Should We Stop Making Violent Movies? (Full Article)

To discover the possibility that the work one has devoted one’s entire life to is unnecessary or even detrimental to the existence of human society may come as a dreadful shock, but it is an issue that every action filmmaker must face at some point in his or her life. Having been fascinated with action sequences in film and aspiring to replicate them throughout the entire latter portion of my teenage years, the idea that pursuing this craft is bad and perfecting it even worse in the grand scheme of the universe causes me to agonize at long stretches over the significance of the work that I aim to achieve. With the entire collective genre of the action film shouldering the burden of countless accusations – the promotion and influencing of violence throughout the world and the desensitizing of the world’s youth to violent subject material notwithstanding – one would wonder if it would be better that action movies or movies containing violence in any shape or form were completely erased from the face of the planet. But certainly, I tell myself, a genre that has generated such overwhelming appeal throughout the history of cinema must be good for something; a convincing argument in our defense seems constantly to be at the tip of my tongue, but it invariably dissolves as I struggle to put it to words. In my pursuit to find a justification for the existence of the action film, I have realized that trying to logically refute many of the common points of concern in regards to the genre is an exercise in futility; the negatives are there, and to ignore or falsely disprove them would be nothing more than to live in a disillusioned fantasy of self-deceit. However, I believe that the first step towards redemption for the art of the action filmmaker is the acceptance of such commonly associated shortcomings and the understanding that they are not as universally negative as they seem.

Reading Lawrence Weschler’s “Valkyries Over Iraq” was a complete nightmare for me in that it communicated effectively and in relatively few words all of the reasons why people like me should not be making movies. Throughout his essay, Weschler synthesizes interviews from various industry members involved in the production of the war films Apocalypse Now (1979) and Jarhead (2005) in order to voice his primary concern with war films as a whole: regardless of intention, even films with the most adamant anti-war messages end up presenting in their depiction of warfare and chaotic battles an almost pornographic allure from which members of the audience will invariably derive a sense of pleasure and violent inspiration. The existence of the epic battlefield setpiece is especially pivotal to this concern – cited by Weschler as the failure of such supposedly anti-war films as Apocalypse Now, with the enormous spectacle of its infamous “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter bombing referred to throughout the essay as an ironic, inspirational piece for overzealous, hot-blooded young soldiers – and the ultimate success of the unconventional Jarhead, which chooses to exclude such scenes entirely. In Weschler’s interview with Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola, Coppola is forced to admit that “to make a film that is truly antiwar, it would not be set anywhere near battlefields or theaters of war, but rather in human situations far from those” (258). The danger in this statement is that it can be extended by association to mean that making movies centered on violence without subconsciously filling onscreen violence with pornographic appeal is not possible if violence is shown in any form.

Faced with such a blindingly logical argument, even I myself, seemingly dismissed in value to the level below that of a pornographer by its words, cannot claim to be capable of completely refuting it. In trying to reconcile myself with the weight of such charges, I bring up in my mind the typical structure of many of the films that I so admire, as in concept form they do not seem to be unhealthy in the slightest. In actuality, a great number of the action films that I study so religiously follow benevolent characters with good intentions faced with situations forced upon them by malevolent circumstances beyond their control; violence resulting is merely incidental. Surely, I tell myself, the depiction of good triumphing over evil through necessary violence is not too terribly unhealthy for the average viewers eyes, but thinking more clearly into the matter, I must admit to myself that such a simple justification is a trap I cannot let myself fall into if I am to be honest with myself – regardless of the underlying themes of righteousness in such films, their highlights remain the violent spectacles that their stories seem to be in opposition to – in fact, believing in such a justification would even further solidify the arguments of Weschler who clearly discusses in his essay the problem of violent appeal in opposition to a film’s message. Taking a film like Michael Mann’s crime thriller Collateral (2004), a film following a hapless cab driver struggling to stop an assassin for hire who is forcing the driver to chauffeur him from hit to hit, into view as my case in point, anyone having seen the film would have a hard time trying to suggest that Michael Mann is trying to persuade people to drive around and commit murders, especially in light of his established reputation throughout his career for trying to represent violence as realistically as possible. However, when the film is brought up amongst its fans, the scenes undergoing the most enthusiastic discussion are almost inevitably the assassin’s calm dispatching of two muggers, or the infamously violent nightclub setpiece in which he must push through a massive crowd of dancers and armed bodyguards in order to reach a target. I, myself, must admit to skipping straight to such scenes whenever I pop the film into my DVD player, and the same could be said of many other movies I own in which cinematic action is present.

Having declared myself beaten in the face of Weschler’s words, many disturbing questions present themselves. Do films containing violent material invariably cause people to take pleasure in and desire violence in their lives? Am I doing the world a disservice by continuing to pursue the work of my passion? Does the collective action filmmaking community lack a significant justification to exist? In wrestling with the burden of such implications of my work, I turn to the advice of my friends in the stunt filmmaking industry, many of whom have already begun devoting their professional careers to the production of action films.

Art appeals to human intuition far more than to reason

–Lucy Van Atta

Amidst the countless heap of ardent opinions thrown at me following my positioning of these questions, I found a particular kinship in the words of Paul Drechsler-Martell. As a professional stunt actor and aspiring action filmmaker, the significance (or lack thereof) of the action film is an integral part of Paul’s life, and, having ruminated himself at great length on the matter in his own personal experiences, he insists that the implications of Weschler’s words are not as fatal as they may seem:

Questioning the necessity of action films is almost like asking ‘why do people pay money to see movies that make them cry?’ What we desire the most in films is to feel; we go through different emotions like happiness, pain, fear, laughter, arousal, sadness, etc. and I think it's silly to think that films should be made only for the positive emotions or only for certain emotions in general.

An audience will naturally tend to seek out the highest emotional point in a film; in a war film, or in any action film in general, this is very likely to be the most violent scene in the story. To say that the appeal that one derives from such violent scenes is pornographic may be true in many ways, but in accepting it as truth, one must also be willing to admit that all other emotional peaks in other genres share an almost identical pornographic appeal as well. In the same way I find myself constantly replaying the most violent scenes in certain films, I am incredibly drawn to the happiest, the most tragic, the most horrifying, the funniest, or the most romantic scenes in others. Much in the same way that I view Collateral, as I watch Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), I find myself forwarding to the heart-rending scene in which the misshapen Edward, embracing the woman he loves in his arms, recalls the death of the loving scientist who created him, but this does not suggest in any way that I desire death and sadness in my life, just as my predilection towards the most tense scenes of Collateral has not caused me to tear up local clubs with a gun in hand. We, as filmgoers, enjoy experiencing emotional extremes in films not because these extremes define who want to be or what we want to happen in our lives, but because something about emotional extremes feels more inexplicably human to us than anything else that could be shown on the screens that we so intently study.

Doubtless, there will be a certain number of outliers amongst the public audience who seek to use cinema as a reference point justifying their own irrational behaviors; violent people seeking violent entertainment will find violent movies with which they feel they can relate, just as people who are wishing to wallow excessively in their own depression, prejudices, ideologies, etc. will seek out corresponding fiction in which they can immerse themselves.

The fact that we designate something as art means that it is art for us, but says nothing about what it is in itself for other people.

–Thomas McEvilley

In reading Terry Tempest Williams’ “A Shark in the Mind of One Contemplating Wilderness,” I discover that Weschler’s argument hits so hard only because he limits himself to the subject of the war film; just as the idea that pornographic appeal extends to all films, the possibility of wildly unconventional interpretations and their resulting influences upon people exists within every genre of film as well. By this rationale, negative influence can be gained from any film or artistic presentation; to be able to account for every last exception would be a battle lost from the beginning. There will always be another person who thinks it is ok to be racist, uncouth, and offensive to others after watching too much Comedy Central or another teenage girl who finds herself molding herself into the image of the superficial high school divas of Mean Girls (2004), but if we are to remove an entire genre of films from the shelves, then who is to say that next week, another genre won’t be subject to extinguishing? If we are to extinguish films entirely, who is to say that music or books will be safe once people begin to blame the emotional problems of the world upon them? To erase our fantasies and our experiences of the emotional extremes that we so love would be to destroy what makes us human. Now, after carefully analyzing this thought and its implications, I find that the answers I was looking for had been waiting for me in the pages of Weschler’s essay all along. Anthony Swofford himself admits that “art should expand rather than constrict people’s moral range,” and to these words, I cannot agree more.


--Jon Truei (Honorary Super Dude!)