I saw the Time Out review before I went.

I like the look of Wendy too.

Did you see Rachel getting married? I'm a long-time fan of Debra Winger.

Z

Waxy,

First off, I agree with your basic premise. I don't want to see freedom of choice disappear, and you're right that the cat is out of the bag anyway.

However, I'm not sure I agree with your contention that there are no cases of movie violence having inspired real life crime. Without researching this, I'm sure I've read of cases where the perpetrator has admitted copying movie ideas. And surely the danger here is that the effect is usually unconscious - so, people will say they're not affected by films when in fact they are. In the same way (as Zettel says), people claim they're not affected by advertising, when if they weren't, it would have died out decades ago.

I'm also not so sure that it's only the case that a 'criminal is a criminal'. Plenty of people are borderline, to be tipped over to the dark/illegal side when conditions are right. Hence lynch mobs, looters, etc, often worked up by proselytisers, story-tellers - directors?

On another scale, I remember when I was young feeling heavily pressured to look at girls/women in a particular way, i.e. to see them basically as goddesses or whores. This pressure was compounded by movies, TV and fiction at the time. It was a very difficult coercion to resist; most didn't.

Terry

Yes, it's a tricky issue.

No, I didn't see 'Rachel Getting Married' - I was probably on holiday or it was a week with a lot of other good films. I try to avoid any films about women getting married as a rule, though.

Just been watching one called 'The Big Sky' on TV, though - a meandering style of western starring a very young Kirk Douglas. It's mainly about getting a boat up a river. The only female is a Red Indian who doesn't speak English, motivating the action by having to be rescued. There's a mumbling olf timer, a fur trapper, who seems to be give the bulk of the lines.(not Gabby Hayes) I can't be bothered to see the end.

Sheila

Terry, I'm not sure either. I'm not a psychiatrist or a lawyer, I just think that if a person is prone to violence or any other crime, then if all works of art were suddenly non-existant, then something else would trigger them. It's pop psychology, of course, but just how it strikes me.

I take the point about advertising. Advertising works, but then is a violent movie really an advertisement for people to go out and commit violence? I think selling shoes and coercing people to hurt others are two very different things, so while I acknowledge that parallel, I'm not sure it's entirely balanced. Movies and the arts are where we take our vicarious pleasures, and the reason it's called a horror movie, is that most of the healthy-minded audience will feel horrified by what's on screen. There will always be a sick minority inspired to sick deeds by external influence, but I personally don't think censorship makes any difference. Like I said, I think they'd just find some other form of inspiration, but what do I know?

JB

We do have quite tight censorship and other laws that restrict film makers from advocating violence. The nasties always get theirs in the last reel.

I agree about being frightened or shocked is part of the attraction of films (& plays, books, etc)Some theorists suggest this vicarious experience diverts potentially harmful emotions, like a pressure valve.

I think people can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. People don't go out and stab women in showers just because they've watched 'Psycho'.

The amount of stuff my husband has watched in that line, (and dragged me along to) he should be an axe murderer by now.

Maybe all those episodes of 'Larkrise to Candleford' have a balancing effect.

Sheila

Maybe all those episodes of 'Larkrise to Candleford' have a balancing effect.

Lol!

I think what people find hard to decide is whether audiences 'getting off' on big screen sex and violence is healthy or not. When people go to watch Horror movies, they usually go excited at the prospect of shocks and gore, and are therefore getting off on at least the idea of violence. No one can argue with that, surely? But not all films are so morally poised. I've seen one or two where the bad guys just carry on being bad, or are even vindicated.

On another level, it always amazes me that what we love on screen, we condemn in real life - violence, theft, illicit sex. We'll happily cheer for any number of bank robbers, attractive adulterers and sauve killers in the cinema, won't we? It's a funny old world.

JB

Horror has always been pitched at a youthful audience so I guess there are lots of reasons for going - as with many other genres:

- Bravado - among your mates
- Showing off - to the girls
- Using the fear and fright, real or affected, as an excuse to 'get close'
- Extolling the virtues of Horror, the gorier the better to parents and older people precisely because you know it will wind them up.
- Rebellion - against our cosy, safe, danger averse 'prettified' culture
- Conformity to peer-group pressure.

I can see a lot of benefit in may of these reasons. And plenty of reasons not to take it all too seriously. Obviously some cute lawyers will often claim their 'client' was unduly influenced, corrupted into a rape or a murder by this or that movie - and that usually doesn't wash with most juries - rightly.

I don't think anyone seriously believes in the post hoc propter hoc principle here - 'this caused that'.

In many ways I've always hated the Horror genre mostly for aesthetic rather than moral reasons - i.e. it relishes ugliness and takes pleasure in some of the most hateful qualities human being can display, and they do - across cultures and countries and continents.

The more insidious moral effect of movies is not so much in the formulaic violence of the Horror genre but the drip drip drip of images and unexamined assumptions of mainline movies in all genres - especially perhaps formulaic action movies etc.

One fact bugs me; nags away at me: most movies are still funded and controlled by men. I would argue that a disturbing number of Hollywood movies of all genres are misogynistic in that they either exploit or abuse 50% of humanity. THAT seems to me to be worth making a few more serious films about (like In The Cut).

It is inconceivable that anyone nowadays could make movies as systematically racist in underlying assumption and approach - as Hollywood does that are systematically sexist and misogynistic.

When you say JB rightly I think, that many people 'get off' on watching violent movies - Horror or mainstream - I think we are talking mostly of men. Of course loads of women go to horror movies as well but I do wonder whether their reasons are different. Given the 1000's of movies devoted to exploiting these qualities just to make a buck, it seems a shame that so few try to use the medium to explore rather than exploit the phenomenon. And then most infuriating of all, as classically with A Clockwork Orange, everyone gets their knickers in a twist precisely because the violence is real, is ugly, but is shown as a tendency as human beings at least 50% of us are disproportionately drawn to.

I find groups of guys watching sex shows or porn films sad and pathetic - including me on those odd occasions when I am one of them. But at least sex is something we're supposed to get off on. I'm disturbed by the idea that people, usually in groups, 'get off' on violence. The current phenomenon of using mobile phones to video a gang beating up a single invidual is uniquely hateful and the sight of lots of girls joining in even more troubling - even if that view is sort of 'sexist'.

Rambling. Sorry. In the end I guess film is like any other medium books, magazines, music etc - a tool, like a hammer: and it's down to us whether we use it to beat someone's head in or build something. And you can't ban hammers just because some nut misuses one. (I know: headline "Nut screws washers and bolts" - lighten up Z)

But is the same true for guns?

Pass

Z

- Bravado - among your mates - Showing off - to the girls - Using the fear and fright, real or affected, as an excuse to 'get close' - Extolling the virtues of Horror, the gorier the better to parents and older people precisely because you know it will wind them up. - Rebellion - against our cosy, safe, danger averse 'prettified' culture - Conformity to peer-group pressure.

LOL at the last one. Horror's one of my favourite genres. But most of my peer group are little old ladies.

Maybe number three is valid. I'd feel silly sitting on my own in the cinema with my hands over my eyes or yelling with fright at sudden shocks. It makes my partner of forty years or so chuckle to see me 'over-react'.

I find suspense irresistble and unbearable at the same time, but it has to be well-managed in a film or book. Not too many shocks and the suspense not too long drawn-out. I once had to leave a film in the sixties - maybe it was a Hitchcock- where there was a countdown in the middle where audience members with weak hearts were given a chance to go out. I felt cheated by that. Recent Guillermo del Toro films have been good for the kind of suspense where someone - usually a woman - wanders about a dark house looking for the source of a creak.

I think the penultimate motive is nearest to what I believe - the theory that we need to experience horror and fear as a virtual rehearsal for some imagined future crisis. We also need a resolution, to take away the threat, at least for the time being. I think 'catharis' is nearest to this. Certainly it helps to explain why boys are seduced by violent video games - they may feel they are preparing themselves for future conflicts - that they hope, of course, will never happen.

I don't like torture - the Reservoir Dogs scene where they slice the guy's ear off was horrible, and I was shaking at 'Texas China Saw Massacre'. I especially didn't like that film set in the magnetic area of the Australian desert where the villain strung up the victims in a shed. On the other hand, I can see it gets over the message that some men can be pretty sadistic and it's as well not to be too trusting.

With older, physically weaker people the idea of taking up arms against a sea of troubles, so so speak, is less appealing. Maybe they prefer to lull themselves into a belief that the world is what my old mum called 'nicey-bonny' - hence the popularity of 'Larkrise to Candleford' type dramas. Or they don't like to contemplate anything more bothersome than wedding date clashes. Give me a proper disaster, like the world freezing over - or catching fire, any day.

Mabe a taste for horror depends on individual psychology, but there's no shortage of an audience for it.

Sheila

This is such an interesting debate.

Of course, no one has to like Horror, everyone is entitled to their personal taste, but I get uncomfortable at cries of sexism in the industry, because while I'm sure it goes on, I'm also sure there's a whole slew of women only too eager to bare their breasts on screen and fall under the axe of the latest masked maniac. Nobody forces them. They get paid, don't they? And in the literary world, at least, some of our most respected horror, thriller or suspense writers, from Susan Hill to Anne Rice to Poppy Z.Brite, are female. The latter is perhaps the goriest writer I have ever read! I don't think violence - the tendency toward it, the appreciation of it - has anything to do with gender myself, though I'll accept that it is mostly men who make movies, and that women are indeed stereotyped.

The genre has many different facets. Cheap splatter movies, uber-violence, graphic sex - these are only a small part of the ingredients that make up Horror. Cornelia is spot on to point out that, like it or not, Horror is a part of life. Violence happens. Torture goes on every day. The human mind is curious - viscerally, viciously curious - how do those people feel, chained and trapped in a murderer's dungeon? The closest we can come to those experiences, to learn about them, is through art. Art encompasses all. You don't have to like some of those facets, but no one should stand in the way of them, and no one should lose sight of the fact that all these things stem from the human psyche. It's part of us.

We baulk at the cheapness of human life on screen, when some poor actress or actor is cut down or chopped up or mangled or whatever, but it isn't real. Perhaps it's only a reflection of how cheaply we, as human beings, seem to regard the lives of others. We've been happily killing each other for thousands of years, haven't we? In many interesting, painful ways. Maybe Horror, at it's roots, is a subconcious attempt to explore our own dark nature, to probe and to understand, even if it is only to realise that violence itself is a part of that nature.
Dr Jekyll tried to seperate himself from Mr Hyde, and look what happened there! Horror, I think, is often closer to reality than any amount of episodes of Larkrise to Candleford etc. On that, we are agreed.

But most people want comfort from the darkness, rather than face it. Again, human nature, but the more society says this or that is verboten, the more young minds will hungrily explore it. The freely available porn and violence that is all around us is a direct result of censorship in the first place! A board somewhere made something 'bad', and hey presto! everybody wanted it. Now folk complain we have overkill. Well no bloody wonder! I think (hope) that one of the greatest realisations of the modern age will be that censorship doesn't work. Censorship only signposts the route for curious - and on occasion, sick - minds to follow.

By the way, that Australian film you mention Wolf Creek was indeed chilling. Even more so because it is based on a true story.

JB

JB

I agree - such an interesting debate: in fact I guess a series of inter-related debates.

On the gender issue - I'm not so much concerned with the actresses for as you say they are professionals, they're in the business and often don't need a lot of pushing. That issue does arise with very young or inexperienced actresses: I was doubtful about the very young, inexperiecned actress in Lust Caution for example but one must assume the legitimate business deals with agents etc. Personlly I think legalising brothels and prostitution is a no-brainer - to remove the criminality and exploitation, control disease, protect customer and client alike. The only reason against that seems to be that we must be willing to accept tha fact that it has always and will always be there but that we can't accept that openly and act accordingly.

No my problem with mysogyny rather than just sexism is aesthetic and the moral dimension that draws us close to - women as things, objects, to be violently dominated and of course the diusturbing fact that across the millenia, across cultures and in all nations - rape is almost the universal crime. I don't want to deny these often brutal facts of life but there is a moral difference worth fighting for, between exploiting the worst of human nature to turn out a product to make money rather than exploring these deep and dark areas of our psyches in order perhaps to understand them better.

There is a test case on the violence issue: I explored this a bit in my review of Jarhead last year. Isn't there something weird about that fact the we will spend $100 million dollars to re-create as nearly as possible the awfulness of combat etc to produce an 'entertainment' product that we will spend money to buy making a massive profit for someone - BUT we won't watch the horrific war footage of REAL violence in combat. One wonders whether we would actual be ABLE to wage wars so easily if the REALITY of it were shown to us in our homes. Ever since the technologisation (ugh) of war in WW1 and subsequently the detachemnt of the action and its leathal consequence has enabled us to maintain a mental distance between the action and the mass destruction it causes. The Enola Gay syndrome.

These are difficult questions but the film footage exists - we are just not willing to insist on it being shown so we can preserve a self-deception that the brave men and women who have experienced this horror directly cannot pretend to themselves.

We massively censor REAL film footage to a degree we would find totally unacceptable in the movies.

Surreal.

Z

It's crazy, isn't it? Hollywood glamourises war all the time, turning it into something heroic, something where men (sometimes women, but usually men) can 'prove their mettle' and indeed 'become men', against any number of 'evil' foes that the US are currently seeking to deride. Real life is never that black and white, and anyone reading a little into the subject, or watching the footage you mention, can easily identify that war is not glamourous or something to feel proud of. It's a sick undertaking, a waste of human life, and solves nothing - if it did, why are we still fighting wars? Does Hollywood seek to justify US military action abroad? I think it does. I think Hollywood has been doing that since the 50's. Sadly, most western audiences buy it.

This seperation from fact, turning reality into digestible fiction, is as fascinating as it is perverse. Are our sensitivities being dulled by entertainment in order to make the unacceptable acceptable? Perhaps, but if so, it's already happened. Humankind have hardly mastered its dark side. We fall foul of it all the time. All these themes might make an excellent horror story, but I'm with you on those who employ gratuitous violence in order to make bucks and little else. But is it really their fault? The fact that bucks are there to be made denotes that there is an audience willing to supply those bucks. What we cringe from on screen would severely traumatise us were we to witness it in real life, and that division between the real and the unreal, and our reaction to both, is surely an essential part of the genre. On the moral stance, maybe we need to have the good defined from the bad in bold type. The more we become desensitised, the greater the violence, the greater the shock we require?

J.G.Ballard is big on this theme. His explorations of violence and crime - usually seen as futuristic entertainment, or, in the case of Cocaine Nights, something to define and excite the mediocre lives of the filthy rich - have always resonated with me. Crash, of course, is as seminal and groundbreaking as it is sick and twisted. But we live in a twisted society. There is so much darkness beneath the shiny day-to-day skin. So much that we don't really know. Horror, I think, represents that unknown, and how paper thin the world we're sold on TV actually is.

You'll get superficial, made-for-money art in any genre, but Horror at it's best reminds us that we should watch ourselves as a species. One massive hole in the ozone layer, one all encompassing pathogen, and all this could be over. Ghouls, vampires and ghosts - these have always only ever been the archetypes of what lies within, reminders that we are not perfect, far from it, and must fight our own demons. Ok, it's turned into an essay, and perhaps I'm a touch defensive over a genre I love, but you see, I think Horror is all about the frailty and vulnerability of the human condition, which we seem to forget in our quest for technological immortality and television-imbued Utopian comfort. Horror shakes it's head at all that. Horror lets you know that you're only flesh and blood, and that death comes to all, and not always kindly. If there were ever a greater reminder that we should make the most of life, protect our loved ones, not become too smug and comfortable, and not cause pain to others, Horror is it. Nothing else defines 'evil' so unflinchingly. Nothing else defines the light so clearly.

JB

JB

Eloquent and persuasive. I see where you are coming from and certainly i have been guilty at times in this interesting discussion of conflating importantly different movies and genres to the detriment of the debate.

I don't think we would disagree fundamentally about most individual films: certainly any film achieving if not the exploration then at least the powerful representation of the important points you make about shaking us out of our complacency and self-delusion (the blood and guts reality of life) is worthy of anyone's attention. The Shining and Clockwork Orange being just two.

I'm even trying to understand better the comic/graphic novel genre. I was raised on DG/Marvel etc though I never got into graphic novels. On that front there seems to me more struggling to get out in The Watchmen than I ever saw in Sin City though I know the latter has many devotees. I suppose cinematically what these movies do is through the form itself they undermine the lie of naturalism that invests mainstream cinema images: the form makes it clear that this is representation, imagination - not simple documentary recording. (Godard always reminds us taht we are watching a construct of the imagination, a film, not 'reality'. I also thought Nolan made great use fo the Batman myth in Dark Knight.

Here therefore I find many of the arguments about extreme graphic violence easier to accept. I still find it ugly - but I guess that's part of the point. The easy mixture of sexuality and violence will I think always trouble me: for that reason and others I find Sin City adolescent in tone (not a problem in itself - IF is were made by people of adolescent age) whereas Watchmen clearly had for me throughout, evidence of mature thought. Not sure the film as a whole added up but by report the original graphic novel succeeds better.

I don't think people make money by accident so I'm not too keen on the 'we're only giving people what they want' argument. People make money from good films too - it's just harder. Any artist surely should not be trying to make decisions for other people but simply making people aware of the richness and range of the possible decisions they might make.

If we want a free and demoncratic society strengthened by the freedom of dissent; if we don't want to per impossibile impose change or improvement then surely our artists most of all should be challenging us to do things better, to recognize beauty, respect thought, and hope that will generate braver, wiser, more human decisions.

Long way from the splatter movie - though perhaps not as far as we might think. Thanks for your contribution to the debate - as ever thoughtful and insightful. I don't think I'll ever like Horror movies as a genre but you make a strong case not to pre-judge. That's a kind of progress.

Ta

Z

<Added>

"demoncratic" - how's that for a Freudian slip?

I like what you say about art challenging people to do (see?) better things. You're right to point out that some movies only appeal to the lowest common denominator and appear to wallow there, with little else to recommend them. I just wanted to illustrate that it's only one ray in the spectrum. Classic Horror, especially, deals with some very grand and human themes - the right of man to play God in Frankenstein, the seperation of the lower instincts from the higher in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and of course, why you should never move your family to remote hotels in The Shining.

Graphic novels are interesting. Probably because they arrive in comic-strip form, they've been able (up to now) to get away with some powerful and controversial themes. I can't see Preacher on the cinema screens, for instance, where a hard-drinking priest walks around with the Voice of God. Watchmen did ok on the screen, it wasn't particularly watered down, but the plodding noir element of the book didn't make for the paciest movie. Sin City is uber-noir, isn't it, and certainly more one-track than the others mentioned. Nolan did the right thing. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are closest to the original mythos than any of the preceding movies. So much so that most audiences think it's a 'take', whereas it's actually very faithful to the nub of the comics.

I guess I like horror most as an element, rather than an end in itself. There'll always be no end of movies which have hot young things running around getting diced which seems to serve no apparent purpose other than hot young things running around getting diced, because I guess that's where the money is, and Hollywood, as we all know, is a cynical machine.

I don't have any answers. I just think people should judge for themselves and look out for others where need be i.e. in terms of children and those of sensitive or easily influenced dispositions. Interestingly, our local paper called this film that you've reviewed 'absurd' and 'tasteless'. Thinking about this discussion, the idea of 'tasteful violence' made me raise my eyebrows. At least some of us steer our art beyond those baser boundaries and hope to do something more than shock?

I want to see the film for myself now!

JB







<Added>

Oh, and I like 'demoncratic'. It's probably what they vote for in Hell?

Of course. So would I. My son does too.

Some catch that Catch-22!

Yossarian

our artists most of all should be challenging us to do things better, to recognize beauty, respect thought, and hope that will generate braver, wiser, more human decisions.

I may be misunderstanding here, but this sounds very like the rationale behind the Chinese film censorship board's decisions from the fifties on, when so many films were banned for unacceptable content.

It wasn't just that anti-goverentment criticism was banned - that would have been easy. It was more a question of emphasis - anything depicting negative or unpleasant issues- crime, sexual activity or negative emotions were banned. The emphasis, it was implied but never stated, should be on the positive and the upbeat: people striving and succeeding in building a newer, braver society. Trouble was, the products lacked authenticity and were received for the most part as the propoganda roducts they were. Fortunately, the real cinema artists went underground to make the films they wanted to or adopted various disguise techniques.

You can't really prescribe for content unless you have a dicatorship, and even then there are the leaky bits that will appeal because they are somehow more authentic than the nicey-bonny stuff.

I must try to get to see this film instead of being distracted by the likes of 'Wendy and Lucy'. I think, though, that signals a whole raft of 'heroism of the American people in the face of adversity' films. Should be interesting.

Sheila