The release this week of Natural Born Killers raises the question of whether violent films encourage violence in real life and should be censored. They don’t and they shouldn’t, argues Shaun de Waal (also see film review below)
OLIVER STONE’S film about a pair of casual serial murderers, Natural Born Killers, opens in South Africa this week. But in Britain, debate is raging over whether it should be released at all. The argument is that another violent film, Child’s Play 2, incited the 10-year-old killers of Jamie Bulger.
Those who find humanity infinitely corruptible (usually state officials, who should know) love blaming movies for the horrors people commit. And, certainly, there are some repulsive visions to be seen on screen. But is it right to suppress them?
Natural Born Killers is based on a story by Quentin Tarantino, whose own film, Reservoir Dogs, is an orgy of ultra-violence. One might think from the fuss that Tarantino has introduced explicit violence into the cinema for the first time, and that Stone is his accomplice in mass murder.
But in the early 1970s, there was outrage in Britain — with questions asked in parliament — about A Clockwork Orange. Some saw in this futuristic fable about teenage gangs a spur to contemporary teenage hoodlums. A strong case was made for suppression of the film; in the end, it received a limited release.
What eluded the censors is that the film was based on existing gangs, Mods, Rockers, Hell’s Angels and others.
To argue that violence in film encourages murder and mayhem is akin to arguing that pornography leads to rape. Images of death may incite those inclined to kill, just as images of live sex may excite the rapist, but those tendencies must have been there already, or we would all be killers and rapists. Horrible images may desentitise, even brutalise, viewers — but then the real gore of news footage is as much to blame.
Films do not cause society’s ills; they are symptomatic of them. Humanity has not become noticeably less civilised since the invention of moving pictures, and no one accused Dame Agatha Christie of inciting homicide because she wrote murder mysteries.
One may argue, as did Aristotle of the terrors of Greek tragedy, that watching fictional horrors has a cathartic effect. We all suppress violent urges: to ram the car that just stole one’s parking space or, like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, pull an Uzi on the unco-operative flunkey behind the counter. Movies may siphon off such aggression, and that’s why they can be so satisfying.
Of course, movies have become more explicit. When, in Notorious (1946), Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman performed what was then the longest kiss in screen history, the result was, well, notorious. Nowadays we get nine and a half weeks of thudding thighs. The way we receive narrative messages has changed: in the days of Hollywood’s hyper- moralistic “Hays Code”, when the baddies always met a sticky end, a kiss stood for sex and a slap stood for full- scale assault.
Compare that with Tony Scott’s True Romance, for which Tarantino wrote the script. In it, Patricia Arquette is beaten up by a gangster, and the bloody scene goes on for what seems like an interminable six or seven minutes.
Many (myself included) were repelled by the sadism of this scene, which was more explicit — that is, more honest — than in other stylish, highbrow movies. But those who complained that it was “gratuitous” missed the point. Firstly, all art is gratuitous. It exists to thrill, to generate audience adrenalin, and thus to make money. Secondly, the scene served a narrative function. Until that point, we had seen Arquette only as a flighty, opportunistic hustler; now we were writhing with sympathy for her.
There are other examples of film violence with higher aims. When Arthur Penn (whose 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde drew exactly the same fire as Tarantino and Stone are drawing now) made Little Big Man, he used horrifying violence to make an important point.
He cast distinctly Asiatic-looking actors as the Indians, so that when the United States cavalry came galloping in to massacre them, the allusion to the Vietnam war could not be missed.
There is a danger that film-makers who use violence to repel merely titillate. An earlier Stone film, Platoon, was going as an anti-war tract, so the scene in which US soldiers gun down innocent Vietnamese villagers was presumably meant to revolt the audience. But I saw it in a cinema in Hillbrow where viewers were getting off on the explosive — and expertly, compellingly filmed — slaughter.
Perhaps what bothers sensitive viewers about the blood ‘n’ guts in Tarantino is its flippant absurdism; we are uneasy about the lack of moral signposts.
But this is not his fault. We are used to the way Hollywood shows cops and criminals (or Rambos and Russians) as equally ferocious — and we accept the distinction between good and bad violence. If the hero’s doing the killing, that’s OK. Such a corruption of values has more to do with politics and power than film-making.
In the end the question of violence in film may be one of taste — and taste is relative. In the pages of Films and Filming magazine, dated February 1973, one reads the following plaintive letter from a distressed filmgoer: “Why can’t people die on screen the way they used to? Surely a guy falling down with maybe a touch of red for realism is quite sufficient to get the point across?”