A tendency for films to celebrate the evil of violence brings censorship closer, argues Reg Rumney
AS a writer I feel bound to oppose censorship because I will contest anything that tries to limit artistic expression. As an ordinary person I increasingly favour censorship, particularly of violence.
This was distilled for me by Natural Born Killers, a film which is, perhaps, the apotheosis of a trend of prurient, contentless bloodlust in the movies. Apart from being a study in directorial self-indulgence by Oliver Stone, the film unconsciously presents an argument for its own censorship while failing in a weak attempt at satire.
The hero and heroine of Natural Born Killers are a ruthless and ultra-violent couple who also happen to be young lovers. They become celebrities as they carve a trail of bloody murder across America. That they do so is presented as the fault of the sensationalist press and television. Or is it the fault of American society?
One of the figures of would-be satire in the film is a television journalist who feeds off the killers’ actions. Yet the most disturbing images of violence that literally accompany the couple almost everywhere, surrealistically projected on to a window in a motel room, for instance, are filmic, not documentary.
Scenes of the Nazi death camps are abhorrent in quite a different way from psychopath Mickey casually gutting a hapless diner with a hunting knife. Particularly disturbing, as always, is a scene where sex is twinned with murder.
Far from condemning violence, as it might pretend to, the film revels in the cruelty it depicts, putting it firmly in the category of the pornography of violence.
The producers of hard-core pornography argue that they are only catering for consumer demand: curiously, another particularly violent film I enjoyed, The King of New York, has its arch-villain arguing the same case for drugs.
The liberal contention is that freeing the market for such goods sates demand, and suppression creates demand. In the real world the tendency to portray graphic and bloody violence contains the same impetus as other pornography towards a spiralling excess, a kind of inflation of expectations by audiences or spectators of titillation. (Pornography itself gravitates towards violence, towards sado-masochism and portrayals of the infliction of pain.)
The sight of breasts was sensational in the Victorian era. Now nothing less than gynaecological views will do, and a film that was shocking for audiences in its explosive violence in the 1960s is barely worthy of mention now.
It is meretricious to pretend portrayal of such violence has no effect, or that we should be left to choose what we or our children see. At worst, films like Natural Born Killers spur the impressionable in society to copy what appears on screen. At best films like these are profoundly depressing to the human spirit, undermining the ordinary values that keep society cohesive. In it evil is all- pervading, from the beginning of the film to the last, and the depiction of the love that holds the two killers together in the film is cynical or naive.
Such moral deficiency in a film allows for the unselfconscious celebration of violence for violence sake. All the violence in Natural Born Killers is gratuitous.
Granted, where morality enters aesthetic argument there are bound to be sparks. The classical view of this runs counter to the Romantic view that holds sway now, that the portrayal of triumphant evil is aesthetically permissible and morality has no part in artistic creations.
Perhaps the pendulum should swing back again. We don’t have to subscribe to the conservative view that everything about the modern world is a descent from a mythical golden age to feel that the present obsession with evil and evil’s effects is evil itself.
True, it is hard to see how to put the genie of pornographic violence back into the bottle now, and alarming to contemplate a return to the kind of censorship that gives such power to so few people.
Judgements of what is or is not gratuitous or what is artistic merit are difficult.
I realise that the kind of artistic merit I see in, say, The King of New York, where good triumphs (barely), or Reservoir Dogs, which contains a complex examination of duty, can be disputed. I would like to see such films continue to be made. I think they would still be powerful without the painstaking, loving recreation of brutality and savagery.
The producers of films like Natural Born Killers should note that growing revulsion of people with commercially disseminated pornographic violence. That it might not work will not prevent those who are pro-censorship from attempting it. The eventual backlash will curtail the freedom of all of us.