Theatre of Mayhem

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“It is necessary to recognize that acts of extreme violence and cruelty do not represent merely an odd or marginal and private retreat into barbarism. On the contrary, warlike values and the social mindset they legitimate have become the primary currency of a market-driven culture that takes as its model a Darwinian shark tank in which only the strongest survive. In a neoliberal order in which vengeance and revenge seem to be the most cherished values in a “social order organized around the brute necessity of survival,” violence becomes both a legitimate mediating force and one of the few remaining sources of pleasure.11 At work in the new hyper-social Darwinism is a view of the Other as the enemy, an all-too-quick willingness in the name of war to embrace the dehumanization of the Other, and an all-too-easy acceptance of violence, however extreme, as routine and normalized. As many theorists have observed, the production of extreme violence in its various incarnations is now a source of profit for Hollywood moguls, mainstream news, popular culture, the corporate-controlled entertainment industry, and a major market for the defense industries.”
Henry Giroux

Sgt Robert Bales

Sgt Robert Bales

The question of violence in popular culture is now inescapable. The sheer volume of gun shots, explosions, car wrecks, torture, beatings, and the amount of noise this generates; the screams, crashes, and automatic weapons fire is available and screened pretty much 24-7. The US public lives in an enclosed psychic cell of mayhem. This is largely the point of Giroux’s excellent article at Monthly Review.

“Within this network of alignments, risk and danger combine with myth and fantasy to stoke the seductions of sadomasochistic violence, echoing the fundamental values of the fascist state in which aesthetics dissolves into pathology and a carnival of cruelty. How else to explain the emergence of superhero films that increasingly contain deep authoritarian strains, films that appear to have a deep hold on their dutifully submissive audiences. The film critic A. O. Scott has argued that films such as Spider-Man, Dark Knight, and The Avengers are marked by a “hectic emptiness,” “bloated cynicism,” and “function primarily as dutiful corporate citizens…serving private interests.” But most important, they reinforce the increasingly popular notion that “the price of entertainment is obedience.” There is more at work here than what Scott calls “imaginative decadence.” There is also the seductive lure and appeal of the authoritarian personality, which runs deep in U.S. culture and finds its emergence in the longing for hyper-masculine superheroes who merge vigilante justice with anti-democratic values.”

How is it, in the face of daily news items about not just foreign wars (for those are easy to project as something that happens far away, to people unlike us, and conducted by *experts* on such matters) but on domestic acts of violence, by both police and the public themselves, there is really so little reaction. Increasingly the violence doesn’t even try to hide itself as the work of *criminals* (perhaps because that term is openly fluid these days) but is the work of high school kids, workers, unhappy spouses, or parents. The shock of three three women discovered in a suburban home in Cleveland, captives for over a decade, was really only mild shock for the narrative had been played out in numerous films and TV cop shows. One wonders if Ariel Castro in fact had either directly, or indirectly, internalized such tropes and after letting it germinate for years, gave it expression in real life. The dominant brother of three (if we are to believe the police) had worked as a school bus driver for years. The lurid tabloid story of Jodi Arias grabbed some interest, because, again, the plot was familiar. Bleach blond seductress, Methamphetamine, small economically depressed town. Even Travis Alexander’s career as a motivational speaker felt a bit familiar. Where do kitsch TV shows and reality meet, or rather in what ways do they cross pollinate?

The U.S. culture of violence cuts across both gender and class, although both are mediating factors and significant ones if one is attempting to trace certain specific branches of violence and their origins. There is infrequent discussion of Capitalism’s inherent violence. The logic of Capital is to WIN….and that means beating the competition. There is an almost embarrassed silence on this subject; for it’s easier to discuss gun control, or video games, or even war, rather than examine the fact that capitalism is now reaching its optimal incarnation as pure consolidated structural violence, a distilled tightened ratio of inequality and punishment. It is a mental critical mass, and the ruthless ethos of capital, especially in its Wall Street hedge fund practioners, permeates consciousness, and it can be seen clearly in Hollywood film, as well as in daily life, in the routines at the water cooler (except many offices did away with water coolers) or in lunch rooms, or back alleys during cigarette breaks.

Jodi Arias

Jodi Arias

What Giroux describes as the media depiction of hyper masculine protagonists, is right, but it’s not the entire story. The Hollywood super heroes of today are not just “hyper masculine”, but also oddly un-alive. They lack nuance, and the plastic surgery and photoshopping, and CGI, and post production tweeking, all contribute to this feeling of simulacra. When I wrote about automation, about technology, I was aware of what was being stolen from daily life, the pride in crafts or learned skills, in traditions handed down through families. This may have included (well, it DID include) the most brutalizing and dangerous work sometimes, but it allowed for a culture that created folk legends, heroes and mythic symbols for the laboring class. As Capital has financialized, it has also become more abstract, and post industrial Capitalism has destroyed community and torn apart traditions in the name of “progress” — and one of the problems of the middle brow reaction to hyper-violence has been to create as corrective, a de-masculinized low testosterone masculinity of adjustment. It is the revenge of the dying white (nerd) patriarch. The pater familias without his family — this is, I suspect, why the adjective “hollow” continues to crop up so often when describing cultural product in the 21st century. The grown but still childish impersonater of adulthood.

This white male rage is manifested in state violence firstly. No matter how many black cops one can find, police brutality is a white man’s crime. And its directed against black and brown, and poor. The Imperialist wars of Empire are also white wars directed against foreigners with odd habits and beliefs… relatively powerless, who once knew their place as obedient colonial subjects.

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So, if Dracula was the repressed Victorian libido (Moretti), then the endless stream of super hero films today are the post modern weakened libido in acts of over-compensation. One of the best films of the first decade of the new century was Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus, the story of TV actor Bob Crane, and his unseemly murder.

It is like watching some awful confession from people you know slightly, but don’t want to know about deeply. It is the stripping away of the hyper masculine to reveal the terminal dissatisfaction and depression at the heart of so many adult men and their idea of the pursuit of happiness. It is the portrait of a stunted American dream.

That despair, that panic, of course must be shot through a socially acceptable prism, or filter, in most mainstream film or theatre. For the 21st century, that prism is usually science, progress, technology. The virility so compromised in daily life, its lack felt so acutely by studio execs, is blown out of proportion in creations such as Iron Man, or Super Man, or the Dark Knight. Or it is couched in a faux history of romanticized violence, Boardwalk Empire, or any of another twenty Mafia and gangster franchises.

In Auto Focus, the shriveling potency felt by white male America is reflected in a compulsive womanizing second tier TV actor. I can think of few films, actually, as disturbing as Auto Focus.

300 (2007) Dr. Zach Snyder

300 (2007) Dr. Zach Snyder


The strange nostalgia for cold war style, the ironic hipster subsuming of shiny shark skin coats and Brillcreame is perhaps a defense mechanism after all. The Huge Hefner anachronistic martini at quarter to two, James Bond, the Rat Pack, the lounge act; all interrupted oddly by the sixties, when drugs replaced booze and the trauma of the Viet Nam war slashed across the collective, and civil rights and assasination — finally as it came to an end, and the state scurried in search of ways to prevent it happening again, and as the long hair and styles receded and Madison Avenue regrouped and opened new fronts in the culture wars, the hollow men were left, with their perception of ownership rattled. Without tracking the entire evolution of white man privilege, and how it expresses itself culturally, the companion product to those hyper violent comic book heroes, or the sadistic vigilante cop was the earnest Liberal reformer film. Redford’s output is a useful gauge, from Brubaker to The Natural, to The Legend of Bagger Vance, but perhaps most clearly in Up Close and Personal; the middle brow white paternal code operates in complete arrogance and blindess. I singled out Up Close and Personal, for the original script by John Gregory Dunne, and based on the life of news anchor Jessica Savitch, had been worked on for eight years, chronicling the life of the pill popping self destructive network news-blond talking head –and meant as a dissection of the privileged class, its superficial grasp of reality, and the corporate domination and control of the “news”. In the end, however, Redford and the studio turned it into a A Star is Born redux. No reason to produce bummer buzz kill. White world doesn’t like to advertise what it sees as it failures.

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The Natural appealed to that specific creepy white liberal fixation with baseball as nostalgic pastime. It conjurs a pastoral setting that never existed, but which functions in White mythology as if it did (this season 30% of MLB players are foreign born, the majority from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela). There is in Redford such a reflex sentimentality, such a turgid sensibility, that anything he touches becomes a flaccid valentine to the good intentions and abilities of rich white people.

Bagger Vance is just another “magical negro” product, starring that most white of black actors, Will Smith.

I should add, as a footnote, Lions to Lambs, made in 2007, because while its a coda project in Redford’s long tedious career, it is also, possibly, the most representative film for the Democratic Party interventionist belief system. This is the ‘liberal who loves war’ syndrome (and as an added treat you get to see Redford trying to act all ‘professor’ey.).

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The point here is that as the liberal reformer hero gradually gave way in the face of Reaganomics and the various hedge fund schemes, as wealth became more polarized, and as the economy, such as it was, became ever more pegged to the Pentagon and base building and the defense industry, the white liberal hero felt (more) tumescent. It might be interesting to track the rise of MMA contests and its inter-relationship with DC and Marvell comics franchises. Hyper violent unmediated blood sport, and the new barely mediated vigilante fascism. In fact, it’s interesting to clock the entire recent Batman franchise.

The Natural, 1984, Dr. Robert Redford

The Natural, 1984, Dr. Robert Redford

The Tim Burton Batman film, with Michael Keaton came out in 1989, the follow up a couple years later. Following on this came installments by Joel Schumacher, and eventually Chris Nolan. The Burton films, however, marked the liberal sensibility’s entree into the hyper-reactionary world of Bruce Wayne, billionaire vigilante. Burton, himself a sort of irony laden art school hipster, found a seamless meeting of liberal style and fascist content. In fact, I suppose the liberal codes were barely there, even in that original Keaton version. Still, they retained a sense of humor, and seemed pitched clearly at a youth market. Schumacher, another Hollywood liberal, followed the same formula, basically, with less energy, and then with Nolan, something shifted, as if the studio understood an era of Redford soft paternalism was over. Nolan was the new cruise missile left, a Clinton era filmmaker now expressing the Bush era War on Terror moral vacuity. Nolan’s Batman was more jingoistic, more racist, and more militarist. Each subsequent installment of the series felt more sadistic, and more nihilistic. But its nihilism was the negation of life, not an expression of anguish. It WAS nihilistic. They were also humorless, and they seemed to target an adult demographic (well, as if this culture has any adults left in it). They were portentious self important fascist storytelling made by a self important director (son of an ad copy writer for a marketing firm…same as Guy Ritchie, interestingly) with grand Wellesian delusions.

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At the same time as the Burton Batman, the first MMA contests were being staged and getting cable deals — the era of the Gracie family momentary monopoly. Previously, violence in sport had had to mediated, even if barely, as in boxing. The full on embrace of pure punishment coincided, I think, with liberalism’s strategy of layering its apologia for violence with a recipe of ironic codes. If art school far-out-ness, complete with funny eye glass frames, could create openly fascist entertainments, then why not relax all the nozzle settings for sublimation. David Lynch (who in his spare time owns and runs very profitable business schools in Europe) was the exemplar of the faux liberal, serving undergraduate taste perfectly. I will say, Mulholland Drive did contain enough of anti-Hollywood feeling to rise to the level of genuine auteur work. Lynch was never about much to begin with, from Eraserhead to Blue Velvet, this was the work of a middle brow conformist who gave educated liberal college kids a safe sort of protest to their parents digging on Brubaker.

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In any event, this brings us back to the current hyper violence of Capital. There are no refuges in which to escape, for this last optimal epoch for Capital, for dying Empire, for the frenzy of carnage and blood, it is the anti-Dionysian, a death cult, a infectious final wheeze that seems unable to satiate itself. It does resemble a bad sci fi horror film. It is the invasion of the body snatchers, but it is the pods created by the irrational drives of Capital. The canonizing of profit as a justifiable motive for murder, for sadism and torture, is now openly expressed. Bruce Wayne’s mission no longer seemed about justice, but about the cleansing of the the poor from Gotham City. It began to feel like a de-populating, an ethnic cleansing as much as anything.

Ariel Castro's house, Cleveland

Ariel Castro’s house, Cleveland

Nolan is now serving as producer on Man of Steel, the latest Superman film, directed by arch reactionary Zach Snyder. The final small tiles have fallen off the facade, and we have reached absolute totalitarian kitsch.

Snyder’s real breakthrough film, remember, was 300, as fully fascistic and racist a film as one might find in the last decade, but its violence was a violence to the aesthetic and taste, as well, and even more dehumanizing than Nolan’s baroque authoritarianism in its lurid vulgarity and eroticized warfare. Snyder may be the perfect director for Obama’s America. He is tasteless, vulgar, and war mongering. The white guy who liked to read comic books and now gets to make big comic books himself. Today’s Hollywood feels more and more like a repository for the resentments and anger of infantile white boys (i.e. studio execs).
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As Giroux points out, the most concise example of this new madness on the non cultural front is perhaps Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, who strolled out from his base in Kandahar and in an orgy of violence cut down seventeen villagers, most of them children and women. Bates is this era’s Lt Calley. But Bates feels more possessed, more confused as well. He strolled back to base and turned himself in.

Domestically, the state of siege can be found at schools, even at pre-schools, at least if you are black or brown.
http://www.ctmirror.org/story/hundreds-kindergarten-students-suspended-school#.UZaqIzaS61p.facebook

The open intentions of turning schools into prison compounds found a receptive audience in the hyper resentful American white man. In New York, you have the stop and frisk, and those justifications that are part of the entire societal back drop now….The War on Terror… are not really meant to be taken at face value. The entire society, even those in opposition, seem to read the meta-narrative first, and only later think to digest the actual meaning of the top text, of the story. And really, the meta narrative is the same: America is a force for good, making money is blessed by God, and minorities should be kept in line (or given how they have uncontrollable sexual urges, they might become the *majority*). That Israeli soldiers routinely shoot children, and that drone strikes employ “double taps” to ensure those trying to help their injured or dying friends are murdered, too, is reported daily and people barely react is testament to the moral vacuum in which we live.

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Presumably just knowing someone the U.S. *THINKS* might be a terrorist is enough to get killed. In other words, we kill who the fuck we want, and if you don’t like it, well, fuck off. Popular entertainment remains (and intensifies) white people killing, beating up, and driving cars very fast. Film franchises such as Fast and Furious, now in its 6th or 7th installment, are presented as morality plays — simple soap opera level narratives that are squeezed in between car chases and all with the exaggerated and magnified sound of car engines. The message is always the same, the U.S. military is the highest moral achievement possible. Support your Troops. Hoo-ha. Moral nullity meets aesthetic nullity.

There is now a formatting of the new Empire’s user-manual: torture, extrajudicial murder, surveillance, and the increasing automation of murder means this stretching of the very idea of ethics and morality to the point where reason itself is colonized, and made to conform. And the culture industry increasingly reflects this. Directors such as Chris Nolan, Zach Snyder, Michael Bay, Guy Ritchie, and really Joss Whedon, and J.J. Abrams too, are producing much the same film. Nolan and Snyder are the hard authoritarian end of the spectrum, and Whedon and Abrams the soft liberal authoritarian end, but really, the same message permeates this work — the necessity for state violence, masculinity IS violence, authority must use power to keep (fill in blank…aliens, criminals, viruses, women…) in line. A discussion of the misogyny in the films from these directors would necessitate another whole post, but I think it would be worthwhile to look at women in DC and Marvell comics. One must develop aesthetic resistance — a pedagogy of radical culture. The conclusion I leave to Giroux:

“Any viable challenge to the new authoritarianism and its theater of cruelty and violence must include developing a variety of cultural discourses and sites where new modes of agency can be imagined and enacted, particularly as they work to reconfigure a new collective subject, modes of sociality, and “alternative conceptualizations of the self and its relationship to others.”

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Comments

  1. Fascinating article! I was just reading the ‘Tate Etc’ in the loo and saw that Bacon image. I went to the Tate Britain yesterday and also saw this (second image down) http://www.theartsdesk.com/visual-arts/damien-hirst-tate-modern

    The piece, one of Hirst’s best called something about a self-imposed prison, is really amazing. You can’t see from the article, but the desk is in these welded shut metal girders and there is a package of cigarettes on the desk with one cigarette out and a lighter. There are two planes of glass and metal from the front-facing view. It really FREAKED me out and MADE ME GO WOW: that is some damn good (and simple art).

    As you mention above we have these symptoms and notions about militarism that really are part-n-parcel to the entire matrices of power and control from the family to the government. Feminism has been, in my opinion, the biggest bastion against war-culture since the early 60s. Feminists, almost consistently but not always of course, noted early on the patriarchal and sadistically MALE world of the Military-Industrial-Complex! Nuns (and some priests) in the US became very radicalised against weapons and the ‘arms race!’ Even the Catholic women were on board! And then of course there is Susan Sontag, Emma Goldman, (the SUPER BRAVE) Jeannette Pickering Rankin, etc…

    The (mainstream) Civil Rights movement, with the exception of Dr. King and others wanted to focus more on the basics of legalisms, and this ended up having little effect (for both black people and against the military)

    The (mainstream) LGBT movement moved toward legalism as well… fail… Whilst the Feminist movement did both of these in some respects, it was, in my embryonic analysis the only one to sustain an anti-war critique, saddle up with the anti-war movement and show that peace means more than no war – peace in the home, etc…. What’s your thoughts on feminisms and the types of oppressions you discuss that are on the mise en scene and being brought culturally to bear?

  2. John Steppling says:

    @eilif:

    when i needed a 4f to get out of the draft…circa 1969……i went to the women against the draft…….who helped you either get to canada, or find doctors who would cooperate in finding something wrong with you to get out of the draft. My number in the lottery came up 6th I think, very high, so I needed help. They sent me to a doctor who discovered I still wet the bed at 18,…..I hadnt even known. 🙂 And i got a 4f. I think though, in a larger perspective, you have these really horrid sort of faux leftists….what ed herman called the Cruise Missile Left…..samantha power, Jodi Dean, and the like…..supporters of hillary clinton…. or suzanne nossell (chris hedges wrote about her vis a vis PEN )..and i remember during the Balkans and later the Milosevic trial, the apologists for NATO came largely from this group of Clintonites. They have carved out a strong public identity —(by the way, Diana Johnstone is the best journalist still, on the balkans, and a perfect corrective to Power and the rest)……anyway, I think feminism got partly compromised by white college educated bourgeois feminists….really liberals with strong links to the Democratic Party. That said, YES, I would agree that many many feminists, earlier mostly, made clear the connections between violence and constructs of masculinity and power. And authoritarian apparatuses. That was a crucial corrective. The question of legalism is complex. I have to think through this topic a bit before responding. I mean, King and Malcolm came at it from different directions, but it points to the distinctions between gender and class, and the importance of intelligent analysis of both. I think often you get this Branding of movements……and this white feminisim forgets for example the prison complex and its effect on families …mostly black and brown, and always poor. Or immigration rights etc. Or education. And of course going back to Rankin, and emma goldman…..so yeah, the militarism is deeply entrenched though culturally (Stan Goff has written great stuff on this)….its a deep deep system of signs and narratives for most people and its a constant stream of propaganda that reinforces these things. SO you see the Gay Pride march in SF pull back on bradley Manning as grand marshall………….http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/27/bradley-manning-sf-gay-pride

    This became a very telling incident……and lisa williams letter very telling. Anyway, the violence against women….and kirby dick’s documentary The Silent War, is excellent on rape in the military…..is so huge a topic, so representative of how this male privilege operates, and its operating in that Williams letter, and in corporate narrative constantly. There is also, of course, a deep puritanism in America….always has been and its not receded at all. This sex negative shaming of unwed mothers or single mothers, and working mothers., as well as this constant repetition of the bootstraps myth……..http://www.thenation.com/blog/174449/first-couples-post-racial-bootstraps-myth#ixzz2TwfiBbFM

  3. John, thank you for your analyses. Good stuff. Yes, I am in complete agreement, the Clinton-Albright-Powers-Condi Rice bunch all came out of the same cooker: that being the bread machine that turns people into these twisted limbs of the military industrial complex – the same machine that turns the ‘doughy’ bill Clinton into ‘the Bill with the Ball-kans.’ And men are doing terrible things to themselves and other women at the ‘lower end’ of the US spectrum, and some of the women are supporting this – we see this ‘return to traditional values feminism’ in the likes of the Tea Party activists – many of them women – and, of course, in Sarah Palin who went ‘rogue.’ In fact, if we are to believe her press advisors her union-husband Todd is out on the snow-mobile fishing for the family meal right now, and this is not a jab at Palin from a hyperbolic state – this is prolly close to something like ‘fact.’ There has been a ‘feminism’ of the poor, white woman – and this is epitomised in Sarah Palin, and the ‘feminism’ for the upper middle class white woman, well that too has it analogy with Hillary Clinton. That said, these two women represent edifices that don’t seem to be too populated by women. In fact, their ‘base’ of support is generally the male-dominated home(bodyness) of Palin-vision and/or the Military Industrial Complex…. in the Case of both Palin and Clinton and even more egregiously in the ‘it’s worth the cost’ Madame ‘Excuse me, that’s Genocide’ Albright *cough*

    SF pride should be ashamed of itself. I am disgusted with sexuality in general, and have moved myself into the asexual category altogether considering the power-relations, communication networks, digital-drug plugs, etc. I am out of the scene, and politically I am with some segments of the mainstream gay rights movement…. marriage, yes; hate crimes legislation, NO; military acceptance – to go to your first remark – NO; So I am in the ‘queer fringe’ occupied by people like Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (do your know ze’s work?) or Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Yasmin Nair…. And the women are still fighting – I am saying FEMINISM is the DEATH of CAPITALISM – it is really, when exercised in all its glory – with women of colour, queer women, women with disabilities, gender queers, androgynous isolates (like myself) – when ‘we’ unite (which means stepping back from gender/sex essentialism and legalism)… BAM!

  4. Henry Giroux says:

    John, wonderful article. Incisive and brave.

    Thanks for writing.

    HAG

  5. Corrrection …kirby dick’s film about rape in the military is called The INVISIBLE War.
    Your catalog of filmed violence in service of fascism is truly impressive John, and had me engaging in a certain nostalgia for the “pure” Dionysian violence of 70’s horror films; Cronenberg’s early work, Tobe Hooper’s first film (Texas Chainsaw M) and the twisted and distinctively anti-bourgeois Last House on the Left, to more heady and refined work like Kubrick’s Shining. The subversive messaging and weird jouissance of what was once a subculture into the remakes and series which transformed the horror genre into pure, no-comment sadism (Saw 1, 2, etc) or banality –youve commented a bit on The Walking Dead–is a further illustration of the rigorous enforcement of authoritarian values in the entertainment industry, where any critical analysis not in service of marketing is deeply discouraged.

    re Ellif’s comments…after some 40 years of struggling thru the world of work as a woman in a male-dominated industry, it is clear that dropping out–renunciation on all levels–would have been a smarter, bolder more radical course! All desire has been permeated and polluted with concerns of Capital and as such, all desire needs to be somehow liberated. I wish her the best and also have the aspiration that all women–and men–can ultimately confront and realize a solution.

  6. john steppling says:

    @rita….yeah, of course, Invisible War (the disk jacket is right on the table in front of me and i still wrote it wrong).
    I intend to write more about qualities of violence (in a sense). At one end is Saw et al….but in a weird way, that troubles me less than some other things, because it is unadorned by any mediating factors, its just sadism porn. But early Cronenberg is an interesting topic. Even up to Videodrome…a film in which the quality of violence is partly the subject matter. I think Cronenberg is sort of asking what does this stuff do to us. The red room broadcast they pick up — and I think he had no answer, but its a genuine question asked, artistically, narratively, in a relevant manner., There is also this sub genre of paperback, True Crime….and its an entire shelf now in most bookstores. And i admit a sort of fascination with it myself, mostly I think because there is always something telling in the (however adumbrated) the social analysis and description. But you can go back to In Cold Blood, or Executioner’s Song for work that probed the nature and quality of violence. The causes and implications socially. Or Blood Meridian…and I think it has to do with, and it is a crucial sort of question, with that sense of consequences, for the creator of the work, for the characters, for everything, and work that serves up violence as decoration, or as, worse, an expression of bravery or courage, in and of itself. They often exist together. The cartoon violence of a Bruce Willis film say, is sub-cartoon. Its just infantile, and normalizes the *idea* of violence as natural, as inevitable, or as fun. A film such as A Prophet, does the opposite. It is posited as unnatural, as counter to any spiritual project, and it haunts those involved — it haunts society. McCarthy is doing much the same thing. The landscape becomes soaked in blood, in vengeance, and there is a horrible irredeemable price, and as soon as that is laid before us, the other registers of violence connect — a Pinter or a Kafka, and we see nature, landscape, and history, as repositories for these hauntings. Its a profound subject, or a thomas bernhard as another example. So, the commerical manufacture of this violence as decor, as natural, as heroic, as masculine, etc etc etc, is quite distinct from a sober look at the horror and how we are implicated, or often causes of it., though usually it is a recognition firstly of state domination. This is why I wrote that stuff on Redford (there are obviously many many others ) where in a way, that work is MORE dishonest than Bruce willis or Saw. And it is within that realm of cultural dishonesty that I think the greatest harm occurs.

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