I'm thinking about the "splatter" category of horror comedies, where the ridiculous, over-the-top death is the punchline.
It's funny precisely because, to use your turn of phrase, the moral context is very different: precisely because we're in an aesthetic world where it doesn't have weight, where it doesn't have consequences, where the meaninglessness is the joke.
Good point, Robert. Splatter is big right now for exactly these reasons. The Final Destination series, which made $287m this summer, is a good example. The weightlessness you mention can now be found across genres - John Wick, A24 vibe films, comedies - a broad disinterest in the real-world physics of consequence and continuity.
Osgood Perkins, director of the Stephen King adaptation The Monkey (very much in this genre) said something like this: his father was Norman Bates and died of AIDS, his mother died in 9/11, and that's why he's making a movie about violent death as absurdist comedy.
His mother was Berry Berenson, sister of Marisa (Barry Lyndon, Cabaret). She was a passenger on one of the hijacked airplanes.
All this to say that I'm not sure that this mode of filmmaking represents a turning away from the real world so much as a reflection of it. Random, senseless violence is one of the horrors of our world and splatter black comedy is a way to represent it in a fictional context.
That's an interesting thought. I'm not sure if this distinction matters to you, but for me, many of these films feel like random, senseless products of today's world, rather than conscious, thoughtful reflections on it. Better films, like Kristoffer Borgli's Sick of Myself or Alex Russell's Lurker, dramatize the senselessness without succumbing to it.
First off, the "golden age" of cinema gave us plenty of action movies as nihilistic in the violence department as John Wick. Dirty Harry, Damnation Alley, Duel, the ascendency of the Bond franchise, the list goes on. Comparing a character-driven dramatic thriller (Taci Driver) to a pure action movie (John Wick) is false equlivalency, and doesn't make much of a point if unbiased and considered.
Similarly, it's difficult to call The Matrix a movie that glorifies violence more than, say, a Peckinpah film, when the whole movie is about Revolution (also part of the American story) and generational warfare. The sequels naturally dig deeper into this, but the original movie firmly showcased thhe difference between digital violence in the Matrix and real world violence. More to the point, the inspirations were international and extra-cultural, predominantly being influenced by Japanese anime and manga. There's too much of an attempt to make cinema an American cultural throughline without dealing with the international nature of storytelling that began with globalization and was then supercharged by the internet.
Real people will forever affect us more than fictional storytelling - they always have and they always will. The fact that we can now be exposed to people we shouldn't be, and join groups and mindsets that would have been hard to find in the past, this is the key to how the internet has changed us.
Back in 1970 Peter Boyle starred in a movie called JOE about a conservative father who disapproved of the hippies his daughter hung out with, so picked up a shotgum and blew them all away (daughter incouded.) It was intended as a satire on the conservative/liberal divide in the country at the time, but while the film was in post production - and without the public knowing it was coming or what it was about - a father did this exact thing in real life. And newspapers recieved lettters to the editor from other parents spouting nothing but SUPPORT for what this father had done, sharing his hate of hippies and liberals. It was reportted that not one person wrote in against him. The father was ultimately granted leniency by the judge on his case, even though he brough multiple weapons and extra ammunition with him to the killing. The judge also forbade any jury member to see the film JOE, and screened for those who had.
These events, these people., and their surprisingly widespread supporters have always been out there. We just haven't had to be aware of them pre-internet, and people couldn't connect to them as easily. Film is often subtle, nuanced, subtextual, and metatextual more than superficial. The Matrix in no way is about glorifying violence, though you can easily read it as such if only glossing the surface. Real life is people saying precisely what they think, and the rest of us grapsing for possible nuance because we don't want to believe it. Fictional narratives are reactions: it's us trying to express what we're thinking and/or feeling about the world in that moment. It's real life and real life alone that is us showcasing precisely what we are in that moment. I fear this essay in every way is getting those two things competely confused.
Thanks for reading, Dave. I have to confess, you lost me here. I think you may have misunderstood my essay. I’m not arguing that movies cause violence, or that we’ve never seen nihilistic spectacle before. My point is more about how the frameworks around violence in cinema have shifted. Where the internet comes in is not that it simply connects violent people (though it does), but that it collapses the distance between fictional spectacle and real-world atrocity. A livestreamed massacre looks like a video game. A memeified movie scene gets stripped of its narrative weight. That’s the “slop” I’m writing about: not violence per se, but violence reduced to aesthetic jolts, endlessly remixed until it signifies nothing (eg, The Matrix - not the movie itself, but the way it resounds in culture).
So we’re not really disagreeing about whether violent people have always existed. Of course they have. The question is how cinema and the internet have reshaped the way we perceive, consume, and aestheticize violence, and what it means when the moral weight drops out.
Yeah, apologies for the ramble, that last comment was definitely a collection of paragraphs in search of a thesis. But that thesis was quibbling primarily with the "moral weight" suggestion, that it's "dropped out" somehow, which I don't believe it has.
It's too easy an answer, and seems too superficial to see modern cinematic violence as being morally weightless, even merely moreso than in the past. Especially when considering how it supposedly collapses the distance between real world violence - war movies were once pure propoganda, looking nothing like actual war, reflecting nothing of its realities, so we would support and even demand war for glory and honor and whatever. Was that better? Was that more morally weighty? The Golden Age was all about (attempting to) make violence appear more real, more horrible (Godfather, Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now). That can be argued as more weighty, but isn't that also closer to real world atrocity? Why then should being closer to real world atrocity now lead to less weight?
Memeification isn't much different than posters, trailers, and Rambo showing up in the Macy's Day parade. Violence has always been memeified and simplified and propagandized outside of a film itself. Today's youth have a far more build-out moral compass than previous generations: they were the first to balk at the atrocities in Gaza, they are the firmest and most consistent voices on gun control, on less police brutality, better mental health services, equality amongst genders and sexual identities. The Mays code era gave us state sanctioned violence that we rarely questioned, violence against minorities, the deification of authorities. I'm not seeing where this "moral weight" has somehow been dropped, or how the fact that everyone can record a massacre or a movie on an iPhone has somehow changed our framework of violence for the worse or more troubling. All I see is a greater awareness of where violence is most pooled and who bears the greatest brunt.
A kind of tangential thought:
I'm thinking about the "splatter" category of horror comedies, where the ridiculous, over-the-top death is the punchline.
It's funny precisely because, to use your turn of phrase, the moral context is very different: precisely because we're in an aesthetic world where it doesn't have weight, where it doesn't have consequences, where the meaninglessness is the joke.
Good point, Robert. Splatter is big right now for exactly these reasons. The Final Destination series, which made $287m this summer, is a good example. The weightlessness you mention can now be found across genres - John Wick, A24 vibe films, comedies - a broad disinterest in the real-world physics of consequence and continuity.
Osgood Perkins, director of the Stephen King adaptation The Monkey (very much in this genre) said something like this: his father was Norman Bates and died of AIDS, his mother died in 9/11, and that's why he's making a movie about violent death as absurdist comedy.
I knew about his dad being Anthony Perkins but hadn't heard that about his mom - wow.
His mother was Berry Berenson, sister of Marisa (Barry Lyndon, Cabaret). She was a passenger on one of the hijacked airplanes.
All this to say that I'm not sure that this mode of filmmaking represents a turning away from the real world so much as a reflection of it. Random, senseless violence is one of the horrors of our world and splatter black comedy is a way to represent it in a fictional context.
That's an interesting thought. I'm not sure if this distinction matters to you, but for me, many of these films feel like random, senseless products of today's world, rather than conscious, thoughtful reflections on it. Better films, like Kristoffer Borgli's Sick of Myself or Alex Russell's Lurker, dramatize the senselessness without succumbing to it.
I have to quibble with a number of things here.
First off, the "golden age" of cinema gave us plenty of action movies as nihilistic in the violence department as John Wick. Dirty Harry, Damnation Alley, Duel, the ascendency of the Bond franchise, the list goes on. Comparing a character-driven dramatic thriller (Taci Driver) to a pure action movie (John Wick) is false equlivalency, and doesn't make much of a point if unbiased and considered.
Similarly, it's difficult to call The Matrix a movie that glorifies violence more than, say, a Peckinpah film, when the whole movie is about Revolution (also part of the American story) and generational warfare. The sequels naturally dig deeper into this, but the original movie firmly showcased thhe difference between digital violence in the Matrix and real world violence. More to the point, the inspirations were international and extra-cultural, predominantly being influenced by Japanese anime and manga. There's too much of an attempt to make cinema an American cultural throughline without dealing with the international nature of storytelling that began with globalization and was then supercharged by the internet.
Real people will forever affect us more than fictional storytelling - they always have and they always will. The fact that we can now be exposed to people we shouldn't be, and join groups and mindsets that would have been hard to find in the past, this is the key to how the internet has changed us.
Back in 1970 Peter Boyle starred in a movie called JOE about a conservative father who disapproved of the hippies his daughter hung out with, so picked up a shotgum and blew them all away (daughter incouded.) It was intended as a satire on the conservative/liberal divide in the country at the time, but while the film was in post production - and without the public knowing it was coming or what it was about - a father did this exact thing in real life. And newspapers recieved lettters to the editor from other parents spouting nothing but SUPPORT for what this father had done, sharing his hate of hippies and liberals. It was reportted that not one person wrote in against him. The father was ultimately granted leniency by the judge on his case, even though he brough multiple weapons and extra ammunition with him to the killing. The judge also forbade any jury member to see the film JOE, and screened for those who had.
These events, these people., and their surprisingly widespread supporters have always been out there. We just haven't had to be aware of them pre-internet, and people couldn't connect to them as easily. Film is often subtle, nuanced, subtextual, and metatextual more than superficial. The Matrix in no way is about glorifying violence, though you can easily read it as such if only glossing the surface. Real life is people saying precisely what they think, and the rest of us grapsing for possible nuance because we don't want to believe it. Fictional narratives are reactions: it's us trying to express what we're thinking and/or feeling about the world in that moment. It's real life and real life alone that is us showcasing precisely what we are in that moment. I fear this essay in every way is getting those two things competely confused.
Thanks for reading, Dave. I have to confess, you lost me here. I think you may have misunderstood my essay. I’m not arguing that movies cause violence, or that we’ve never seen nihilistic spectacle before. My point is more about how the frameworks around violence in cinema have shifted. Where the internet comes in is not that it simply connects violent people (though it does), but that it collapses the distance between fictional spectacle and real-world atrocity. A livestreamed massacre looks like a video game. A memeified movie scene gets stripped of its narrative weight. That’s the “slop” I’m writing about: not violence per se, but violence reduced to aesthetic jolts, endlessly remixed until it signifies nothing (eg, The Matrix - not the movie itself, but the way it resounds in culture).
So we’re not really disagreeing about whether violent people have always existed. Of course they have. The question is how cinema and the internet have reshaped the way we perceive, consume, and aestheticize violence, and what it means when the moral weight drops out.
Yeah, apologies for the ramble, that last comment was definitely a collection of paragraphs in search of a thesis. But that thesis was quibbling primarily with the "moral weight" suggestion, that it's "dropped out" somehow, which I don't believe it has.
It's too easy an answer, and seems too superficial to see modern cinematic violence as being morally weightless, even merely moreso than in the past. Especially when considering how it supposedly collapses the distance between real world violence - war movies were once pure propoganda, looking nothing like actual war, reflecting nothing of its realities, so we would support and even demand war for glory and honor and whatever. Was that better? Was that more morally weighty? The Golden Age was all about (attempting to) make violence appear more real, more horrible (Godfather, Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now). That can be argued as more weighty, but isn't that also closer to real world atrocity? Why then should being closer to real world atrocity now lead to less weight?
Memeification isn't much different than posters, trailers, and Rambo showing up in the Macy's Day parade. Violence has always been memeified and simplified and propagandized outside of a film itself. Today's youth have a far more build-out moral compass than previous generations: they were the first to balk at the atrocities in Gaza, they are the firmest and most consistent voices on gun control, on less police brutality, better mental health services, equality amongst genders and sexual identities. The Mays code era gave us state sanctioned violence that we rarely questioned, violence against minorities, the deification of authorities. I'm not seeing where this "moral weight" has somehow been dropped, or how the fact that everyone can record a massacre or a movie on an iPhone has somehow changed our framework of violence for the worse or more troubling. All I see is a greater awareness of where violence is most pooled and who bears the greatest brunt.