor-
mation Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. The author/editor
of twelve books, his most recent monographs are Rethinking Art and Visual
Culture: The Poetics of Opacity (Palgrave, 2020) and Ways of Seeing in
the Neoliberal State (Palgrave, 2021). Grønstad is the founding director of
Nomadikon: The Bergen Center of Visual Culture.
Hantke Steffen has edited Horror, a special topic issue of Paradoxa (2002),
Horror: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004), Caligari’s Heirs: The German
Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), American Horror Film: The Genre at the
Turn of the Millennium (2010), and, with Agnieszka Soltysik-Monnet, War
Gothic in Literature and Culture (2016). He is also the author of Conspiracy
and Paranoia in Contemporary American Literature (1994) and Monsters
in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after
World War II (2016).
Hodge Amber P. is an English teacher at Choate Rosemary Hall. She holds a
Ph.D. in English with a graduate minor in gender studies from the University
of Mississippi and a master’s degree in American studies from the College of
William and Mary. Her most recent publications include “As She Lay Dying:
Locating the Gothic in Kaui Hart Hemming’s The Descendants ” (2021),
which appeared in American Literature, and their dissertation, The Meat of
the Gothic: Animality and Social Justice in United States Fiction and Film of
the Twenty-First Century.
Jancovic Marek is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Vrije Univer-
siteit Amsterdam. His current research is centered around the materialities of
the moving image, film preservation practices, sustainable media, and format
studies. Together with Axel Volmar and Alexandra Schneider, he is the co-
editor of Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures
(Meson Press, 2020). He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Mainz
(Germany) with the doctoral project Misinscriptions: A Media Epigraphy
of Video Compression, an interdisciplinary archaeology of video compression
techniques exploring the historical interrelationships between mathematics,
medicine, and media.
Kalmár György is a reader at the Department of British Studies of the Insti-
tute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen (DE), Hungary.
He graduated from DE in 1997, his majors were Hungarian and English. He
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

worked as a post-graduate researcher and visiting scholar at the University

of Oxford in Great Britain and at the University of Indiana in Bloom-
ington, USA. He gained Ph.D. in philosophy (2003) and English (2007)
from DE. His main teaching and research areas include literary and cultural
theory, contemporary European cinema, gender studies, and British literature.
He is the author of over fifty articles and five books, including Formations
of Masculinity in Postcommunist Hungarian Cinema (Palgrave-Macmillan,
2017) and Post-Crisis European Cinema: White Men in Off-Modern Landscapes
(Palgrave-Macmillan 2020).
Kendrick James is Professor of Film & Digital Media at Baylor University,
where he studies contemporary cinema. He is the author or editor of A
Companion to the Action Film (2019), Darkness in the Bliss-Out: A Recon-
sideration of the Films of Steven Spielberg (2014), Hollywood Bloodshed: Screen
Violence and 1980s American Cinema (2009), and Film Violence: History,
Ideology, Genre (2009). He has published two dozen book chapters and
journal articles, and he is also the film critic for the website QNetwork.com.
Kenny Oliver is Lecturer in Film and Media in Lille, France. He completed his
Ph.D. at Queen Mary University of London. His first monograph, Extremity
and Ethics in Film: Theorising Transgressive Images of Sex and Violence is
forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.
Kerner Aaron is the Director of the School of Cinema at San Fran-
cisco State University. He has published, among other things, Extreme
Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and Theorizing Stupid Media
(Palgrave/MacMillan, 2019). He is currently working on Abject Pleasures
(EUP), focusing on cinematic material that despite its abject content has the
capacity to elicit pleasurable affects—beautiful, sexual arousal, and laughter.
Kim Se Young is an assistant professor in the Cinema Studies Program
at Colby College. He is currently working on a manuscript titled “Asian
Violence: The Neoliberal Cinema of South Korea and Japan,” which tracks
the proliferation of graphic brutality in East Asian cinema from 1998 to 2008.
Pushing against Orientalist accounts of essential barbarism, the project argues
that violence in South Korean and Japanese cinema can be understood in its
deep entanglement with the socioeconomic crisis in the region.
Lamont Bethany Rose completed her Ph.D. thesis on digital cultural engage-
ments with child sexual abuse in 2019 at the University of the Arts London.
Her work has been previously published in First Monday, Blind Field Journal,
Galactica Journal, The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, and the Palgrave
Macmillan volume “Discourses of Anxiety Over Childhood and Youth Across
Cultures.” She is the editor-in-chief and founder of the art and literature
journal on trauma and mental health, Doll Hospital, and lives in Bristol, UK.
Leung Man-tat Terence received his Ph. D. degree in Humanities and
Creative Writing in 2014 and taught at the College of Professional and
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Continuing Education at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Several of

his manuscripts on film and comparative literature were published in peer-
reviewed journals (e.g. Partial Answers and Cinéma & Cie) and edited volumes
(e.g. Palgrave Macmillan and Wayne State University Press). He is currently
working on his first monograph tentatively entitled, “The Dialectics of Two
Refusals: Cinema, China, the Radical Politics of May ’68” (contracted with
Rowman & Littlefield International).
Lyons Siobhan is a scholar in media and cultural studies, based in Sydney,
Australia, where she received her Ph.D. in 2017. Her books include Ruin
Porn and the Obsession with Decay and Death and the Machine: Intersections of
Mortality and Robotics. Her work has also appeared in Westworld and Philos-
ophy, Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism, and Philosophical
Approaches to the Devil. She was awarded a New Philosopher Writers’ Award
in 2017.
Marshall Kingsley is Head of Film & Television and a member of the
Sound/Image Cinema Lab at Falmouth University, UK, and a producer at
Myskatonic Films. As a practitioner, Kingsley served as an executive producer
on the feature films Wilderness (Justin John Doherty, 2017), The Tape (Martha
Tilston, 2021), Long Way Back (Brett Harvey, 2022), and Enys Men (Mark
Jenkin, 2022), produced Backwoods (Ryan Mackfall, 2019) and The Bird-
watcher (2022), and composed the scores for Hard, Cracked the Wind
(Mark Jenkin, 2019), and Dean Quarry (Rachael Jones, 2021). His academic
research is focused on cultures of film and television production and the
representation of history.
Mendes Ana Cristina is Associate Professor in English Studies at the School
of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon. She uses cultural and post-
colonial studies to examine literary and screen texts (in particular, intermedia
adaptations) as venues for resistant knowledge formations to expand upon
theories of epistemic injustice. Her research interests are visual culture,
postcolonial theory, adaptation studies, and Victorian afterlives. Her latest
publications include the co-edited volumes New Directions in Diaspora Studies
and Transnational Cinema at the Borders, and articles in Studies in the Novel,
the European Journal of English Studies, and Cultural Studies ↔ Critical
Methodologies.
Morton Paul received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, with a concen-
tration in Cinema Studies, from the University of Washington, for which he
wrote a dissertation on the Zagreb School of Animation. He also received an
MA in Film Studies from the University of Iowa and a BA in English from
Columbia University. He is currently working on a manuscript, American
Berserk: The Sick, Sick, Sick World of Jules Feiffer.
Previtali Giuseppe in Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of
Bergamo, where he teaches Film Studies and Visual Culture. His main research
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

interests are the extreme forms of contemporary visuality and the problem
of visual literacy. He published extensively on these topics and is the author
of the books Pikadon. Sopravvivenze di Hiroshima nella cultura visuale giap-
ponese (Aracne 2017), L’ultimo tabù. Filmare la morte fra spettacolarizzazione
e politica dello sguardo (Meltemi 2020) and Educazione visuale (McGraw-Hill
2021).
Dr. Raj Sony Jalarajan is Assistant Professor at the Department of Commu-
nication, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada. Dr. Raj is a professional
journalist turned academic who has worked in different demanding positions
as a reporter, special correspondent, and producer in several news media
channels like BBC, NDTV, Doordarshan, AIR, and Asianet News.
Renner Karen J. is an associate professor of English at Northern Arizona
University, where she teaches and writes about American literature and popular
culture, with a particular focus on horror. Her book Evil Children in the
Popular Imagination was published in 2016, and she is currently working on
a follow-up volume titled Killer Kids: Youth Violence in US Popular Culture.
She has also published articles on Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on the serial
killer narrative, masculinity in ghost-hunting shows, and the appeal of the
apocalypse.
Scalissi Nicole F. is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at the
University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she is a faculty affiliate of the
Afro-Latin American/Latinx Studies Project. Her current book project focuses
on contemporary performances and interventions by American artists that
trace the relationships between identity, violence, and media in the contempo-
rary United States and at its borders. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of
Art and Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh (2019) and carries an
MA in Art History from The Pennsylvania State University (2013).
Mr. Suresh Adith K. is currently associating as a research assistant at the
Department of Communication, MacEwan University. Adith holds a Master’s
Degree in English Language and Literature from Mahatma Gandhi University.
His research interest includes Film Studies, Literary Criticism, and South Asian
Cultural Studies.
Toymentsev Sergey is Assistant Professor of Russian at Saint Louis University.
He is the editor of ReFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky (2021). His articles
and reviews appeared in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, CLCWeb: Comparative
Literature and Culture, Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Philos-
ophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry, Film Criticism, French Studies, Studies in
Russian & Soviet Cinema, Film International, and Kinokultura.
Yu Chang-Min is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages
and Literatures at National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Film
Studies from the University of Iowa. His articles have appeared in Film Crit-
icism, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, NECSUS: European Journal of
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Media Studies, and The Cine-Files. His current research interests lie in corpo-
real cinema, contemporary digital cinema, and Sinophone film historiography.
Before coming back to his alma mater, he previously taught at Washington
University in St. Louis.
 List of Figures

Force, Power, and Control: Functions of Video Game Violence

Image 1 Gameplay from Donkey Kong (1981) 84
Image 2 Gameplay from Donkey Kong (1981) 85
Image 3 A communique from the Board in Control (2019) 92
Image 4 Shimmering cloud of particles erupts from Hiss-possessed
enemies in Control 95

“Man’s Greatest Catastrophe”: Violence in the Films of Cornel

Wilde
Fig. 1 Wilde creates a striking contrast in Beach Red (1967)
between the brutish violence of war and the pastoral memories
of life at home, many of which are erotic in nature 129
Fig. 2 No Blade of Grass (1967) depicts the ravages of environmental
violence through recurring images of fouled rivers, belching
smokestacks, and dead animals 130
Fig. 3 In Sword of Lancelot (1962), Wilde transgressed norms
of on-screen violence by graphically depicting Lancelot slicing
through Dorjak’s helmet and nearly severing Mordred’s arm
and shoulder 135
Fig. 4 In The Naked Prey (1966), Wilde avoids showing the actual
violence of a beheading, but does give us two voluminous spurts
of blood that shoot up into the frame, which the Production
Code Administration clearly felt did not constitute a “detailed
presentation of physical violence” 139

xv
xvi LIST OF FIGURES

When a GIF Becomes a Weapon: The Latent Violence of

Technological Standards and Media Infrastructure
Fig. 1 One frame from the two-frame strobing animated GIF sent
to Eichenwald. This is a meme that has been circulating online
at least since 2004 208

The Birth of Naturalist Violence in the Russian Chernukha

Film
Fig. 1 Woman running with a broomstick in Freeze-Die-Come to Life 288
Fig. 2 The protagonist Andrei forced to watch his girlfriend being
raped in Call Me Harlequin 289
Fig. 3 The rape scene from a sideline impersonal viewpoint in Call Me
Harlequin 289
Fig. 4 Victims of Cheka in The Chekist 291

Violence Framed: Remediating Images of Racialized Violence

in Film
Fig. 1 Still from BlacKkKlansman’s quotation of the scene at the train
yard after the Union victory in the Battle of Atlanta from Victor
Fleming’s Gone with the Wind 303
Fig. 2 Still from Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman: Fred Gildersleeve’s
photos of Jesse Washington remediated 306
Fig. 3 Still from Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman: Harry Belafonte
as Jerome Turner breaking the fourth wall 307
Fig. 4 Still from Lovecraft Country: Rhyan Hill as Emmett Till 309

White and Violent: Political Violence in Twenty-First-Century

European Cinema
Fig. 1 Wenger’s speech in The Wave 339
Fig. 2 Inter-ethnic bonding in The Wave 341
Fig. 3 Shaun’s ambiguous patriarchal heritage in This is England 347
Fig. 4 Ventilating pain and anger on the margins of civilization in This
is England 348

Getting Over the Fear of Murder: Video Game Violence and

the Ethics of Empowerment in The Last of Us
Fig. 1 Joel and a hunter 364
Fig. 2 U LOOT I SHOOT 365
Fig. 3 Kee and Theo in Children of Men 366
Fig. 4 Ellie and Joel in The Last of Us 366
 LIST OF FIGURES xvii

Disgust and the Image: Documentary Film and the

Representation of Violent Extremists in Salafistes (2016)
Fig. 1 A jihadist proselytizes at length in front of a backdrop of books 449

Sadistic Laughter: A Case for “Non-ethical” Viewing

Fig. 1 “Man Drinks Ipecac” (January 28, 2009) 481

A Personal Memoir of Death in Animation

Fig. 1 What’s Opera, Doc? (Chuck Jones, 1953) 516
Fig. 2 Koncert za mašinsku puškuKoncert za mašinsku pušku
(Concerto for Sub-Machine Gun, Dušan Vukotić, 1958) 521
 List of Tables

Equality in the Face of Violence?—Diverging Paths of Moral

Speculation in Violent Fiction
Table 1 Raz and Hendler’s account of factors defining two types of drama 18
Table 2 Comparison of relevant features of The Equalizer and Born
Equal 32

xix
 Introduction: The Ambivalences of Violence

Steve Choe

Representations of violence in film and media are ubiquitous, but their serious
consideration has too often been curtailed by scholars and critics. As with
pornography and other contemptible images, it is often presumed that one
simply knows when a representation may be judged explicitly aggressive or its
underlying intentions deemed unacceptably unethical. The definition of what
is exactly objectionable and even of the word “violence” itself typically remain
vague in these claims, moreover, and are quickly rendered redundant as a
consequence. For reasons having to do with morality or taste, scholars will
dismiss violence on screen as a worthy topic of critical analysis. And for many,
the shock of violence, particularly when it appears in genre cinema, may be
considered excessive, “cheap,” and attention-grabbing, rather than intrinsic to
what the cinema can do and connected to the experience of profound convul-
sion it has the potential to produce. In her seminal essay on the horror film,
Carol Clover coined the term, “body genres,” a concept that has been more
fully elaborated by Linda Williams, to designate popular genres that aim to
induce a sensational effect on the spectator (Williams 1991). In contrast to
the “legitimate” film genres that elevate the cinema as an art by maintaining
a semblance of sublimated civility, pornography and horror (and particularly
the slasher film) find themselves “by and large beyond the purview of the
respectable (middle-aged, middle-class) audience” as well as of “respectable
criticism” (Clover 1987, 187).

S. Choe (B)
School of Cinema, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA
e-mail: stevec3@sfsu.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2022
S. Choe (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05390-0_1
2 S. CHOE

Something similar could be said of representations of violence in film and

media. The shock of these representations seems to momentarily tear the
respectable viewer away from the flow of narrative and history. A disturbing
image may leave one briefly stunned. But the experience of disruption also
compels the quest for assurances in the next moment, that violence will mean
something after all, and that through rationalization a moral message may
be gleaned from it. For when considering images of racial brutalization, the
aesthetics of representations of warfare in the twenty-first century, school
shooter narratives, the politics of trigger warnings, jihadist terrorism, and the
phenomenology of video game violence, their shocking effect compels viewers
to engage with the ethical issues that surround them. Thinking seriously
about violent imagery obliges us to enter the discursive territory “beyond
the purview” described by Clover, necessitating the consideration of the visu-
ally deplorable, the sonically disturbing, and upsetting narratives involving
brutality and unjustifiable cruelty. Analyzing representations of violence raises
questions about the scholarly worthiness of reprehensible materials and,
presumably by co-extension, about the inclinations of those who analyze
them. And yet, as respectable audiences continue to disavow these questions it
could be argued that confronting the contemptable in film and media will be
necessary for addressing the persistent presence of violence in our age more
generally. Clover notes that the slasher film, “not despite but exactly because
of its crudity,” provides clues about the sexual attitudes that are contempora-
neous to the films she analyzes in her essay. The twenty-five chapters in this
handbook pursue a similar task: by addressing the history, aesthetics, and poli-
tics of representations of violence in film and media directly, they provide clues
about the nature and ethics of representation more broadly.
Rousing feelings of horror, outrage, and disgust, representations of violence
compel spectators to make moral judgments and engage in a politics of blame.
Following the experience of disruptive violence in media, the pursuit of its
meaning within a large narrative ensues, one that will link it to past events
and anticipated future ones. An originating cause is sought and identified, a
value is inscribed to the act of violence in light of the intentions that underpin
it, and then a judgment may occur as to whether the exercise of violence
may be justified in the end. Images showing victims suffering physical or
emotional injury, who are subject to discrimination, have had their legal liber-
ties refused, their moral entitlements or their capacity to flourish hindered,
solicit viewers to connect these violations with a victimizer who is acting in
some moral capacity. Representations of bodies in pain implore viewers to
“feel for” these representations, while providing an opportunity to ponder the
mystery of how sympathy with others is possible at all. When acts of vicious-
ness are deemed unjust, the who or what that originated them are cast as
unsympathetic and judged to harbor evil by the observer who registers the
suffering of the victim. The offending party may be embodied by an indi-
vidual, but also by a dominant ideology, authoritarian government, an imperial
colonizer, and even history itself within this politics of blame. On the other
 INTRODUCTION: THE AMBIVALENCES OF VIOLENCE 3

hand, the representation of violence may be deemed morally valid, and here
we begin to perceive its ambivalences, when it responds to a previous act of
cruelty. The one who was previously victimized gains in sympathy as their own
acts of retaliatory aggression may be understood as gestures of empowerment
for the aggrieved. This is the logic that justifies the counter-violence of the
colonized for Franz Fanon as a kind of “cleansing force” that restores the
dignity of the oppressed and “frees the native from his inferiority complex and
from his despair and inaction” (Fanon 1963, 94). For some violence may be
considered just when the pain that it produces, as a form of moral currency,
serves as recompense for that pain that was received, when one cruel act is
measured in proportion to another. The victim holds the victimizer account-
able; the latter must “pay” for their original transgression. Emboldened by its
sense of moral righteousness, retaliatory violence may be convinced of its own
entitlement to act with impunity and transgress legal and moral norms.
Violent ends are typically deemed loathsome, but violent means, directed
toward virtuous ends, may be perceived to be righteous and just. These are the
ambiguous forms of violence and revenge that Nietzsche describes in On the
Genealogy of Morality, where he explains how morality is projected onto doers
after they have performed their deeds. “There is no ‘being’ behind’ the deed,
its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought,—
the doing is everything” (Nietzsche 2006, 26). Actions materialized in the
world lead the one who witnesses these actions back to the “character” of
victims and victimizers, propped up by the concept of a private individual
responsible for putting those actions into motion. Nietzsche proposes that the
concepts of character, motive, the psychological self, a moral soul, that point
to an invisible interiority are concocted by the aggrieved as afterthoughts.
The categories of the “victim” and “victimizer” are projections that arise as
a consequence of violence and the chaos that it produced in the world of
the victimized. Yet it is this reactive claim to victimization that legitimates
their political identity, one that lays claim to their universality. In her reading
of Nietzsche, Wendy Brown explains that the wounded subject “reinscribes
incapacity, powerlessness, and rejection” with the culmination of ressentiment
(Brown 1995, 69). Violence in film and media encourages this quest toward
the perception of deeds as meaningful by connecting them to doers and their
underlying motives, while harnessing their disruptive power for the purposes
of narrative drama. The radical potential of violence enters into the realm of
politics, in other words, of the moral give and take that takes place between
individuals and of stories told about friends and enemies.
Even as we critique these trajectories of means and ends, violent imagery
retains its sensational, disturbing force on viewers. The notion that the
experience of violence in the cinema inspires a kind of perverse fascination
or compels aggressive behavior in life outside the film theater still seems
entrenched in the popular understanding. Stephen Prince’s writings on Sam
Peckinpah and his anthology on “screening violence” work with the notion,
articulated by some commentators of New Hollywood cinema, that film
4 S. CHOE

violence provides the spectator with the experience of Aristotelian catharsis and
enables him or her to channel feelings of hostility into the aesthetic experience.
Films like The Wild Bunch, Taxi Driver, and A Clockwork Orange feature spec-
tacular scenes of graphic violence that ostensibly allow viewers the opportunity
to purge their conscious or unconscious violent tendencies. While acknowl-
edging that Peckinpah, Scorsese, and Kubrick produced these ultraviolent films
to reveal the harrowing futility of cruelty, Prince remains highly skeptical of
this thesis. “Filmmakers who wish to use graphic violence,” he writes, “to
offer a counterviolence message—that, to use violence in a way that undercuts
its potential for arousing excitatory responses in viewers—may be working in
the wrong medium” (Prince 2000, 29). The sensationalizing experience of the
film medium, which for Prince places it beyond the scope of Aristotle’s classical
aesthetic theory, runs the risk of inciting unintended and morally problem-
atic spectatorial responses. His statements remind us of the need to continue
research into the discursive workings of affect and emotion, not only in rela-
tion to the content of media but also to its form and mode of address. Instead
of inspiring self-examination, violence on screen runs the danger of inducing
sadistic laughter and fetishization, dangers that he apparently would rather
avoid altogether.
Prince cites empirical and cognitive research to build his argument on
the physiological response of viewers to representations of violence. Current
research, however, both in the sciences and humanities, has taken up new
models and approaches as well as new mediums and objects. These novel
approaches will be deployed in a good number of essays in this volume.
Through them, we can glean that current film and media studies research has
enabled us to rethink the very relationship between the sciences and human-
ities. But more crucially, this research reconsiders the relationship between
representation and reality as well as the linkages between the experience of
violent media and violent behavior. In an age in which electronically repro-
duced sounds and images have become increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday
lives, when the very notion of the media itself has expanded to include the
ways in which bodies and images interface with their environments, the idea
of focusing only on representations of violence in film only seems limiting and
perhaps even a bit antiquated in its analytical scope. The global pandemic of
2020 underscored the importance of screens in our everyday lives as we were
forced to quarantine indoors while physical contact with strangers in public
was curtailed. And while social media and the Zoom platform allowed us to
communicate with colleagues and friends, they were also implicated with the
demands of corporate capital and the logic of algorithms. This situation has
already strained the classical boundaries between representation and reality and
of what counts as “real” in this highly mediated context. With the prolifera-
tion of electronic media as constituting the reality of our living environments,
we may also sense the extent to which past film theorizing has implicated
somewhat impoverished conceptions of how fantasy relates to agency in the
world. Spectators are not simply sutured into the cinematic apparatus but are
 INTRODUCTION: THE AMBIVALENCES OF VIOLENCE 5

engaged with the cinema in ways that are always multiple, already embodied
and sensory, and never only ideological and fetishizing. Our phones, smart-
watches, tablets, portable gaming consoles, and home theaters now constitute
our contemporary Umwelt, each having their potentialities and means of inter-
acting with users’ bodies, while networks and platforms organize how we
navigate the data that our devices access.
If the notion of media can be thought of as a kind of ecology, itself consti-
tutive of contemporary human life, then it has quickly become clear that the
problems raised by representations of violence in our world have become all
the more urgent. As the possibility of encountering violent imagery online
rises, so does the possibility of the politics surrounding it and the projection
of a world constituted by victims and victimizers. In this context, the necessity
for coping with their distressing effects rises as well, as violence is repeatedly
brought into the proximity of our private lives. These images and sounds do
not simply represent violence “out there” or merely model for impression-
able viewers how crimes could be carried out in real life. Representations of
violence remind us of the need to critically think the message and the ethics
of the medium itself.
Thus the problem of real violence returns. The claim that violent imagery
is merely representational and thus has little to do with historical reality and
ethics has become increasingly specious as we have become more aware of
their triggering effects. Visual and auditory representations not only refer
to violence in the world but the medium itself may be thought as violent,
instilling new traumatic memories. Once more, the medium assaults the
viewer, despite all attempts by apologists to isolate the ontology or “appre-
ciate” the aesthetics of brutality. Once more, one is forced to confront the
brute indexicality of the image and its reference to a violent reality existing
in the world. If, as Elaine Scarry reminds us, violence “unmakes” the discur-
sive world of the victim, the devastating force of torture and warfare radically
unmakes the capacity to narrate this trauma in representational language
(Scarry 1985). The agitation perpetuated by the audiovisual medium on the
sensorium of the viewer could perhaps be thought as a corollary to the
unmaking of language. This is particularly acute when considering representa-
tions of violence that affect the viewer disproportionately, that may be called
“excessive” or “gratuitous,” in relation to the needs of the plot.
The gap between the sensational impact induced by representations of
violence and their analysis within the kingdom of means and ends is decisive,
as it carries ramifications for the politics, ontology, and aesthetics of violence
more generally. In their reading of Assyrian palace reliefs, Leo Bersani and
Ulysse Dutoit capture this undecidability between what we might call the
ontological and moralistic approaches toward the forms of violence in art. On
the one hand, there is the act of narrativization of violent spectacle, performed
by the one who claims a position of mastery and in so doing domesticates and
immobilizes its transformative potential. This position may be compared to
that of the fetishist who seeks mastery over the object of desire and emerges
6 S. CHOE

as the consequence of an unconscious, sadomasochistic impulse. On the other

hand, Bersani and Dutoit show how the representation of violence in Assyrian
art in fact insists upon the drive toward narrativization while recuperating the
radically subversive in art. They write that “We might say that the assumption
of this art is that we cannot help but be interested by narratives of violence,
but that we are also already ready to follow marginal interests which disrupt
narrative and which prevent the reading of violence from becoming a fasci-
nated identification with acts of violence” (Bersani and Dutoit 1985, 56). For
Bersani and Dutoit, Assyrian reliefs resist analytical mastery and provide an
aesthetic model for thinking the notion of transgression through their treat-
ment of violent spectacle and without the hermeneutic crutch of thinking it as
one moment within an overarching narrative. Through its resistance to narra-
tivization, this analytic of violence also resists easy politicization and rebuffs
the politics of blame that demands that a violent deed be linked to a doer
responsible for it. In this, Bersani and Dutoit seem to have found repre-
sentations of violence that cannot be reduced to the logics of fetishism and
narrative causality. We might liken this critical phenomenology of violence to
what Giorgio Agamben calls a “means without end,” whereby violent means
are put to apolitical or even purposeless ends (Agamben 2000). In his critique
of violence, Walter Benjamin developed this phenomenology from his under-
standing of the seemingly anarchic ends that animate the general strike, calling
it “divine violence” (Benjamin 1999).
For our part, we can note the extent to which violence in various repre-
sentational mediums, including digital and social media, seems to repeatedly
implicate a chain of causation that links violence and their depictions with
political life in modernity. Violent representations are incessantly folded back
into politics, to preconceived narratives of patriotism, ideologies of social
justice, and the metaphysics of the moral self in modernity. Violent videos
published by political bodies such as the U.S. government, the Islamic state,
or the Russian army are quickly understood within pre-existing narratives of
aggressor and aggrieved, as well as Manichean conflicts between good and
evil. Images and sounds depicting police brutality, school shootings, suffering
laborers, or the devastation of climate change that appear on social media feeds
are already political to the extent that disturbing images have been explained
and fetishized, their power to disturb contingent on the premise that discursive
positions have already been established and sides taken. Video games inter-
pellate the player through their on-screen avatar, implicating him or her in
fantasies of control and, in the case of most campaign-based games, engaging
them with choices that are inextricably linked to issues of morality and the
carrying out of violence. In these and other instances, images of those who
unjustly suffer gain in affective power through their capacity to solicit the
sympathies of the viewer, to inspire pity for and even identification with the
misfortune of others. Sympathy in turn fuels the passion for political change,
ignited by the outrage in witnessing moral wrongdoings and the suffering of
victims of violence. Then again, as Susan Sontag reminds us, sympathy is not
 INTRODUCTION: THE AMBIVALENCES OF VIOLENCE 7

enough—the emotional link suggested by the image of those who suffer far
away from the viewer remains spurious at best. “So far as we feel sympathy,”
she writes, “we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering”
(Sontag 2003, 102).
This Handbook will address the politics of violence in film and media as well
as the critical means by which it may be understood. These theoretical issues
are inseparable from the historical and cultural contexts in which violent media
is produced, distributed, and consumed. Infrastructures and networks make
streams of brutal images available to connected computers and cell phones.
Nevertheless, despite the diversity of our current media contexts, the history
of film in the US remains illuminating for understanding how the politics of
violence reflects historical and social change. Perhaps the most consequential
is the series of proscriptions on representation in film dictated by the Produc-
tion Code from 1930 to about 1968. The Code prohibited the depiction of
brutal murder and cruelty to animals during this key period of Hollywood
history with the ultimate goal of ensuring “moral uplift” for film audiences.
Revenge was not to be justified while the depiction of robbery, theft, safe-
cracking, and other crimes were not to be shown in detail to safeguard against
audience imitation. When the Code was dismantled and the ratings system
implemented on November 1, 1968, legal interdictions against violent images
gave way to moral ones while battles around propriety and taste continued
in the culture wars to come. Filmmakers quickly began to produce more
explicit depictions of sex and violence while moral virtue was itself placed
under critical scrutiny. The early work of William Friedkin is exemplary in this
regard. The French Connection (1971) gave us images of unkempt, morally
compromised policemen while blasphemous depictions of defiled innocence
and virtue abounded in The Exorcist (1973). Both films feature ambiguous
endings that lead one to question whether good has in fact triumphed over
evil (as stipulated in the Production Code) and to wonder whether moral
certainty can be reestablished in the world. Friedkin’s work, as well as that
of the New Hollywood cinema, responded to social transformations spurred
by the counterculture but also the politics of the ongoing war in Vietnam and
the Watergate scandal that unfolded in the news media from 1972 to 1974.
The cinema seemed to articulate and amplify questions about the moral legit-
imacy of state authority during this time as well as America’s right to exercise
violence abroad in the name of Cold War moral righteousness.
September 11, 2011 marks another key moment in the representation of
violence in film and media, again raising issues around morality and the politics
of violence. Following the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the
world seemed to rally around America and sympathize with its victimization
by hostile foreign forces. As good and evil were defined all too clearly along
the lines of friend and enemy, binarized positions that were both mutually
opposed and ontologically irreducible to each other, the notion of pursuing
and killing “our enemies” became legitimized as an act of moral justice. We
may be reminded of the phrase, “axis of evil,” formulated only months after
8 S. CHOE

9/11 and which clearly delineated, in the spirit of Nietzschean ressentiment,

the rhetoric of us-versus-them that would dominate the “war on terror.” In
a world surrounded by enemies, the moral right to violent war was embold-
ened as a sovereign right. These rights were sustained through the continued
demonization of the enemy and the need for violence to eradicate them, even
while circumventing international laws that grant universal civil liberties to
all human beings. One need only recall the paradoxical logic of the legal
exception that is granted to the sovereign, articulated forcefully by Judith
Butler, that underpinned the indefinite detention of both American and non-
American detainees in Guantanamo Bay (Butler 2004). Two films directed
by Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012),
depict the desire for retribution in war while offering viewers the sadistic, and
therefore deeply unsettling, pleasure of seeing America’s enemies be captured
and pitilessly assassinated. Violent warfare in the new millennium is depicted as
highly complex, in an age where drones and remote IEDs have enabled killing
to take place from a distance while mediated through imaging and surveil-
lance technologies. This complexity is also reflected in the ways Bigelow’s
films problematize the moral certainty that insists upon the binary between
good and evil.
More recently, the insurrection on the US capital building on January 6,
2021 reminded us of the extent to which the justification for violence is
entrenched by the narrative of grievance. In a context where the difference
between fact and “fake news” has become increasingly tenuous, this narrative
remains intoxicating for some in its power to embolden and envision righ-
teous revenge against one’s imagined enemies. As film as a medium has lost its
urgency in our understanding of these events, the news and social media have
unquestionably gained importance in forming this understanding. The narra-
tive of grievance remains affectively and emotionally compelling in our current
context. But as these technologies continue to inform and mislead, inducing
more distrust and uncertainty, moral and otherwise, into civil society, the need
for critically thinking about the ambivalences between violence and the media
becomes all the more urgent.
The chapters in the Handbook of Violence in Film and Media are organized
into five parts, which I will describe briefly below, and each part consists of five
original chapter contributions. Part I, “Critical Models,” introduces readers
to a series of critical approaches that have been deployed to evaluate issues of
violence in film and media. Drawing from cultural studies approaches, media
theory, philosophies of violence, and cognitive science research on violence
and the brain, these chapters bring readers quickly to the kinds of questions
that will be brought to bear on many of the essays in the Handbook. Individual
texts such as Antoine Fuqua’s film, The Equalizer (2014), Michael Haneke’s
cinema, and the video game Control (2019) are analyzed to draw out claims
that will have universal relevance beyond these particular case studies. Readers
will discover how violence in film and media may be discursively framed more
 INTRODUCTION: THE AMBIVALENCES OF VIOLENCE 9

broadly. While these chapters critically address issues of morality through indi-
vidual instances, questions about the representation of violence generally, its
aesthetics and politics, and power to shock and provoke are raised as well.
Part II, “Histories of Violence in Film and Media,” features chapters that
contextualize representations of violence within social, industrial, technolog-
ical, and political contexts. They examine how cultural politics in the film
industry and national censorship policy constitute and are constituted by
cinematic representations of violence. The chapters also demonstrate how
narratives about national history and stories circulating in the news media are
regarded in the cinema, opening up opportunities for viewers to reflect on the
legal and moral frames for understanding historical violence, but also about
how history informs its representation. The essays in this section show that film
and media do not simply and straightforwardly represent violence but that they
relate to history in myriad and nuanced ways. This is made particularly evident
as the final chapter in this section considers the digital infrastructure that makes
possible the development and distribution of assaultive images online.
Part III, “The Aesthetics of Aggression,” considers the possibility of
whether the representation of violence may be appreciated for their partic-
ular aesthetic and formal qualities. Past scholarship has addressed this problem
by considering the cathartic experience of violence in art, but these essays
approach it with renewed force and with contemporary events in mind:
the depiction of warfare in the twenty-first century, the new extremity in
European art house cinema, and the representation of racialized violence.
While previous chapters have evaluated how film and media interact with
history, these essays ask readers to consider the formal aspects that make these
interactions possible—including editing, cinematography, spaces of exhibition,
self-reflexivity, and off-screen space—and that contribute to the depiction of
explicit events on screen. Through these considerations, one may quickly
realize the key importance of the reality of aggressive imagery, constituted
through the aesthetics of the media, in addition to what the media indexes in
reality.
In the chapters that make up “The Politics and Ethics of Brutal Media,”
authors directly connect readings of violence in film and media to their poli-
tics as well as to their corresponding political ideologies. The image of justified
violence is often understood to empower spectators by appealing to the melo-
drama of beset victims, a key means of solicitation that encourages the taking
of political sides. On the one hand, some of the essays in this section work
through the politics that is mobilized to rationalize violence, particularly right-
wing and extremist ideology, while also critiquing them and laying bare their
futility. The moral righteousness that underpins political violence, often in
the name of civil disobedience, is ultimately one of the moral impoverish-
ment according to this critique. Its objectification through sound and image
provides the opportunity for viewers to judge the exercise of moral judg-
ment itself and to shift the critical discussion around violence from morality
10 S. CHOE

to ethics. This shift can perhaps be perceived most acutely when considering
extremely difficult images and which induce immediate moral objection.
The notion of “triggering” is one of the topics covered in “Affected Audi-
ences,” which focuses on a crucial topic that is in dire need of further research
and theorization. All the chapters in the Handbook touch on the topic of
affect more or less, and this section offers ways of thinking about it in
terms of phenomenology, theories of emotion, audience response research,
and the politics of trigger warnings. Indeed, it could be argued that settling
this fundamental issue is key for determining the aesthetics and politics of
violent representations more generally. In order to bring issues of spectator-
ship into further relief, the chapters examine experiences of disgust, revulsion,
and “sadistic laughter” to describe how embodied viewers are affected and
affect ideological apparatuses that position viewers. Reflection on the place of
the spectator returns us to a problem that I have tried to raise throughout
this introduction—the role and place of the critical scholar who reflects on
violence in film and media.

References
Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by
Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “Critique of Violence.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writ-
ings, Vol. 1, 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings,
236–252. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit. 1985. The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian
Art and Modern Culture. New York: Shocken.
Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Butler, Judith. 2004. “Indefinite Detention.” In Precarious Life: The Powers of
Mourning and Violence, 50–100. New York: Verso.
Clover, Carol. 1987. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representa-
tions 20 (Autumn): 187–228.
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington.
New York: Grove.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Carol Diethe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prince, Stephen, ed. 2000. Screening Violence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.
Williams, Linda. 1991. “Film Bodies, Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly
44, No. 4 (Summer): 2–13.
Critical Models
 Equality in the Face of Violence?—Diverging
Paths of Moral Speculation in Violent Fiction

Henry Bacon

Violence in action films such as Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer (2014) appeals
to our imaginary desires, above all the way we may like to fantasize about
spectacular violence being used to restore what we would recognize as being
a just state of affairs. This is different from what we might actually hope to
happen and very far removed from what we know about how things work out
in the real world. By contrast, Dominic Savage’s Born Equal (2006), a film
about the moral fragility of a number of characters from very different social
circumstances, appeals to our need for thoughtful representations about the
real world. We have a need for narratives that offer plausible explanations of
why crimes are actually committed, and what their real consequences are.
One crucial question is what kind of patterns of engagement these films
evoke. This entails exploring the semantics of understanding in the double
meaning of the word, first of all as comprehension and secondly as a form
of sympathy. This will be explored in terms of two theories that have been
developed to explain how we understand other people as well as fictional char-
acters, theory of mind and embodied simulation theories as analysed by Gal Raz
and Talma Hendler. They have demonstrated that the two theories relate to
two different kinds of stimuli giving rise to activity in different parts of the
brain. As regards making sense of characters in films, they suggest that a film
may contain both eso- and para-dramatic factors, the former tending to evoke

H. Bacon (B)
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
e-mail: henry.bacon@helsinki.fi

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Switzerland AG 2022
S. Choe (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05390-0_2
14 H. BACON

embodied simulation, the latter the kind of cognitive responses examined in

the theory of mind approach. These factors will be employed to the study of
the contrasting strategies of spectator appeal in the two films to be examined.
The principle guideline of this article is crystallized by Wyatt Moss-
Wellington in his Narrative Humanism: “If it is clear how ethics are inextri-
cable from narrative (even those that purposefully frustrate ethical intelligibility
or minimise ethical evaluations within the diegesis), and if we accept that our
quotidian engagements with story media are proliferating, then it also makes
sense to ask how we should value the relative ethical strategies employed by
various contemporary narratives, and what we want from narrative ethics.”1

Enjoying and Questioning Fictional Violence

In a fairly early scene in Antoine Fuqua’s film The Equalizer (2014), Robert
McCall (Denzel Washington) enters the office of Slavi (David Meunier), the
local leader of Russian Mafia in Boston. McCall has befriended a young woman
Alina (Chloë Grace Moretz), whom Slavi exploits as a prostitute and has just
beaten brutally. McCall offers the pimp almost ten thousand dollars for her
release. Slavi mocks him revealing his absolute contempt for the girl as well
as the man, who in his view is just trying to buy a good piece of property
for cheap. He throws the money back to McCall and tells him to go and jerk
off for every dollar and then come back—perhaps the girl is by that time in a
condition in which he can have her free. McCall takes the money and goes to
the door.
What do we hope will happen next? It has already become apparent that
McCall is a man of high moral standards, caring for people who are being
exploited. Having entered a pimp’s den all alone and appearing perfectly
cool, he clearly is fearless. He has not been intimidated by the armed men
looking at him with smug contempt. Furthermore, given the genre, we are
likely expecting that he has the ability to deal with bad guys. Most of us are
highly likely to want to see him turn back and give the slimy pimp and his
henchmen their badly needed comeuppance. And this is what McCall does,
using as his weapons only items available at the office. In 28 seconds—McCall
times his effort—all of Slavi’s henchmen are dead. Just before Slavi himself
expires, McCall points out to him: “In about 30 seconds, your body is gonna
shut down and you’re gonna suffocate. Alina, the girl you beat, her life is
gonna go on. Yours is gonna end right here, on this funky floor for 9800
dollars. You should have taken the money.” After Slavi has expired, McCall
adds quietly: “I’m sorry.”
This was to be expected. Even as McCall is negotiating with Slavi, he is
checking out what he can use as weapons, he even organizes items such as
glass skulls on the table. As he has closed the door there is a terrific zoom into
the pupil of his eye followed by a sequence of shots showing all the details he
observes in the room. Even more importantly, in terms of genre expectations
 EQUALITY IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE?—DIVERGING PATHS … 15

McCall is what William Flesch has called “an altruistic avenger.”2 Even specta-
tors unfamiliar with this scholarly term will recognize the archetypal character
who assumes as his task to protect the innocent and punish the wrongdoers,
the vigilante, who for unselfish reasons sees to it that justice will take place
even when the forces of law and order are impotent or simply absent.
A very different kind of act violence takes place at the very end of Dominic
Savage’s Born Equal (2006) as two main storylines fatally converge. Mark
and Laura have been out for dinner. They are happy and Mark, a successful
businessman, who throughout the film has struggled with his social anxieties
which he has channelled to an aborted attempt at facing social responsibility,
now appears content with life and the prospect of having a child with Laura. As
they are driving back, they almost hit Robert, an ex-convict, the protagonist
of another storyline. He is not physically hurt but, because of what we have
seen him go through earlier on in the film, he is in a mental condition, which
causes the slight incident to lead into violent action: With a knife in his hand he
follows the car up the road, telling himself that he will “show” that other man.
Mark and Laura have reached the comfort of their home when the doorbell
rings and Mark goes to open it. We are not shown a violent act, but the
implication is that Robert stabs Mark.
The contrast with the scene in The Equalizer is enormous. Rather than
mentally cheering the avenging hero, we might feel like crying to Robert
something like “oh don’t do it!” Mark has not appeared particularly remark-
able, but his shortcomings do not make us wish that he be punished, let alone
killed. There is no scope for the thrills of counterviolence executed with supe-
rior fighting skills in this film. Rather, we are led to follow the lives of a
bunch of people, each of them somehow lost in life because of their own their
own situations and weaknesses. The killing, although the end result of certain
circumstances and a psychological process we have been following right from
the beginning of the film, is just a random act of violence. We are invited to
try to understand why it takes place, not to celebrate it.

Understanding and Relating to Characters

Dirk Eitzen summarizes notions about gratuitous violence as “depiction
of violence that revolves round the spectacle and suspense and downplays
suffering and sentiment.” Its opposite would then be “representation of
violence that foregrounds suffering and serves up large doses of sentiment.”3
Eitzen explores these contrasting patterns in The Dark Knight and Private
Ryan, respectively. In the present study, the two films under scrutiny are
even further apart from one another, starting from the mode of production,
one being a perfectly crafted Hollywood mainstream action film, the other a
BBC television production based partly on improvization. The former mode
is costly and functions on the basis of catering thrills likely to attract a large
section of the primary target group (aficionados of action films, mainly); the
latter has the mandate of creating socially relevant drama with sufficient appeal
16 H. BACON

so as to achieve reasonable ratings. These differences in mode and purpose

of production are conducive to treating violence in two completely different
ways.
Violence in films such as The Equalizer appeals principally to certain imag-
inary desires, above all the way we like to fantasize about spectacular violence
being used to restore what we would recognize as being a just state of affairs.4
This is all the more enjoyable the further removed it is from the complexities
of the real world. By contrast, Born Equal is a film about the moral fragility of
a number of characters from very different social circumstances and situations
in life. It appeals to a great extent, if not principally, to our need for mindful
representations of the real world.5 These two films may have been made prin-
cipally for somewhat different target audiences but many of us may enjoy the
thrills of ethically simplistic action films while also having a need for narratives
that offer plausible reflections on why crimes are actually committed, and what
their psychological and social motivations as well as consequences might be.
One principal question, then, will be the widely different narrative function
of ethical considerations in these two films. The fundamental contrast can be
seen as that of exploiting vs. exploring moral concerns.
Answering these questions entails dwelling in the semantics of under-
standing in the double meaning of the word: (1) The ability to understand
something; comprehension; (2) Sympathetic awareness or tolerance. In prin-
ciple, these should be kept separate, but in practice, and perhaps for some good
reason, they tend to intertwine. It should be clear that we may understand why
a person behaves the way he or she does without approving of those actions.
This understanding may be purely theoretical, in the sense that our compre-
hension is based on the way we conceptualize human behaviour, and make
sense of its motives and its consequences. Presumably, such mental processes
can be completely detached from our personal reactions to the people or char-
acters in question. But understanding can also be embodied in that it draws
on our idiosyncratic way of responding to human affairs, even when we are
not personally involved in a situation.
This second aspect of understanding gives rise to feelings that according to
various definitions are referred to as sympathy and empathy. There is some
confusion in terminology, but generally, empathy refers to experiencing the
same feeling as someone else whereas sympathy is feeling for a person as he or
she goes through his or her own joys and sorrows. Empathy, in turn, can be
thought of as such deep immersion in the experience of another person that
at least momentarily it impedes observing and judging that experience as if
from outside.6 In terms of cognitive psychology, this mirrors to a considerable
extent the two accounts of how we make sense of each other as well as fictional
characters: theory of mind (ToM) and embodied simulation (ES) theories.
Controversy has raged over which is predominant. Gal Raz and Talma Hendler
of University of Tel Aviv have taken a major step forward in tracing the neural
basis of the cognitive (ToM) and somato-visceral (ES) reactions to the repre-
sentation of characters in certain kind of emotionally involving situations.
 EQUALITY IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE?—DIVERGING PATHS … 17

Empathic processes are driven by either somato-visceral or cognitive repre-

sentations of others. ES takes place in the same regions of the brain that are
activated when observing the emotional state of another as when experiencing
that emotion oneself. These areas of the brain are connected with interoceptive
functions, which means that the observation is tied to bodily reactions. ToM
in turn is about “ascribing beliefs, thoughts, motivations, and intentions to
another person… It is a top-down process based on cognitive representations
of mental states.” The difference is captivated in the observations that while
ES relies on relatively automatic “emotional contagion.” ToM is a cognitive
perspective-taking process.7
Raz and Hendler argue that our mode of identification is tied to the ways
in which the two modes of understanding others are activated. In their view,
the balance between the two may vary depending on whether the story situ-
ation appeals to an emotionally charged sense of immediacy or whether the
emotional dilemma is presented as a future event and is thus primarily cogni-
tively stimulated. ES is based on the functioning of our limbic system, which
gives rise to sympathetic responses, ToM functions on the level of the cortex
and is needed for our understanding of other people in the primary sense. It
may be quite detached, simply allowing us to make sense of the motivations
and consequences of action. However, that understanding may then trigger a
more profoundly affective reaction stemming from the limbic system.
One crucial background assumption is the layeredness of selfhood.
Following Antonio Damasio, Raz and Hendler discuss three levels: “The
primordial proto-self maps sensorimotor and visceral states and is influenced
by homeostasis perturbations including pain, hunger, thirst, and temperature
changes”—i.e. embodied basic reactions. The core-self, in turn, “links modi-
fications of the proto-self with images of specific objects and thus constitutes
relationships between the self and the world.” Already the combined activity of
these two establishes an object-related, to use Damasio’s expression, “feeling
of what happens now.” Yet, it is only the autobiographical self that allows us to
have memories and anticipations of the future. Raz and Hendler propose that
emotionally charged representations of events may capture us by “connecting
the ‘real-time’ proto- and core-selves of the spectator and fictional characters,”
whereas scenes that entail emotional verbal interaction elicit “cognitive mental-
ization via partial alignment of the autobiographical self.”8 Thus, as cinematic
empathy “is based on the matching of the spectator’s and character’s perspec-
tives, films may flexibly align different aspects of the self to trigger various
types of emotional experiences.” The Israeli scholars come to the conclusion
that cinematic empathy is “a bridge on which different spectator and character
selves meet.”9
This leads to the conclusion that a scene such as the one in Sophie’s Choice
in which Sophie is forced by a Nazi officer to choose which of her two children
will be allowed to live, “triggers empathic engagement mainly by connecting
the ‘real-time’ proto- and core-selves of the spectator and fictional characters.”
By contrast, Stepmom, the scene in which the future implications of a mother’s
18 H. BACON

cancer diagnosis is discussed, elicits partial alignment with the autobiographical

self. In the experiments which Raz and Hendler conducted, responses to these
two film clips revealed similarities between the activity of a low-level affective
system but dissimilarities between the affective system and higher-level cogni-
tive system which mediates between empathy and emotion regulation. Unlike
Sophie’s Choice, watching Stepmom created a correlation between feelings of
sorrow and ToM brain activity, whereas the opposite correlation emerged
in respect of ES, indicating that Sophie’s Choice gave rise to a stronger and
more visceral feeling of distress.10 The crucial difference between the situ-
ations in these scenes is that the one in Sophie’s Choice is acutely dramatic,
whereas in Stepmom the sadness is projected into the future. Emphatic reac-
tions that these films generate thus have a different neurological basis. These
results may be given an evolutionary interpretation: ES ensures that we care
for our fellowmen, ToM that we are able to assume the necessary distance to
do something useful.11
The main point here is that simulation theory and the theory of mind
should by no means be thought of as mutually opposed. They complement
one another as a less and a more conscious mental process. The fact that we
have these mental faculties at our disposal allows for the interweaving of imagi-
nation and conceptual thinking, fantasy and orientation toward the real world,
reason and emotion—both sides in each pair constantly conditioning the other.

Two Kinds of Drama

Raz and Hendler’s discoveries have interesting implications for the study of
cinematic narration. Table 1 outline two types of factors.
These two categories relate to different types of pleasures films may offer.
Eso-dramatic factors give rise to “a sympathetic boost of adrenaline, somatic
excitation, arousal and the subsequent relief.” Para-dramatic factors in turn
“provide pleasures of mitigation based on emotion regulation mechanisms
acquired during childhood …. Witnessing another’s distress from a secure
psychological distance possibly involves an active cognitive ‘objectification’ of
the distress, externalizing it from the proto/core self.”12 All this is in line

Table 1 Raz and Hendler’s account of factors defining two types of drama

Para-dramatic factors Eso-dramatic factors

Cognitive cues lead the spectator to infer the
mental state of the characters
References to factors not immediately present
give rise to emotional reactions
Cinematic means are used to create a distanced
position of observation
3rd person’s point of view
Character reactions serve as indicators of
the mental state of the characters
Attention is focused on what is
immediately present
Cinematic means are used to give emphasis
to the characters’ emotional reactions
1st person’s point of view
 EQUALITY IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE?—DIVERGING PATHS … 19

with Eitzen’s distinction between gratuitous and non-gratuitous violence, the

former employing representations of violence to give the spectators visceral
thrills, the latter seeking in a meaningful fashion to depict the suffering and
sorrow that is an inextricable part of violence.
Here we should bring back to mind the point Russian formalist and later
neoformalist film scholars such as Kristin Thompson have made, namely that
from the point of view of analysis characters are bundles of traits which serve
certain story functions, rather than real human beings:

Since characters are not people, we do not necessarily judge them by the stan-
dards of everyday behaviour and psychology. Rather, as with all [filmic] devices
and collections of devices, characters must be analysed in terms of their functions
in the work as a whole.13

But in terms of our actual viewing practices, it does appear that we have
a strong tendency to take the activities of these trait bundles at least quasi
seriously, to some undefined extent as if they were real people going through
emotionally and morally loaded events, performing activities that either cause
pain and suffering to other people or help them in gaining a possibility to live
a better life.
ES theory offers a simple explanation: a fictional story situation may trigger
the more or less same brain activities as a real-life situation and create visceral
reactions in spectators thus addressing a combination of core and proto-selves.
This offers satisfaction that is inimical to reflection on existing social circum-
stances or concerns about violent solutions. Thus, even as the story is tagged
as fictional and on some level we are aware of the characters being constructed
as bundle of traits more or less according to the norms established by genre
conventions, we may experience strong psychophysical reactions attached to
the fictional character in likely judgemental fashion. Arguably, if the genre
offers familiar schemas according to which the characters behave and relate to
one another, no deeper ToM-like rational understanding is needed. Further-
more, as there tends to be a bit of a moralist in each and every one of us when
watching an action film, we are likely to enjoy the moral spectacle of despicable
characters being punished by an altruistic avenger. That is, provided one’s
moralistic sensibilities do not lead one into condemning this kind of morally
simplistic entertainment entirely.
The fact that in mainstream films the characters can be grasped in terms
of a limited number of character traits eases recognition. For dramaturgical
purposes, recognition of different aspects of a character may vary between
immediately obvious and perhaps even almost totally inscrutable. In most
mainstream as well as much of art-house cinema, following the story is facili-
tated by introducing easily recognizable characters, usually having them stand
for some historical or social category, which in the eyes of the target audience
ascribes them with certain qualities, including an idea of their moral standing.
The initial recognitions give rise to stereotypical expectations, which may then
20 H. BACON

be substantiated or contradicted according to dramaturgical demands such as

surprises when characters do things which go against our category expecta-
tions. At least by the end of the film the fictional truth of their moral qualities
has usually been clearly established—possibly with extra-fictional claims (say,
that certain kind of people have or do not have moral fibre).
Art house cinema—and corresponding television production—is likely to
present characters who may be easily recognizable as social types, but who
are constructed so as to suggest interiority which we will have to try to infer
based on their appearance and actions, verbal and non-verbal behaviour—very
much as we interpret each other in real life. Together with character moti-
vation, what happens in this kind of cinema calls for interpretation in terms
real-life knowledge about social types, norms of behaviour, scripts for appro-
priate action in different kinds of situations and so on.14 We are likely to notice
not only moral weaknesses but recognize how they stem from the social condi-
tions and personal histories as presented in the story—or, inferred on the basis
of real-life knowledge, if need be.
This amounts up to a call for the kind of entertainment, art if you like, with
characters who, bundles of traits as they may be, at least combine traits that to
some extent may be only non-obviously compatible and even conflicting, thus
offering a greater cognitive and moral challenge for the spectator. Born Equal
offers such a challenge, calling for recognition of human traits in characters,
leading to a degree of identification and sympathy in reference to one’s autobi-
ographical self, recognition of human traits and situations together with their
implications. It should be appreciated that identification does not require the
abolishing of psychological distance between oneself and the object of iden-
tification. Normally we do not identify totally even with ourselves, as we are
able to observe our feelings and reactions as if from a slight distance from
our situation.15 This is crucial from the point of understanding otherness in
fictional worlds as well as the real world.
The notion of identification contains a duality, which parallels that of under-
standing. The word stands first of all for identifying something or someone as a
member of a class and or as an individual, usually with traits that also mark the
individual as a member of a class. However, the expression “to identify with”
carries the connotation of finding in another person or a fictional character or
his/her situation something similar with oneself or a situation one has expe-
rienced. When watching a film there is an obvious cognitive level, on which
we first identify and then possibly identify with characters partly according to
schemata that apply also to our attempts to identify new people we encounter
in our daily life. The main difference is that genre conventions often make the
process of identification fairly, if not perfectly clear-cut. In order to examine
how these aspects of viewing violent fiction actually work out in the two films
under discussion, let us examine them in more detail.
 EQUALITY IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE?—DIVERGING PATHS … 21

Understanding The Equalizer16

As The Equalizer begins, the African American protagonist is seen living on
his own and working in a warehouse, where he is helping a working mate
to prepare for an entrance test to security guard training. He goes regularly
to a diner for supper. One night he has a conversation with a young woman
who appears to work as a prostitute. They seem to come from very different
circumstances, but they engage in friendly banter. The second time we see
them talk, he ends up offering her the maxim: “Gotta be who you are in this
world, no matter what.”
The third time we see them together she goes to his table and introduces
herself as Alina. She gives him a CD titled “Alina the Singer.” She is apologetic,
saying, “You and I know what I really am.” He replies: “I think you could be
anything you wanna be.” “Maybe in your world, Robert,” she says, and he
replies: “Change the world.” Alina understands that also Robert has suffered
losses in his life. The scene is quiet and beautifully lit, creating a serene atmo-
sphere. They walk out together, but just as they are about to separate a car
stops by them, men get out and grab Alina. Clearly, this is her pimp with his
minions. The pimp, Slavi slaps her on the face. McCall comes closer, and Slavi
explains: “This girl is no good.” he gives McCall his calling card and promises:
“Call this number. I send you another. Better.” McCall does not react, he just
watches the car drive away. Later, as he once again comes to the diner, the
bartender tells him that the girl is at a hospital because “someone beat her up
real good.” At the hospital, McCall meets Alina’s friend who tells him horrible
stories about how Slavi treats the women he has under his control.
Then follows the scene described above.
After the cleansing operation, McCall’s life seems to return to normal. His
working mate has reached his target weight for the training but still needs
help and advice. McCall is always willing to offer his help. We then follow a
Russian gangster (Teddy Rensen) examine the scene of the massacre in Slavi’s
office. The gangster uses extremely violent methods in extorting information
in order to find out who is responsible. Meanwhile, McCall beats corrupt
policemen who extract protection money from hardworking shopkeepers and
engages in other such vigilante activities. For a while, the two storylines serve
more to maintain the extreme moral polarization than to keep the story going.
Eventually, they converge. The formidable Russian tracks down McCall, who
obviously immediately figures out what is going on. Standard cat and mouse
sequence follows, and at most only at its beginning we might not be sure
which is which. The only thing we are likely to wonder is just how invincible
our hero is. It soon turns out that he has worked for some branch of the US
Intelligence service. Through his old connections he gets the information he
needs about how the prostitution network connects with the Russian mafia.
His former superior thinks he has come for a “permission” rather than just
the information. All this is needed only to give McCall’s action the veneer of
justification in terms of larger patterns of maintaining law and order as well
22 H. BACON

as the moral sphere of the nation. When the superior asks McCall about his
motivation he answers: “I couldn’t tell why what they did to her mattered
to me so much. One day somebody does something unspeakable to someone
else, to someone you hardly knew, and you do something about it because
you can.” Presumably, this is what the film’s title refers to.
McCall now appears to have access to seemingly inaccessible knowledge
such as the childhood trauma of the Russian killer, Nicolai. In purely formal
terms a chance of moral choice appears every time McCall is about to kill
someone. His “victims,” if the word can be applied to characters that are
anything but, are given the chance of doing the right thing. They never do,
not even for camouflage. They make no attempt even to pretend that they
could do anything good in their lives. Thus, within the moral terms of this
fictional world, it really is the unpleasant duty of McCall to terminate them,
sometimes even in quite a gruesome fashion. He never loses his cool, but that
just spices up the thrill of seeing him put his supreme intelligence and fighting
skills into spectacular use. In the one but final scene, McCall is in a huge,
glorious mansion in Moscow. He kills “the head of the snake,” the man who
leads the Russian mafia. As he leaves through staircases and corridors, we see
the bodies of all the guards he has had to kill on his way in. Apparently, this
has not been much of an effort to him. In the final scene, he is walking with
his grocery on a Boston street and meets Alina, who happily tells about having
had a new start. A letter containing 10,000 dollars that mysteriously appeared
at her bedside at the hospital has helped a lot.
The three main crooks McCall finishes off all make the same wrong ques-
tion: “Who are you?” They should be asking together with us: “What do you
stand for?”

Understanding Those Born Equal

Born Equal exemplifies well Moss-Wellington’s call for a higher ethical stan-
dard of narration: “humanist storytelling emphasises difficult, multifaceted
ethics and complicates intuitive responses to familiar problems, especially puni-
tive responses—it challenges the comfort of seeing justice prevail, threats
brought under control, and order occurring independently of our personal
efforts, brought by a hero, heroes, or nature.”17
Born Equal focuses specifically on moral speculation related to violence,
above all to its psychological motivations and social causes, but also on its
consequences. The film is about the moral fragility of characters from very
different social circumstances, many of whom end up doing something at least
reprehensible or irresponsible, even committing crimes. Instead of expecting
to experience great thrills watching the hero engage in spectacular violence
in order to restore a just state of affairs, this film presents both physical and
relational violence as distinctly reprehensible acts deriving from inequality and
lack of self-knowledge or self-control. At the very end of the film, instead of a
concluding purgatory act, we are led to expect a killing about to happen just
 EQUALITY IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE?—DIVERGING PATHS … 23

because two completely separate paths just happen to cross at the very wrong
moment.
There are four more or less interwoven storylines. A hostel at Swiss Cottage
in London serves as the common focal point, bringing together characters each
having their own social and psychological problems. The geographical setting
introduces the main theme of the film: social dissonance. The polar opposites
are a character of working-class origins who has just served a prison sentence,
and another who hails from an affluent social sphere and has just received a
huge bonus after a successful business deal. The latter is on equal terms with
the other characters only in that he too appears to be somehow lost in life.
During the opening credits, we see tracking shots of the streets of London,
suggesting a range of social spheres. A somewhat shabby-looking character—
who may be recognized as Robert Carlyle, known for generally sympathetic
working-class characters more or less unable to hold his life together—enters a
building, which a title on the film defines as a “hostel for the homeless, Swiss
cottage London nw 3” This area is known to be affluent, so having a hostel
for the homeless there suggests a degree of social tension.18 From the point
of view of the story set-up, it is important that people from quite different
social classes might accidentally meet here. This aspect is made conspicuous as
there is a cut to smartly dressed two men in a high society bar. It is mentioned
that the shot of cognac they are about to enjoy costs 425 Pounds. One of
the men may be recognized as Colin Firth, a sensitive actor known mainly
for upper-middle-class, sometimes aristocratic roles. The men are celebrating
the considerable bonus they have received after closing a good deal. The Firth
character, whose name we will later discover to be Mark, expresses his concern
about his life changing as he will soon become a father.
They are about to enter a taxi when Mark makes a sudden decision to
take the tube. In a long otherwise empty underground corridor, he meets a
homeless person and refuses to give change to him. The beggar shouts an
insult after him and they almost end up fighting. Thus is established the sense
of potential violence that social dissonance may cause. But the way it actually
works out goes through winding paths and is not entirely built on obvious
character motivation. At points, the reasons for some character’s behaviour
are left as a matter of conjecture, and to a degree, we are left making our own
assumptions as to why they behave the way they do. As Mark gets home and
chats with his pregnant wife Laura (Emilia Fox), we may begin to assume that
all the changes to his life that the birth of the child is likely to cause, makes
him feel uneasy, if not downright anxious.
Between these events, we have seen the Carlyle character, later on intro-
ducing himself as Robert, in the lounge of the hostel, where another man
correctly guesses that he has been in prison. Robert acknowledges this and
when asked what he is going to do he says he is looking for someone. Later
on, he is asked about the reason for his prison sentence. He is reluctant to
answer and tries to wriggle out of the situation.
24 H. BACON

Two other storylines open, one with a distraught, pregnant woman

Michelle (Anne-Marie Duff) with a little girl at a railway station not knowing
where to go. It turns out she is escaping a violent husband and ends up in the
same hostel as Robert. There is yet another storyline centred on an African
family living at the hostel, who have the problem of getting the husband’s
father out of Nigeria where his life is threatened by a criminal gang. This story-
line does not interweave with the rest, so only one critical point of their story
makes will be mentioned in the sequel. Suffice it to say that the motivations
of these characters are quite unequivocal.
One evening Mark is coming through the same or some other anonymous
tube pedestrian tunnel as earlier on. There is another homeless person sitting
there, and Mark gives him money. When asked, he admits to having a bad
conscience. He is then seen with his wife at a posh restaurant. We may infer
that the discrepancy between his own wealth and the misery of the homeless
people has begun to haunt him just at the moment when he is about to take a
major step of bringing up a family amidst even greater affluence than hitherto.
It is as if he were suddenly hit by the need to show social responsibility in
order to justify his privileged position. Mark signs up as a volunteer for doing
outreach work. He soon ends up helping a 17-year-old runaway Zoe (Nichola
Burley) to get a room at the hostel, and then trying to give her some support
in life. But as appalled as he is by the idea of people having to sleep in tunnels,
he doesn’t even know what to say to her. At one point he even starts explaining
his own problems rather than listening to her. They meet a couple of times
and she begins to invest her hopes in him, dressing up for their meetings and
trying to seduce him. When Mark realizes Zoe has fallen in love with him, he
offers her money. She is deeply offended, rejects the money and just tries to
physically cling to him. He panics, violently pushes her away and leaves her
crying in impotent rage on a street. We do not meet Zoe again, but we can
presume that this experience of rejection has further eroded her self-esteem
as well as her chances in life. Mark goes back home and explains to his wife
that he has been mentally completely adrift and has had this weird need to help
people. She doesn’t really understand but appears to be at least convinced that
he is not having an affair.
Robert is sitting on the staircase of the hostel smoking. Black-and-white
memory flashes show him attacking another man. Over the course of the film,
the memory flashes reoccur suggesting that his past haunts him. Michelle
is seen receiving a telephone message from her husband angrily telling her
to phone back or she will be in trouble. Going upstairs she meets Robert.
Gradually a tender relationship begins to form between them. However, even
Robert’s signs of affection bring out his inability to adhere to the norms of
the society: as he can’t afford to buy a nice bunch of flowers for her, he ends
up stealing one.
Robert is trying to find his mother, with whom he has lost contact during
his prison term. He is totally shattered to discover that she has died years ago.
He returns to the hostel. As recollections of the murder he has committed
 EQUALITY IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE?—DIVERGING PATHS … 25

again start flashing in his mind, the feeling that his life is a complete mess
overwhelms him. Michelle comes to see him and tries to console him, but he
chases her away. “You can’t fucking help me! I don’t fucking want you here,”
he yells at her. Crying, she leaves.
At the very end, the two main storylines fatally meet. Laura and Mark have
been out for dinner. They are happy and Mark appears content with life and
the prospect of having a child with Laura. As they are driving back, they almost
hit the distraught Robert. He is not physically hurt but the incident infuri-
ates him and makes him focus his sense of inferiority and bitterness on the
driver who seems to have all the good things in life at his disposal. He follows
the car up the road, telling himself that he will “show” that man. Mark and
Laura have reached the comfort of their home when the doorbell rings and
Mark goes to open it. We are not shown a violent act, but it is implied that
Robert stabs Mark. Next, we see the police running after him calling him by
his name, catching and handcuffing him. In the closing shots, he is arrested.
The ending is somewhat ambiguous in that we can’t be quite certain is Robert
being arrested for what we assume he just did or is this a flashback showing his
arrest after the murder he committed six years ago—he appears to be wearing
the same clothes on both incidents and it would appear that in connection
with the later incident the police would not yet know who he is.
The fourth story about the Nigerian refugee family reaches its peak as the
wife Itshe (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who is working as a cleaner for a wealthy
family, seizes an opportunity to steal money, which she is sure those rich people
don’t really need. Her husband Yemi (David Oyelowo) is horrified to hear
about this and tells her to put the money back. She does so, but is caught in
the act and is probably dismissed. Later on, Yemi is coming out from a phone
booth. His reaction implies that his father has been killed. Yemi is then seen
in a church—telling God how much he hates him. All this does not connect
with the other storylines apart from most of the characters living in the same
hostel, but it does connect thematically in that each storyline tells how in
adverse conditions, even the concern for others, with the best of intentions,
can lead to reprehensible, even criminal action.
At the very end of the film, Michelle gets into a hospital to give birth to
her second child. It is not exactly the cliché of a baby born at the end of a
film suggesting a new life and possibilities, as Michelle clearly appears uncertain
about whether she will have the strength to take care of the new-born. Thus at
the end of the film, two women are left as single parents, but with completely
opposite social and financial situations.

Simplistic vs. Complex Moral Fantasies

The Equalizer begins with a Mark Twain quote: “The two most important
days in your life are the day when you were born and the day you find out
why.” Presumably, we are to understand that McCall has reached some such
understanding as he assumes his self-imposed duty as a vigilante. No such
26 H. BACON

epiphany is granter to any of the characters of Born Equal . The film exemplifies
the kind of mindful narrative which invites us to try to understand why bad
things happen in the real world, rather than indulge in quasi-moral spectacle in
which evil is defeated by means of quasi-supernatural fighting skills leading to
an imaginary restoration of a just state of affairs. In their very different ways,
both films exploit our tendency to react emotionally to how other people are
treated. The Equalizer provides us with sensational entertainment by creating
morally clear-cut situations in which victims are avenged and the offenders
punished for all they are worth; Born Equal engages us with life-like characters
trying to cope with social dissonance, which alienates them and restricts their
possibilities in life.
Savage explains his ideas when making Born Equal : “Maybe because there
is so much tragedy and suffering around us, people want to watch programmes
that take their minds off all that? I hope that really isn’t the case, and I hope
that my film can effect some change, even if it’s just making people more
aware of the realities of the society that we all live in.”19
Narratively the difference between the two films is that while The Equalizer
offers us a meticulously scripted linear narrative with stereotypical character
motivation, Born Equal has four almost independent storylines generated by
characters uncertain as to what they should do in life. None of the storylines
in Born Equal reaches a proper conclusion. We can only speculate about what
will happen to the characters on the basis of our generalized knowledge of
how things tend to work out for people in different kinds of adverse situations
in real life. This suits well a film in which a basic understanding of the char-
acters’ motivations—and sometimes even exactly what happens—is at critical
points left fairly open. The need to avoid the narrative lines proposing easy
solutions to social dilemmas was built into the working method: the dialogue
was improvized by the actors, who were given just the parameters of each
situation. Nevertheless, the social situations are easily recognizable at least for
anyone familiar with British or any Western society. Understanding why most
of the characters on the lower levels of society are not happy with their lives
is fairly obvious: in one way or other they have not succeeded in life and
have in a variety of ways lost connections with important people in their lives.
Mark, however, is a particularly awkward character to decipher in that we really
have to make an effort to understand why he, a successful businessman, is
dissatisfied with his life—or perhaps rather: dissatisfied with himself. In typical
art house cinema fashion, the film invites the spectator to provide the char-
acter traits missing from the bundle on the basis of his or her life-experience,
autobiographical self, so to say.
The central thematic tension is created by Mark and Robert, both being
depicted as acutely aware of the social dissonance in their lives and environ-
ments. They are both vulnerable and morally fragile, thus doing harm to both
themselves as well as others. Nevertheless, their prospects could not be more
different. The underprivileged Robert has nothing and no one to hold on
to, whereas the affluent Mark has a safe haven and a pregnant wife to return
 EQUALITY IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE?—DIVERGING PATHS … 27

to—except that at the end of the film his path has just crossed that of the
out-of-control Robert.
The story of The Equalizer evolves in a wholly different manner. McCall
is not a superhero, but as the film proceeds it turns out that he is a retired
Marine and Defence Intelligence Agency officer, which in this fictional world
grants the moral right and skills needed to dispatch four armed men almost
within the time limit he has set for himself. The moral universe is as polar-
ized as it only can be in a fairy tale or a mainstream film. The Mafiosos are
the scum of the earth and they should be done away with so that good inno-
cent people can live decent lives. The cool, almost detached manner in which
McCall performs his act of moral purge, serves as a final justification. He is
the paradigm altruistic avenger, perhaps even more than Clint Eastwood in
his Dirty Harry or subsequent films, as there is more emphasis on protecting
the innocent. Nevertheless, the principle pleasure offered to the audience is
spectacular, unquestionably justified counterviolence performed with abso-
lutely superior fighting skills. All this, together with all the enemies being
Russian, obviously has its ideological overtones targeted mainly for American
audiences, but it seems to go down pretty well also in many other parts of
the world. Watching the scene in Slavi’s den, it is really difficult not to want
McCall turn back and beat the pimp and his entourage. They brutally exploit
young women, they are cruel, arrogant, lewd and plain evil. Even as we see
them being effectively killed there is no scope for us to feel sorry for them.
The effect is further strengthened by the sympathetic altruistic avenger acting
with perfect cool. His anger is perfectly justified and deeply felt but kept in
perfect control. He is an ideal figure, just as the baddies he finishes off are that
in a negative sense.
There is nothing exceptional in this set-up. It is based on the standard
pattern used to make violence in fiction not only acceptable but actually desir-
able and enjoyable. Spectators are likely to be aware that the set-up is not in
the least bit realistic, otherwise the show would not be enjoyable. To achieve
that, our sense of the real world and the complexities of the moral concerns
involved in resorting to violence in order to fight a greater evil must be brack-
eted. Any moral speculation in connection with a film like this would be totally
beside the point. This is mainstream cinema, after all, intended for entertain-
ment which is all too often supposed to be inimical to series consideration
of any such sombrely complex issues as dealing with social evils in a morally
acceptable fashion. It exploits our desire for simple moral solutions brought
about by viscerally effective displays of sovereignly executed counterviolence.
But why does the restoration of a supposedly just state of affairs appear all
the more satisfactory, when it is achieved by much more straightforward means
than could possibly happen in real life? According to William Flesch “we are
willing, and even grateful, to accept supernatural or magical or improbable
answers, answers that are dysfunctional for learning how to cope with the real
environments of our lives.”20 McCall’s actions in the Equalizer fall only a little
short of supernatural and most certainly do not provide a model for coping in
28 H. BACON

the real world. Flesch’s account of the function of what he calls strong recipro-
cators, those who assume the task of punishing and rewarding members of the
social group irrespective of their own interests, captures precisely the appeal
of this kind of narrative.21 “Our own propensity toward strong reciprocity
will make us root for characters with a propensity for strong reciprocity, not
because we judge them as like us, or identify with them, but because dispo-
sition to reward co-operators and to punish defectors is itself a central aspect
of cooperation.”22 Such an altruistic punisher is likely to be seen as a hero,
not so much because he or she serves as someone to be identified with, but
because we are pleased with the idea of wrongdoers being punished. We are
innately disposed to admire altruistic punishers.23 This account goes a long
way in explaining the appeal of vigilante films such as The Equalizer.
By contrast, Born Equal is an anti-comeuppance story. Most of the main
characters are in some sense victims, even as their weaknesses make them, in
a sense, perpetrators. Thus, no need for altruistic avengers. What is needed
within the story world is people who are sufficiently balanced within them-
selves so as to be able to help or even just support others in very realistically
depicted social and psychological circumstances. Alas, there are no such char-
acters in this story. As Moss-Wellington further explains his notion of narrative
humanism: “Yet any questions that lead us to evaluate an individual’s moral
worth are decentred in humanist narrative, as we are focused upon social inter-
action and the collective forces that drive behaviour, not the punishment of
bad behaviour.”24
In one way or the other, the focus in this film is always on some form
of moral weakness coupled with sheer lack of wisdom, understanding of how
to cope with problems of life. This applies to Mark as much as to Robert,
however successful the former may be as a businessman. Because of his under-
privileged background, Robert is probably a looser anyway, but he also has
a low threshold of aggression and is prone to having his sense of inferiority
overwhelm him in an emotional crisis driving him to a state where he can
hardly be held responsible for his actions. The net-like plot guides us to under-
stand why he might be driven to a random act of violence, random in that
the object of his anger might be just anyone who he happens to see as a
beneficiary of the grossly unfair social system. Just like the homeless people
Mark meets, Robert’s family background has been such that we can assume
that he has not really had a proper chance in life. We do not learn anything
about Mark’s family background, but we may assume that he has had a good
start. Yet, he too lives in a somewhat similar existential vacuum as Robert.
He thinks he wants to do more for people who haven’t got the support of a
decent home, but as it turns out, his anxiety is completely self-absorbed and
his concern merely self-indulgent. Thus, instead of offering any kind of real
help to Zoe, he psychologically exploits her and ends up delivering to her yet
another devastating disappointment. The psychology behind his motivations is
left somewhat unclear as his character is not particularly deeply sketched out,
but it does become obvious that he is simply too self-centred to really care at
 EQUALITY IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE?—DIVERGING PATHS … 29

all for the inexperienced person he is supposed to help. At the end of the film,
Mark seems to have left not only Zoe but also his social concerns behind.

Para- and Eso-Dramatic Features

in The Equalizer and Born Equal
Of the two films analysed here, The Equalizer relies more on what Raz and
Hendler call eso-dramatic factors, whereas Born Equal verges more on the side
of para-dramatic. In the former, the focus is very much on what happens and
what will happen next. We are mainly aware of the characters’ mental states
through their behaviour brought forth effectively by cinematic means. McCall
is not shown reacting strongly, but at no point is there any doubt about his
moral high ground or his ability to deal masterly with any violent situation.
Watching Born Equal we often have to rely on only suggestive cues in
trying to understand and assess the actions of the characters as crucial moti-
vating background information is not immediately if at all present. This applies
particularly to the sudden awakening of Mark’s social conscience, as it may
not even be taken as quite realistic without further assumptions about his life.
However, this kind of thought experiment—leaving it to the spectator to try to
understand exceptional behaviour—is a legitimate storytelling device in terms
of arthouse cinema. Robert is less of an enigma in view of his family history
as he relates it to Michelle, but even that does not really explain why he has
such a low threshold of resorting to violence. In his final scene, the film moves
some way toward the eso-dramatic as his bitterness about being a social failure
is acerbated by having heard about his mother’s death while he has been in
prison. This has just made him reject Michelle, probably the only ray of hope
in his life for a long time. Yet, even as we understand all these factors, the
possibility of an empathetic reaction is blocked as we realize that he is about
to do a fatally wrong thing. Remarkably, as we understand his condition in
the deeper sense of the word, we may sympathize with him despite his fatal
shortcomings.
This division outlined by Raz and Hendler corresponds in an interesting
way with Torben Grodal’s theory about sorrowful and angry reactions to
something bad happening to characters. In his view, anger emerges from bad
situations caused by characters who purposefully do evil things. Its basis is in
the sympathetic nervous system, which switches on the propensity to act, even
if that in a film-viewing situation is blocked. Sorrow in turn emerges when
the bad situation appears unavoidable, if only because of human weakness.
Its basis is in the pacifying parasympathetic nervous system making us seek
to cope with that kind of situation. Thus, films about human relationships
provoke anger when someone is causing other people to suffer; sorrow if the
way things turn out seems an instance of fate. Obviously, the functioning of
these nervous systems is exceedingly complex with many factors functioning
as either stimulants or inhibitors somewhat differently in each one of us.25
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
having conquered the valley of the Nile, his lieutenant Amrou
suggested to him the formation of a canal direct from Suez to
Pelusium; but,” continues Monsieur Dupin, “was it likely that the
man (Amrou) who was guilty of burning the Alexandrian library,
should possess sufficient capacity to carry out so grand an idea.”
Now there are here almost as many errors as words. First, the
Emir Omar never did conquer the valley of the Nile. Secondly, he
could not have rejected the idea of the construction of a canal
from Suez to Pelusium, for the very good reason that the canal
already existed; and lastly, he did not burn the Ptolomean library
of Alexandria, as it had been destroyed two centuries and a half
previously.
[16] This literal translation from the passage in Arabic is due to
Silvestre de Sacy. G. Heyne, in his Opuscula Academica,
explains concisely all the vicissitudes the Alexandrian Library
underwent.
[17] Mémoire de C. Langlès, Magasin Encyclopédique, 1799, Vol.
III.
[18] Martinus Polonus died about the year 1270, that is to say 184
years after Marianus. His remarks on Pope Joan are not fit for
transcription.
[19] Familier éclaircissement de la question si une femme a été
assise au siège Papal de Rome: Amsterdam 1747, in 8ᵛᵒ.
[20] In his dissertation De nummo argenteo, Benedicti III.: Rome
1749, in 4ᵗᵒ.
[21] Inserted in vol. II. part 1. of the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores.
[22] Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne: Février 1863.
[23] This decree of the council is delivered in terms sufficiently
damaging to the reputation of the convent of which Eloisa was
prioress: “In communi audientiâ conclamatum est super
enormitate et infamiâ cujusdam monasterii sanctimonialium quod
dicitur Argentolium in quo paucæ moniales multiplici infamiâ ad
ignominiam sui ordinis degentes, multo tempore spurcâ et infami
conversatione omnem ejusdem loci affinitatem fœdaverant.”
(Gallia Christiana, Vol. VII. p. 52.)
[24] Dulcius mihi semper exstitit amicæ vocabulum aut si non
indigneris, concubinæ vel scorti. Charius mihi et dignius videretur
tua dici meretrix quam Augusti imperatrix.
[25] The rest is better left in Latin: “Concupiscentia te mihi potius
quam amicitia sociavit, libidinis ardor potius quam amor. Ubi igitur
quod desiderabas cessavit, quicquid propter hoc exhibebas
pariter evanuit.”
[26] Frustra utrumque geritur quod amore Dei non agitur. In omni
autem Deus scit, vitæ meæ statu, te magis adhuc offendere
quam Deum vereor. Tibi placere amplius quam ipsi appeto. Tua
me ad religionis habitum jussio, non divina traxit dilectio. Vide
quam infelicem et omnibus miserabiliorem ducam vitam, si tanta
hic frustra substineo: nihil habitura remunerations in futuro!!
[27] M. Lenoir, at the time of the publication of his work, was the
keeper of the Musée des petits Augustins, in Paris.
[28] Annales archéologiques de Didron, 1846. p. 12.
[29] Lettres d’Abailard et d’Héloïse traduite sur les manuscrits de
la Bibliothèque Royale par E. Oddoul, avec une préface par
Monsieur Guizot Paris 1839, gr. in 8ᵒ, gravures.
[30] It was taken down 1861 and a plaister statue of Tell erected
in its place.
[31] L’illustre Châtelaine des environs de Vaucluse; dissertation et
examen critique de la Laure de Pétrarque. Paris 1842, in 8ᵛᵒ.
[32] As already stated, a large tablet was carried before her on
which her alleged crimes were inscribed.
[33] Namely: Mémoire tiré des archives de Chateaubriand par feu
le Président Ferrand.
[34] Mignet, Amédée Pichot, and W. Stirling.
M. Gachard has rather given the rein, we believe, to his
imagination, and adopts the legend of the funeral obsequies. We
shall see how triumphantly M. Mignet rebuts it.
[35] It was the Venetian, Frederic Badouaro, who conceived the
comical idea of representing Giovanni Torriano as a simple
clockmaker. Cardanus, in book XVII. of his work De Artibus,
mentions a wonderful piece of mechanism constructed by
Torriano.
[36] Henry Coiffier de Ruzé d’Effiat, Marquis de Cinq-Mars,
beheaded at Lyons in 1642 by order of Richelieu. He was secretly
married to Marion Delorme.
 [37] The author of this letter adds in a note: “The Marquis of
Worcester, who is considered by the English to be the inventor of
the steam-engine, appropriated to himself the discovery of
Salomon de Caus and inserted it in a book entitled Century of
Inventions, published in 1663.”
[38] Some very interesting details on Salomon de Caus and on
the honourable appointments he held until his death may be
found in a work of M. L. Dussieux: Les Artistes Français à
l’Étranger, Paris 1856.
[39] Only a very few of the innumerable Histories and Biographies
of Charles V. will be mentioned here.

Transcriber’s Notes:
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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