Life is Cheap
(But Moral Judgements are Expensive)

This previously unpublished essay was delivered as the Keynote talk for a “Violence in Cinema” conference at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, Sydney, Australia, 9 August 1997.

1. Blast From the Past
The other week I took down from the shelf a movie I had taped off late-night TV five years previously, but never watched: a low-budget action film noir directed and co-written by Anthony Mann, Desperate (1947). What nudged me into finally watching this movie was this discovery: in a book published only a couple of years ago (Jean-Pierre Coursodon & Bertrand Tavernier’s massive 50 Years of American Cinema [1995]), Desperate is described as a film containing “violence ... not excluding a certain sadism”.

This immediately intrigued me: we all have some working idea of what a violent, sadistic movie from 1997 or ‘67 looks like … but a violent, sadistic movie from ‘47? There is nothing more salutary and disconcerting than looking at an old violent movie, a movie once designated as violent in another time and another culture. Such a viewing experience immediately alerts you to how screen violence isn’t one, unchanging, obvious thing at all, but a completely constructed category, always with its own codes and conventions. And the construction of violence, the artifice of violence, those codes and conventions, change rapidly and wildly with the tides of history.

I find a particular scene of Desperate – an interrogation scene – completely fascinating. It does indeed impress and shock me, me sitting in 1997, as a violent and brutal scene, in its overall mood and effect. What is notable about this quite brilliantly directed fragment is the diversity of kinds of violence in it. There is direct, graphic violence, rendered in a sudden, extreme, unexpected way: the fist of Raymond Burr (playing Walter Radak) in super close-up, whacking out poor patsy Randall (Steve Brodie).

Far more intricately, there is a whole violence of form, of style, going on right across the sequence. Mann is a filmmaker who really takes the mood, the event, the ethos of violence right into the fine grain of how he shoots and lights, stages and renders action. There’s violence in the choice of angles and edits, violence in the stark spatial distortions and play-offs of foreground and background, violence in the slow, crawling movements of bodies as in the sudden impactful ones.

Above all, there’s violence in the lighting, in the oldest cliché of action-thriller lighting that is here brought magnificently to life: the disturbed, swinging lightbulb that, in an exaggerated way, keeps plunging us in and out of absolute dark and blinding light, like an early strobe-flicker effect.

In terms of the changing history of screen violence, there’s one special aspect of this scene that strikes me as particularly modern and contemporary – an amazing portent of our time and our conventions. And that’s the aspect that my handy reference book was describing as “sadistic”. The sadism arises mainly from a certain hardboiled use of words, language, dialogue. Radak advances menacingly with a broken bottle and starts spreading the dread around; he’s talking creepily about the hero’s “pretty wife”, concluding “she won’t look so good anymore”. This could easily be, with a few minor alterations, a bit of business from a Quentin Tarantino movie, one of those slow-burn moments where a character is preyed upon menacingly – and so is the audience. It’s a sadism aimed at the viewer as well as the fictional character.

Watching this scene from an old movie, and ricocheting in my mind between it and Tarantino, I experienced a memory-flash from my days in secondary school in the mid 1970s. I had a young, basically left-wing, neo-hippie Year 11 teacher in Politics, who looked rather like Daddy Cool’s Ross Wilson. One day, bored and exasperated with trying to teach us kids about the parliamentary system, he decided to amuse himself and us by describing in drooling, graphic detail a scene from a movie that he had just seen and loved. The film happened to be Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973).

And so, here’s this sensitive, radical guy up the front of the classroom recreating a scene in which a bad guy (Mark Rydell as Marty Augustine) prowls around the hapless hero (a modern-day Phillip Marlowe played by Elliot Gould), bottle in hand, raving in a distracted, dissociated manner about how beautiful his girlfriend is. Suddenly, this thug swings around and smashes the bottle into his girlfriend’s face, instead of using it on Marlowe. It’s a really distressing scene; and again, a preying, sadistic kind of spectacle in the way it’s delivered on screen. But I shall never forget the satisfied, roaring laugh of my lefty politics teacher as he quoted the hard-boiled one-liner that goes with this violent action: it’s when the thug summarises what he has done with the words: “I gave my girlfriend a coke-bottle for a nose”.

I’m now wondering, 23 years later, whether my position on screen violence was in some way formed in that classroom on that day – my appreciation for screen violence, for love for it sometimes and, as well, my ambivalence toward it – not to mention the intense combination of urgent passions, irritations and defense mechanisms every time this topic comes up for public discussion.

Let me be perfectly frank. I come from a generation of film lovers and film critics that has a high tolerance and a high regard for screen violence. I often enjoy the spectacle of screen violence – and I actively seek it out, as a certain heightened, paroxysmic form of entertainment. I champion it, too, in public, as a kind of mission. Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, John Woo, Kathryn Bigelow: these are some of the violent filmmakers that I venerate and, in this respect, I am a fairly typical cinephile of a certain persuasion.

I love the cinema of sensation: the cinema of shocks and jolts and attractions, visceral cinema, kinetic cinema. I think that the cinema is – only in part, but an important part – the art of sensation, and I like any subject-matter, any technique, any formal or stylistic exploration that maximises sensation, that digs into it and pushes the boundaries out further.

How seriously do I take this particular kind of screen violence that I venerate? That is a good question. My generation of film lovers and film critics, and even more the next generation that’s come up under me, has developed a pat, public answer to this question – maybe too pat. I say it, Tarantino says it, the anti-censorship lobby all over the world says it: we all say, in chorus, that screen violence is not real violence, and should never be confused with real violence. Movie violence is movie violence. It’s fun, it’s spectacle, it’s make-believe, it’s dramatic metaphor, it’s generic, it’s pure sensation, it’s fantasy.

Nobody who loves and appreciates a certain kind of violent movie wants to be caught dead implying that there’s some direct causal link between the over-the-top, visceral thrills in a John Woo movie and the daily, real traumas of death and suffering that bedevil our planet in crisis. No one who is at all sensitive to the artifice and the texture and the construction of screen violence wants to concur that screen violence, in some brute, indistinct way, desensitises our perceptions, our feelings and our moral sense.

Yet I must confess to you that part of my own ambivalence and uneasiness, whenever it comes to publicly dealing with this topic, derives from the fact that I think the cinephile’s fun-and-spectacle defense of violence has itself become a desperate defense mechanism, a jamming device – a refusal of further thought or discussion. It’s becoming as useless as all those tired old, indiscriminate, anti-violence arguments trotted out endlessly by somber, concerned, finger-wagging moralists in the newspaper columns, on TV and radio – all those completely unconvincing diatribes against Taxi Driver (1976), Trainspotting (1996) or Pulp Fiction (1994) by old farts or young farts, left-wingers or right-wingers … All those commentaries that betray absolutely no knowledge of cinema, its history or conventions – no knowledge, and even less love.

2. From the High Moral Ground ...
But let’s stay on this High Moral Ground of commentary on screen violence for a little while longer. I have publicly complained before about what I see as an obsession within the Australian media with spotting the moral centre of a movie – and cleanly distinguishing those movies that have a defensible, noble centre, a moral conscience, from those that lack any such centre. In the game of Spot the Moral Centre, the quick division usually goes like this: Pulp Fiction has a moral centre, but Killing Zoe (1993) does not; Heavenly Creatures (1994) has a moral centre, but Natural Born Killers (1994) does not. Goodfellas (1990) has a moral centre, but some trashy B movie from your local video store on the same topic probably does not. Once Were Warriors (1994) has a firm moral centre; but the films of Geoffrey Wright have an extremely soft one, if they have one at all.

Basically, this overblown rhetoric comes down to a claim that there are certain movies whose use of violence can be completely justified – and that you can separate these movies from disreputable items where the violence cannot be justified. We are truly inside a hornets’ nest of bad assumptions and wonky binary oppositions here. In fact, we are already mired in complete confusion about what actually constitutes, in any individual case, a violent film, or an instance of violence in a film.

As I suggested through the example of Desperate, screen violence covers many, many things, many conventions and configurations. There is a violent content, depicted violent acts, which can be explicit or not, graphic or not, with many degrees in-between. There are completely artificial and conventionalised forms of violence – cartoon violence, comedy violence – which aim to amuse a knowing spectator familiar with the rules of this particular game, rather than shock or jolt them.

There is the very special kind of violence, again not too serious, that comes with deliberately sick, bad taste humour, or with black comedy – violence that functions often as a parodic gesture, daring you to be so stupid as to take it as some bit of reality – upping the ante of conventional depictions of violence, pushing the limits or blowing a raspberry at politeness and political correctness.

We have to think about how each specific genre defines and utilises its own conventions of violence – I’m constantly amused, and also appalled, whenever some random Z grade slasher movie, for instance, is singled out and condemned or ridiculed in public for exhibiting gratuitous violence – when that gratuity is the sole structure, pleasure and reason for that movie to exist in the first place.

There’s also a violence of form and style, as with kinetic editing and strobe lighting processes, or extremely dense and impactful soundscapes (very prevalent in modern mainstream action cinema). There are subject-matters and themes that necessarily involve violence, such as war. There is violence in the service of dramatic, psychological conflict – as in the films of Scorsese or Paul Schrader – and then there’s violence in the service of a purely kinetic or balletic abstraction, as with all that slow-motion breaking glass and pretty, smoke-filled explosions in Hong Kong action movies.

There is violent effect, a violent or menacing mood, which can be directed more at the audience than at the characters in the film – as in many thrillers and horror films which play with states and structures of suspense or dread. As well, films that show or approach or even just suggest certain behaviours or lifestyles that are confronting, transgressive, amoral – films about drug taking, for instance – are regularly described as violent, beyond the pale, pornographic, even evil.

The instant equation between violence and pornography – as when people start tut-tutting over a ‘pornography of death and killing’ in blockbuster movies – is in fact the laziest, the least accurate or helpful description of violent screen representations that I can think of … But high-ground moralists love to bring it out of their bag, like a rhetorical trump card. We wed something ill-defined (screen violence) to something equally badly defined (porn) and thought stops dead right there.

Screen violence also has a history that remains to be written in any detail. In a public debate where acts of movie violence are often carelessly and hysterically conflated with real crimes of violence, it can be very useful to remind ourselves of the changing artifice of violence in the movies – quite simply because, in the first place, because what was ultra-violent to us yesterday can seem entirely quaint, tame and super-stylised to us today – and the same is bound to happen with whatever is shocking us to the core at present.

Giving us a glimpse into this history, the critics Raymond Durgnat and Judith Bloch (in their 1980 essay “Six Creeds That Won the West”) argue that popular cinema’s great physical, action genres – crime thrillers, swashbucklers, war films and Westerns – are fundamentally and transparently built on a fantasy rendition of violence. Their spectacular gun, sword or knife play belongs to what Durgnat & Bloch call “the realm of impulse, a magic of the wish made deed”. And it’s from this type of fantasy that we derive the classic movie sense that life is cheap on the screen – that death or murder is a throwaway spectacle, ever replayble.

The 1960s, in particular, are a fascinating and under-studied era in the history of screen violence. Jean-Luc Godard is someone who exploited two very different fashions in the screen violence of that era. On the one hand, he was one of the first directors to use (especially in Alphaville, 1965) violence as a Pop Art joke, as an obviously fake spectacle, as a shaggy-dog parody of Hollywood’s conventions. On the other hand, a film of his such as Weekend (1968), with its elliptical and abrasive visions of car mania and cannibalism at World’s End, spoke to a new vision of cinema violence – and a new mission for the spectacle of screen death.

Cinema violence was performing a double-barrelled cultural action, internationally, by the end of the 1960s. Filmmakers used parody and cool and distancing, quotational effects; but they were also driven to reflect on, to express, a torn and convulsing society. This is why, I think, progressive critics of the era went into crazy raptures over the paroxysmic, lyrical, poetic, blood-splattered deaths of Bonnie and Clyde in Arthur Penn’s famous, ground-breaking 1967 film; and why writers of the Norman Mailer ilk celebrated “violence as morality”, as sublime gesture – a rather messier business than spotting the moral centre, I would have to say.

Now, I’ll grant the Moral Centre brigade this much: it’s important to figure out not just that a film is violent, but why it’s violent, what its attitude is towards the violence that it is showing. Because to show or present violence is not necessarily to condone it or celebrate it – and that’s the quick and easy, short-circuiting, bad assumption that so many of or more faint-hearted public commentators continually make.

How often have we had to endure utter nonsense about how David Cronenberg, for instance is an inhuman misogynist because he shows and explores psychotic men and the fantasies they project onto women’s bodies? Personally, I find it a little hard to derive much macho satisfaction from the ending of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991), where the anti-hero (Peter Weller as William Lee, a fictionalised William Burroughs) calmly turns around and shoots his wife (Judy Davis as Joan), as he has already done in reality, and will continue to do forever in his art and imagination.

In fact, so many of the most violent films – I’m thinking of Abel Ferrara’s movies, for instance, Kathryn Bigelow’s, or Cronenberg’s surreal horror films – are in fact pitiless exercises in apocalyptic despair, deliberately taking the spectacle of violence (especially masculine violence) to a point of exhaustion, emptiness, waste. They are not films about heroism but the ruin of heroism.

But maybe – and I’m working towards this thought here – it’s altogether more interesting when we can’t be exactly sure about the why of violence in a movie, and its underlying artistic intention.

The title of this essay – “Life is Cheap (But Moral Judgments are Expensive)” – is a cinephile’s tribute to Wayne Wang’s amazing film about Hong Kong, Life is Cheap … But Toilet Paper is Expensive (1989). Actually, having thought it over a bit, I’d have to say that moral judgments, these days, come pretty cheap, too. They strike me, in many cases, as so much easy public posturing – a way of appearing concerned, sensitive or cultivated. In short, High Moral Ground arguments often, inexorably, seem to me like just another kind of defense mechanism or jamming device, however sincerely, righteously or fervently intended. And their cumulative effect is to shore up a position and block or congeal discussion, rather than take our arguments about screen violence someplace they haven’t already been.

3. ... To the Down and Dirty Badlands
So, what exactly is being repressed or censored in these anxious discussions of the moral centre of violent movies?

I believe it’s a certain complex set of ambiguities and ambivalences that are sparked by, and figured within, violent movies of various stripes. As a matter of fact, I think it is precisely the founding, primal ambiguity of violent movies that prompts all the anxiety about spotting, proclaiming and rewarding films with a moral centre. Because this ambiguity is scary, unmanageable, in a certain way not negotiable – or at least not easily negotiable.

Violence, in a cinema of sensation, carries an inescapable kick or thrill. We enter into a strange, psychological, imaginary space that is highly amoral in its dimensions. Or, at least, moral judgements can be suspended there for a precious, floating moment or two. That thrill, and that amorality, can be pleasurable, but they can also generate a palpable unease at the moment we let ourselves experience them.

I believe that, over a long haul of time, commentators on art, society and culture – not to mention artists and entertainers themselves – have devised some ingenious ways of managing this scary, primal thrill.

The theory of dramatic catharsis – of a violent but ultimately ennobling purging through the spectacle of violence – is one such ingenious theory. Another, altogether ruder ploy was developed in the pop culture badlands of B grade cinema and so-called exploitation movies, in merry genres like the juvenile delinquent films of the 1950s, and in many lowly gangster movies. Here, I’m remembering the good old days when illicit, thrill-kill gangster movies were deemed morally OK if the gangster was shot dead in the street in the final scene, and a neon sign supposedly flashed in every audience member’s mind blaring ‘you see, crime doesn’t pay!’.

We all know that this delivery of morality at the finishing gate of a movie was often just a ploy, a way to secretly have the kicks, but also legitimately, publicly disavow them. But at least, in B movies, it’s an honestly sneaky form of disavowal, rather than a hypocritical, high-culture rationalisation of the pleasures and discomforts of a sensational art.

Now, I know the cinema is not just, not only, the art or arena of sensation. I know it can be reflective and contemplative as well. It’s a growing error of the young fun-spectacle-energy cinephiles of our time to downplay that reflective capacity and champion only the sensational attributes of film. What’s worse, they simplify sensation itself, and tame or restrict the category of fantasy.

One of the biggest problems I have these days with the blithe movie-violence-is-just-movie-fantasy argument is that fantasy is never innocent, never just fun or simple release. Furthermore, I don’t know why we would ever want fantasy to be this innocent or amputated. Fantasy is perverse – some of the time, at least – and it enters into all kinds of devious, displaced and mysterious relations with reality, with the transactions and energies and forces that shape the real world. This has to be true of violent fantasy as much as any other imaginable kind of fantasy, like erotic fantasy, Utopian fantasy or monetary fantasy!

So, I think we have to ask, after all, why there is so much violence in movies today, what it’s doing there – and what it’s doing to us, as well as to the world. But we need to ask these questions in new and supple ways, not the old, useless, moralistic, cause-and-effect ways. We should wonder: why there is this equation in Tarantino’s movies between a Trivial-Pursuit-type obsession with the minutiae of pop culture, and a fascination with a certain mode of glamorous, hilarious, dissociated violence? We need to ask – as Jane Mills has pointedly asked – whether there is enough violence on our screens, given the amount of violence going on around the globe in all kinds of ways on all kinds of levels, and given our urgent need to understand it better, and therefore our urgent need to in some sense immerse ourselves in it.

We need to wonder, in short, whether even the most sensationalist, tasteless violent fantasies of our time – like the gruesome, prurient obsession with serial killers that has seeped up from the Gothic underground into mainstream culture – whether even this sick, disturbing stuff somehow helps us to cope with, to make sense of, a mad and psychotic world. And we do have to think about what some theorists call an ecology of images, of sounds, of stories – therefore what it is we might need to balance out all the violent madness, even just in our minds and imaginations.

I flagged earlier the idea of a useful confusion, ambiguity or ambivalence in our apprehension of instances of screen violence. I don’t believe, personally, that there’s any other way forward in the public discussion of screen violence other than through the murky fog of this constitutive confusion.

I would like to end with a real-life anecdote from the place where I live, indeed the street where I live, in Melbourne: Brunswick St in Fitzroy. Last week, a groovy bookshop named Polyester [it eventually closed in 2016] had its window demolished by – reportedly – a raving fundamentalist, who took great exception to the sexually charged image from a Japanese manga comic emblazoned very large on it. The image was of a young girl about to unzip the jeans of another young girl who is tied up, blindfolded, and maybe (just maybe) a little scared and nervous.

A very thoughtful letter to the local, suburban newspaper took issue with the front-page, right-on coverage of this whole incident. “No one who has seen the image can deny its strong rape connotations”, wrote this correspondent, Antonia Pont. And she went on to ask a series of pointed discussion questions about the manga image, including: “Why is it interesting? Is violence eroticised in our pop culture? Why is dominance arousing? For whose gaze is the image designed? What if the image had been of two men?”

Now, these are deep and weighty questions for a local rag (but I enthusiastically welcome their appearance in that too-guarded sector of the public sphere). Pont concludes her letter by doing the splits in a very curious and telling way. The image is valuable, she says, if it has a constructive, subversive effect – if it subverts structures that are no longer useful, or are even destructive. But the image is dangerous, she says, if it works only to reinforce sexist, racist and homophobic viewpoints that condone violence against women and rape, eroticising a S&M version of lesbianism for the male gaze.

Faced with that stark and, finally, not very appealing choice between interpretative options, I can only say the thing I most want to say: How could we know whether this violent image is valuable or dangerous, as matter of fact and for all time and for everyone – and why would we want to adjudicate the point?

Isn’t it better to stay a bit open and confused, amoral and undecided on these matters – no matter the inevitable wear and tear on our minds, our hearts, and our sensibilities? What possibilities haven’t we entertained yet, that might take us past either the grim certainties of high moralism, or the vacuum-sealed satisfactions of pure sensation?

© Adrian Martin August 1997