Critics Look at Issues of Violence and Culture
Pushing Grisly Boundaries Since 1895
By MANOHLA DARGIS
SEX AND VIOLENCE ARE the twin engines that have long fired up American movies and their harshest critics. This isn’t exactly news — or new. In 1934 Francis D. Culkin, a Republican congressman, riding a wave of political and religious outrage against the movies, declared that “steadily the stream of pollution which has flowed forth from Hollywood has become wilder and more turbulent.”
By July 1934 the industry agreed to enforce the Production Code, deciding that self-censorship was better than risking the federally mandated kind. Yet while movies instituted regulations, the industry made sure that its stories were ambiguous enough to contain vice and its comeuppance too. As the historian Tino Balio writes, as early as 1927, the industry understood that if the code was to work, it had to allow the studios to develop a system that was elastic enough to please and appease different viewers. Or, as one insider put it in 1927, movies that worked for “the sophisticated mind but which would mean nothing to the unsophisticated and inexperienced.” Under the code the bad would be punished, but only after they had spent the entire movie flouting the very morals the code enforced.
I wonder what Culkin would have made of Oliver Stone’s “Savages,” a 2012 release about drugs and dudes that opens with a spooky scene in which a killer beheads some men with a chain saw. One problem for those who would prefer their violence less graphically deployed is that big studios historically play it safe by recycling the same stories, character types and bang-bang, shoot-’em-up, kill-or-be-killed, vengeance is mine, yours, ours distractions. The enterprising Web site All Outta Bubblegum, which racks up the dead, mostly in action flicks, estimates that the “killcount” for “Marvel’s The Avengers,” the highest grossing movie last year, is 964 — which I suspect is higher than that for “Savages.” “The Avengers” received a PG-13 rating: “Parents strongly cautioned.” The more explicit “Savages” was rated R for, among its other attractions, “strong brutal and grisly violence.”
If any of this seems shocking, it shouldn’t be. Movies have been transfixed by violence from their beginning. Among the earliest subjects for nonfiction cinema were war, battles and death, with execution films, as the scholar Mary Ann Doane has observed, a popular subgenre. The film pioneer Thomas A. Edison, in an early example of synergistic branding, advertised two innovations at once in his 1901 exploitation item “Execution of Czolgosz, With Panorama of Auburn Prison,” a re-creation of the electrocution of President William McKinley’s assassin. Far more disturbing is “Electrocuting an Elephant” (1903), in which Topsy, a real Coney Island elephant, was killed on camera with 6,600 volts of electricity with help from Edison’s assistants. (The poor creature had been deemed a menace, having killed several men. Edison had other animals publicly electrocuted in his fight against alternating current.)
By the time he fried Topsy, Edison had already turned death into a spectacle, as in “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,” a wee shocker from 1895, when movies were still watched on viewing machines called Kinetoscopes. Ms. Doane observes that the execution film “manifests an intense fascination with the representation of death,” and that contemporary viewers took notice of the paradox of these images in a medium that, after all, captured bodies in their lifelike glory. It is a paradox that has troubled us for more than a century, as we wring our hands and argue whether bloody life imitates bloody art or the reverse. In the end all that remains clear is that whether in stark black or white or deepest red, American movies have been killing characters since 1895 — and that we like to watch.
