Aestheticization of violence
Encyclopedia
The aestheticization of violence in high culture art
or mass media
is the depiction of or references to violence
in what Indiana University
film studies professor Margaret Bruder calls a "stylistically excessive," "significant and sustained way." When violence is depicted in this fashion in films, television shows, and other media, Bruder argues that audience members are able to connect references from the "play of images and signs
" to artworks, genre
conventions, cultural symbol
s, or concepts.
forms such as fine art
and literature
have aestheticized violence into a form of autonomous art. In 1991, University of Georgia
literature professor Joel Black
stated that "(if) any human act evokes the aesthetic experience of the sublime, certainly it is the act of murder." Black goes on to note that "...if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist — a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction." (1991: 14). This conception of an aesthetic
element of murder has a long history; in the 19th century, Thomas de Quincey
wrote that "Everything in this world has two handles. Murder
, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle… and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it - that is, in relation to good taste."
and television
news reporting have also aestheticized violence with their sensationalized reports on crime
and warfare. Maria Tatar
’s book Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany analyzes murders in pre-Hitler Germany and their artistic representations, investigating "the chilling motives behind representations that aestheticize violence, and that turn the mutilated female body into an object of fascination." Reviewer Patrice Petro calls Tatar’s book "a study of German avant-garde and modernist art and a sustained reflection on the relationships between gender, crime, violence and representation. . ." Leslie Kitchen called the book "...a profound and provocative contribution to our understanding of sexual combat and the aestheticization of violence in modern culture."
Lilie Chouliaraki's article The aestheticization of suffering on television (2006) analyzes "an example of war footage in order to trace the ways in which the tension between presenting airwar as an ‘objective’ piece of news and as an instance of intense human suffering is resolved in television’s strategies of mediation." For example, Chouliaraki argues that the "bombardment of Baghdad in 2003 during the Iraq war was filmed in long-shot and presented in a quasiliterary narrative
that capitalized on an aesthetics of horror, on sublime spectacle (Boltanski). She claims that the "aestheticization of suffering on television is thus produced by a visual and linguistic complex that eliminates the human pain aspect of suffering, whilst retaining the phantasmagoric effects of a tableau vivant
", producing an "aestheticization of suffering [that] manages simultaneously to preserve an aura of objectivity and impartiality, and to take a pro-war side in the war footage."
"...looked upon violence as an artist might look on paint. [He asked:] What are its components? What's its nature? Its glamour?"
Thomas Harris
created a fictional character called Hannibal Lecter
, a cannibal
and aesthete portrayed by Anthony Hopkins
on screen. In the films The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Hannibal
(2001), directors Jonathan Demme
and Ridley Scott
, respectively intentionally generate excitement and anticipation when Lecter is about to kill (and eat) a victim. In David Lynch
's Blue Velvet (1986), the villain of the film, Frank Booth, is an excessively violent man who obsesses over small fetish
es (such as blue velvet) when he is attacking and raping his victims, often to the point of orgasm
.
In Xavier Morales' review of Quentin Tarantino
's Kill Bill, Vol. 1, entitled "Beauty and violence", he calls the film "a groundbreaking aestheticization of violence." Morales says that the film, which he calls "easily one of the most violent movies ever made" is "a breathtaking landscape in which art and violence coalesce into one unforgettable aesthetic experience".
Morales argues that "...Tarantino manages to do precisely what Alex de Large was trying to do in Stanley Kubrick
's A Clockwork Orange
: he presents violence as a form of expressive art...[in which the]...violence is so physically graceful, visually dazzling and meticulously executed that our instinctual, emotional responses undermine any rational objections we may have. Tarantino is able to transform an object of moral outrage into one of aesthetic beauty...[, in which,]...like all art forms, the violence serves a communicative purpose apart from its aesthetic value." When the female sword-wielding protagonist "...skillfully slices and dices her way through...[the opposing fighters]...we get a sense that she is using them as a kind of canvas for her expression of revenge...[,]...like an artist who expresses herself through brush and paint,...[she]...expresses herself through sword and blood."
Film critics analyzing violent film images that seek to aesthetically please the viewer mainly fall into two categories. Critics who see depictions of violence in film as superficial and exploitative argue that it leads audience members to become desensitized to brutality, thus increasing their aggression. On the other hand, critics who view violence as a type of content, or as a theme, claim it is cathartic and provides "acceptable outlets for anti-social impulses." Adrian Martin argues that critics who hold violent cinema in high regard have developed a response to anti-violence advocates, "those who decry everything from Taxi Driver
to Terminator 2 as dehumanising, desensitising cultural influences." Martin claims that critics that value aestheticized violence defend gory and shocking depictions onscreen on the grounds that "screen violence is not real violence, and should never be confused with it." He claims that their rebuttal also claims that "movie violence is fun, spectacle, make-believe; it's dramatic metaphor, or a necessary catharsis akin to that provided by Jacobean theatre; it's generic, pure sensation, pure fantasy. It has its own changing history, its codes, its precise aesthetic uses."
Margaret Bruder, a film studies professor at Indiana University and the author of Aestheticizing Violence, or How To Do Things with Style proposes that there is a distinction between aestheticized violence and the use of gore and blood in mass market action or war films. She argues that "aestheticized violence is not merely the excessive use of violence in a film." Movies such as the popular action film Die Hard 2: Die Harder are very violent, but they do "not fall into the category of aestheticized violence because it is not stylistically excessive in a significant and sustained way."
However, films that use what she calls "stylized [e.g. aestheticized] violence "revel in guns, gore and explosions, exploiting mise-en-scene not so much to provide narrative environment as to create the appearance of a 'movie' atmosphere against which specifically cinematic spectacle can unfold." In movies with aestheticized violence, she argues that the "standard realist modes of editing and cinematography are violated in order to spectacularize the action being played out on the screen"; directors use "quick and awkward editing", "canted framings," shock cuts, and slow motion, to emphasize the impacts of bullets or the "spurting of blood."
For viewers of films with aestheticized violence, such as John Woo
’s movies, she claims that "One of the many pleasures" from watching Woo’s films, such as Hard Target
is that it gets viewers to recognize how Woo plays with conventions "from other Woo films" and how it "connects up with films...which include imitations of or homages to Woo." Bruder argues that films with aestheticized violence such as "'Hard Target', 'True Romance
' and 'Tombstone
' are [filled] with... signs" and indicators, so that "the stylized violence they contain ultimately serves as...another interruption in the narrative drive" of the film.
proposed to ban poets from his ideal republic because he feared that their aesthetic ability to construct attractive narrative
s about immoral behaviour would corrupt young minds. Plato’s writings refer to poetry as a kind of rhetoric
, whose "...influence is pervasive and often harmful." Plato believed that poetry that was "unregulated by philosophy is a danger to soul and community." He warned that tragic poetry can produce "a disordered psychic regime or constitution" by inducing "a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in ...sorrow, grief, anger, [and] resentment." As such, Plato was in effect arguing that "What goes on in the theater, in your home, in your fantasy life, are connected" to what you do in real life.
Aristotle
, though, advocated a useful role for music, drama, and tragedy: a way for people to purge their negative emotions. Aristotle mentions catharsis
at the end of his Politics , where he notes that after people listen to music that elicits pity and fear, they "are liable to become possessed" by these negative emotions. However, afterwards, Aristotle points out that these people return to "a normal condition as if they had been medically treated and undergone a purge [catharsis]...All experience a certain purge [catharsis] and pleasant relief. In the same manner cathartic melodies give innocent joy to men" (from Politics VIII:7; 1341b 35-1342a 8).
The artist Hieronymus Bosch, from the 15th and 16th centuries, used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man. The 16th-century artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder
depicted "...the nightmarish imagery that reflect, if in an extreme fashion, popular dread of the Apocalypse
and Hell."
Mathis Gothart-Neithart, a German artist known as "Gruenewald" (1480–1528) depicted "intense emotion, especially painful emotion." His painting of the Crucifixion "...does not spare the beholder. Gruenewald relentlessly brings out all the marks of terrible suffering and agony, induced by the cruelty and torture of the executioners...[vividly conveying] a sense of horror and pain."
Gruenewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ also shows a violent image of Jesus on the cross, "with his body covered in wounds", with the focus on "...Jesus’ suffering and his death."
, an Italian etcher, archaeologist and architect active from 1740, did imaginary etchings of prisons that depicted people "stretched on racks or trapped like rats in maze-like dungeons", an "aestheticization of violence and suffering."
In 1849, as revolutions raged in European streets and authorities were putting down protests and consolidating state powers, composer Richard Wagner
wrote that "I have an enormous desire to practice a little artistic terrorism."
Laurent Tailhade
is reputed to have stated, after Auguste Vaillant
bombed the Chamber of Deputies in 1893: " [What do the victims matter, so long as the gesture is beautiful]." In 1929 André Breton
's Second Manifesto on surrealist art stated that "" [The simplest Surrealist act consists of running down into the street, pistols in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd]." The German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen
echoed Tailhade and Breton when he called the terrorist attacks of September 11 the "greatest piece of art there has ever been".
theorist Jean Baudrillard
argues that whereas modern societies were "...organized around the production and consumption of commodities
", "postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs
." As such, in "...the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle." For Baudrillard, the West's "commercialization of the whole world...will turn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world — its cosmopolitan spectacularization, its transformation into images, its semiological organization." As a result, the "previously separate domains of the economy
, art, politics, and sexuality" become "collapsed into each other", and art penetrates "all spheres of existence." Thus, Baudrillard argues that "[o]ur society has given rise to a general aestheticization: all forms of culture — not excluding anti-cultural ones — are promoted and all models of representation and anti-representation are taken on board."
meaning might be "there was a man dressed as a police officer placing his hand on the shoulder of another man of a certain age whilst a photographer took a picture." On the other hand, the connotative
meanings might range from, "law enforcement in action" to "a heroic fight to subdue a dangerous terrorist about to release sarin gas," to "police use excessive force to arrest non-violent protesters," to "fancy dress party ends badly." The attribution of the specific subtext
is left to the caption writer, the text accompanying the photo, and the audience.
Through repeated exposure, Susan Sontag
argues that certain well-known photographs have become "ethical reference points," such as the many images depicting the victims and liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
(1977). From this perspective, the subtext of such images, though still connotatively open to interpretation, has been somewhat restrained by familiarity, predominant cultural beliefs regarding the Holocaust, and perhaps by overusage.
If there is a motion picture or video recording of the previously-described scenario of a police officer arresting a man, the filmmakers, videographers, and editors have a great deal of latitude to reframe this scene, by fragmenting the recording, depicting it from different vantage points, editing the material, and reassembling these components. A film editor can produce a non-realistic
sequence of intercut, edited images, which forces the audience to interpret those images according to a different set of semiotic rules. Even without editing or alteration, a film or video recordings' mise en scène
and non-verbal signs become much more explicit and enable the audience to attribute meaning to the scenario.
The value
of this video as a signifier
will be determined by its relations to the other signifiers in the system. Thus, if the video is included in a reputable television news programme, it will acquire a greater claim to be indexical and its status is more likely to be considered reliable "evidence" of real world events. In semiotic terms, the words spoken by the television presenter will be symbolic, and the images will have both iconic and indexical qualities.
The "semiotic value" of the video will change if it is transposed into a polemical or satirical programme, presented by a commentator, or screened with on-screen captions (e.g.,"Crime Wave in the Streets", or "Protesters Brutalized by Police"). These substitute contexts form modality
indicators that may help the viewer to assess the plausibility, credibility, or truthfulness of the content. The violence shown on-screen can be aestheticized by the values of the symbolical signs used by the news presenter, by captions placed on-screen, or by the relations with other signifiers in the same programme (e.g., if the arrest video is preceded by a report about "antisocial and criminal behaviour").
If a film or television director staged a similar scene, the audience will be predisposed to consider it less “real” because the scenario is being filtered through the film maker′s sensibilities and the outcome will reflect the director′s motives. Hence, the lighting, makeup, costumes, acting methods, cutting, and soundtrack
music selection will combine to inform the audience about the film maker's intentions.
The culture industry
′s mass produced texts and images about crime, violence, and war have been consolidated into genres. Film makers typically choose from a predictable range of narrative convention
s and use stereotype
d characters, and cliché
d symbols and metaphors. Over time, certain styles and conventions of shooting and editing are standardised within a medium or a genre. Some conventions tend to naturalise the content and make it seem more real. Other methods deliberately breach convention to create an effect, such as the canted angles, rapid edits, and slow motion shots used in films with aestheticized violence.
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
or mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
is the depiction of or references to violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
in what Indiana University
Indiana University
Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...
film studies professor Margaret Bruder calls a "stylistically excessive," "significant and sustained way." When violence is depicted in this fashion in films, television shows, and other media, Bruder argues that audience members are able to connect references from the "play of images and signs
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
" to artworks, genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
conventions, cultural symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
s, or concepts.
In high culture
High cultureHigh culture
High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture...
forms such as fine art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
and literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
have aestheticized violence into a form of autonomous art. In 1991, University of Georgia
University of Georgia
The University of Georgia is a public research university located in Athens, Georgia, United States. Founded in 1785, it is the oldest and largest of the state's institutions of higher learning and is one of multiple schools to claim the title of the oldest public university in the United States...
literature professor Joel Black
Joel Black
Joel Black is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Black has written extensively on subfields of literature and film studies areas such as romanticism, postmodernism, philosophy and history of science, and cultural studies...
stated that "(if) any human act evokes the aesthetic experience of the sublime, certainly it is the act of murder." Black goes on to note that "...if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist — a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction." (1991: 14). This conception of an aesthetic
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
element of murder has a long history; in the 19th century, Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey
Thomas Penson de Quincey was an English esssayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater .-Child and student:...
wrote that "Everything in this world has two handles. Murder
Murder
Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...
, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle… and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it - that is, in relation to good taste."
In popular culture
In addition to high culture aestheticizations of violence, mass media forms such as newspaperNewspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
and television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
news reporting have also aestheticized violence with their sensationalized reports on crime
Crime
Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...
and warfare. Maria Tatar
Maria Tatar
Maria Tatar is an American academic whose expertise lies in children's literature, German literature, and folklore. Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Chair of Folklore & Mythology at Harvard University...
’s book Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany analyzes murders in pre-Hitler Germany and their artistic representations, investigating "the chilling motives behind representations that aestheticize violence, and that turn the mutilated female body into an object of fascination." Reviewer Patrice Petro calls Tatar’s book "a study of German avant-garde and modernist art and a sustained reflection on the relationships between gender, crime, violence and representation. . ." Leslie Kitchen called the book "...a profound and provocative contribution to our understanding of sexual combat and the aestheticization of violence in modern culture."
Lilie Chouliaraki's article The aestheticization of suffering on television (2006) analyzes "an example of war footage in order to trace the ways in which the tension between presenting airwar as an ‘objective’ piece of news and as an instance of intense human suffering is resolved in television’s strategies of mediation." For example, Chouliaraki argues that the "bombardment of Baghdad in 2003 during the Iraq war was filmed in long-shot and presented in a quasiliterary narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
that capitalized on an aesthetics of horror, on sublime spectacle (Boltanski). She claims that the "aestheticization of suffering on television is thus produced by a visual and linguistic complex that eliminates the human pain aspect of suffering, whilst retaining the phantasmagoric effects of a tableau vivant
Tableau vivant
Tableau vivant is French for "living picture." The term describes a striking group of suitably costumed actors or artist's models, carefully posed and often theatrically lit. Throughout the duration of the display, the people shown do not speak or move...
", producing an "aestheticization of suffering [that] manages simultaneously to preserve an aura of objectivity and impartiality, and to take a pro-war side in the war footage."
In movies
A number of filmmakers from the 20th century have used aestheticized depictions of violence. According to James Fox, filmmaker Donald CammellDonald Cammell
Donald Seaton Cammell was a Scottish film director who enjoys a cult reputation thanks to his debut film Performance, which he co-directed with Nicolas Roeg.-Biography:...
"...looked upon violence as an artist might look on paint. [He asked:] What are its components? What's its nature? Its glamour?"
Thomas Harris
Thomas Harris
Thomas Harris is an American author and screenwriter, best known for a series of suspense novels about his most famous character, Hannibal Lecter...
created a fictional character called Hannibal Lecter
Hannibal Lecter
Hannibal Lecter M.D. is a fictional character in a series of horror novels by Thomas Harris and in the films adapted from them.Lecter was introduced in the 1981 thriller novel Red Dragon as a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer...
, a cannibal
Cannibalism
Cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh of other human beings. It is also called anthropophagy...
and aesthete portrayed by Anthony Hopkins
Anthony Hopkins
Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, KBE , best known as Anthony Hopkins, is a Welsh actor of film, stage and television...
on screen. In the films The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Hannibal
Hannibal (film)
Hannibal is a 2001 psychological thriller film directed by Ridley Scott, adapted from the Thomas Harris novel of the same name. It is a sequel to the 1991 Academy Award-winning film The Silence of the Lambs that returns Anthony Hopkins to his iconic role as serial killer Hannibal Lecter...
(2001), directors Jonathan Demme
Jonathan Demme
Robert Jonathan Demme is an American filmmaker, producer and screenwriter. Best known for directing The Silence of the Lambs, which won him the Academy Award for Best Director, he has also directed the acclaimed movies Philadelphia, Rachel Getting Married, the Talking Heads concert movie Stop...
and Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott
Sir Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer. His most famous films include The Duellists , Alien , Blade Runner , Legend , Thelma & Louise , G. I...
, respectively intentionally generate excitement and anticipation when Lecter is about to kill (and eat) a victim. In David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
's Blue Velvet (1986), the villain of the film, Frank Booth, is an excessively violent man who obsesses over small fetish
Sexual fetishism
Sexual fetishism, or erotic fetishism, is the sexual arousal a person receives from a physical object, or from a specific situation. The object or situation of interest is called the fetish, the person a fetishist who has a fetish for that object/situation. Sexual fetishism may be regarded, e.g...
es (such as blue velvet) when he is attacking and raping his victims, often to the point of orgasm
Orgasm
Orgasm is the peak of the plateau phase of the sexual response cycle, characterized by an intense sensation of pleasure...
.
In Xavier Morales' review of Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
's Kill Bill, Vol. 1, entitled "Beauty and violence", he calls the film "a groundbreaking aestheticization of violence." Morales says that the film, which he calls "easily one of the most violent movies ever made" is "a breathtaking landscape in which art and violence coalesce into one unforgettable aesthetic experience".
Morales argues that "...Tarantino manages to do precisely what Alex de Large was trying to do in Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
's A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange (film)
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It was written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick...
: he presents violence as a form of expressive art...[in which the]...violence is so physically graceful, visually dazzling and meticulously executed that our instinctual, emotional responses undermine any rational objections we may have. Tarantino is able to transform an object of moral outrage into one of aesthetic beauty...[, in which,]...like all art forms, the violence serves a communicative purpose apart from its aesthetic value." When the female sword-wielding protagonist "...skillfully slices and dices her way through...[the opposing fighters]...we get a sense that she is using them as a kind of canvas for her expression of revenge...[,]...like an artist who expresses herself through brush and paint,...[she]...expresses herself through sword and blood."
Film critics analyzing violent film images that seek to aesthetically please the viewer mainly fall into two categories. Critics who see depictions of violence in film as superficial and exploitative argue that it leads audience members to become desensitized to brutality, thus increasing their aggression. On the other hand, critics who view violence as a type of content, or as a theme, claim it is cathartic and provides "acceptable outlets for anti-social impulses." Adrian Martin argues that critics who hold violent cinema in high regard have developed a response to anti-violence advocates, "those who decry everything from Taxi Driver
Taxi Driver
Taxi Driver is a 1976 American drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Paul Schrader. The film is set in New York City, soon after the Vietnam War. The film stars Robert De Niro and features Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, and Cybill Shepherd. The film was nominated for four Academy...
to Terminator 2 as dehumanising, desensitising cultural influences." Martin claims that critics that value aestheticized violence defend gory and shocking depictions onscreen on the grounds that "screen violence is not real violence, and should never be confused with it." He claims that their rebuttal also claims that "movie violence is fun, spectacle, make-believe; it's dramatic metaphor, or a necessary catharsis akin to that provided by Jacobean theatre; it's generic, pure sensation, pure fantasy. It has its own changing history, its codes, its precise aesthetic uses."
Margaret Bruder, a film studies professor at Indiana University and the author of Aestheticizing Violence, or How To Do Things with Style proposes that there is a distinction between aestheticized violence and the use of gore and blood in mass market action or war films. She argues that "aestheticized violence is not merely the excessive use of violence in a film." Movies such as the popular action film Die Hard 2: Die Harder are very violent, but they do "not fall into the category of aestheticized violence because it is not stylistically excessive in a significant and sustained way."
However, films that use what she calls "stylized [e.g. aestheticized] violence "revel in guns, gore and explosions, exploiting mise-en-scene not so much to provide narrative environment as to create the appearance of a 'movie' atmosphere against which specifically cinematic spectacle can unfold." In movies with aestheticized violence, she argues that the "standard realist modes of editing and cinematography are violated in order to spectacularize the action being played out on the screen"; directors use "quick and awkward editing", "canted framings," shock cuts, and slow motion, to emphasize the impacts of bullets or the "spurting of blood."
For viewers of films with aestheticized violence, such as John Woo
John Woo
John Woo Yu-Sen SBS is a Hong Kong-based film director and producer. Recognized for his stylised films of highly choreographed action sequences, Mexican standoffs, and use of slow-motion, Woo has directed several notable Hong Kong action films, among them, A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Hard...
’s movies, she claims that "One of the many pleasures" from watching Woo’s films, such as Hard Target
Hard Target
Hard Target is a 1993 American action film directed by Chinese director John Woo. The film stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as Chance Boudreaux, an out-of-work Cajun merchant seaman who saves a young woman, Natasha Binder , from a gang of thugs in New Orleans...
is that it gets viewers to recognize how Woo plays with conventions "from other Woo films" and how it "connects up with films...which include imitations of or homages to Woo." Bruder argues that films with aestheticized violence such as "'Hard Target', 'True Romance
True Romance
True Romance is a 1993 American romance crime film written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott. The film stars Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette with an ensemble cast consisting of Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin...
' and 'Tombstone
Tombstone (film)
Tombstone is a 1993 American action film set in the Old West directed by George P. Cosmatos, along with uncredited directorial efforts by actor Kurt Russell and writer Kevin Jarre. The storyline was conceived from a screenplay written by Jarre....
' are [filled] with... signs" and indicators, so that "the stylized violence they contain ultimately serves as...another interruption in the narrative drive" of the film.
Antiquity
PlatoPlato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
proposed to ban poets from his ideal republic because he feared that their aesthetic ability to construct attractive narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
s about immoral behaviour would corrupt young minds. Plato’s writings refer to poetry as a kind of rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
, whose "...influence is pervasive and often harmful." Plato believed that poetry that was "unregulated by philosophy is a danger to soul and community." He warned that tragic poetry can produce "a disordered psychic regime or constitution" by inducing "a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in ...sorrow, grief, anger, [and] resentment." As such, Plato was in effect arguing that "What goes on in the theater, in your home, in your fantasy life, are connected" to what you do in real life.
Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, though, advocated a useful role for music, drama, and tragedy: a way for people to purge their negative emotions. Aristotle mentions catharsis
Catharsis
Catharsis or katharsis is a Greek word meaning "cleansing" or "purging". It is derived from the verb καθαίρειν, kathairein, "to purify, purge," and it is related to the adjective καθαρός, katharos, "pure or clean."-Dramatic uses:...
at the end of his Politics , where he notes that after people listen to music that elicits pity and fear, they "are liable to become possessed" by these negative emotions. However, afterwards, Aristotle points out that these people return to "a normal condition as if they had been medically treated and undergone a purge [catharsis]...All experience a certain purge [catharsis] and pleasant relief. In the same manner cathartic melodies give innocent joy to men" (from Politics VIII:7; 1341b 35-1342a 8).
1400s-1600s
Pieter Brueghel the Elder
Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a Flemish renaissance painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes . He is sometimes referred to as the "Peasant Bruegel" to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but he is also the one generally meant when the context does...
depicted "...the nightmarish imagery that reflect, if in an extreme fashion, popular dread of the Apocalypse
Apocalypse
An Apocalypse is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e. the veil to be lifted. The Apocalypse of John is the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament...
and Hell."
Gruenewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ also shows a violent image of Jesus on the cross, "with his body covered in wounds", with the focus on "...Jesus’ suffering and his death."
1700s-present
In the mid-18th century, Giovanni Battista PiranesiGiovanni Battista Piranesi
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an Italian artist famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" .-His Life:...
, an Italian etcher, archaeologist and architect active from 1740, did imaginary etchings of prisons that depicted people "stretched on racks or trapped like rats in maze-like dungeons", an "aestheticization of violence and suffering."
In 1849, as revolutions raged in European streets and authorities were putting down protests and consolidating state powers, composer Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
wrote that "I have an enormous desire to practice a little artistic terrorism."
Laurent Tailhade
Laurent Tailhade
Laurent Tailhade was a French satirical poet, anarchist polemicist, essayist, and translator, active in Paris in the 1890s and early 1900s...
is reputed to have stated, after Auguste Vaillant
Auguste Vaillant
Auguste Vaillant was a French anarchist, most famous for his bomb attack on the French Chamber of Deputies on 9 December 1893. The government's reaction to this attack was the passing of the infamous repressive Lois scélérates.He threw the home-made device from the public gallery and was...
bombed the Chamber of Deputies in 1893: " [What do the victims matter, so long as the gesture is beautiful]." In 1929 André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
's Second Manifesto on surrealist art stated that "" [The simplest Surrealist act consists of running down into the street, pistols in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd]." The German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
echoed Tailhade and Breton when he called the terrorist attacks of September 11 the "greatest piece of art there has ever been".
Baudrillard
French postmodernistPostmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
theorist Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
argues that whereas modern societies were "...organized around the production and consumption of commodities
Commodification
Commodification is the transformation of goods, ideas, or other entities that may not normally be regarded as goods into a commodity....
", "postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
." As such, in "...the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle." For Baudrillard, the West's "commercialization of the whole world...will turn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world — its cosmopolitan spectacularization, its transformation into images, its semiological organization." As a result, the "previously separate domains of the economy
Economy
An economy consists of the economic system of a country or other area; the labor, capital and land resources; and the manufacturing, trade, distribution, and consumption of goods and services of that area...
, art, politics, and sexuality" become "collapsed into each other", and art penetrates "all spheres of existence." Thus, Baudrillard argues that "[o]ur society has given rise to a general aestheticization: all forms of culture — not excluding anti-cultural ones — are promoted and all models of representation and anti-representation are taken on board."
Still images
When a person views an isolated painting, photograph or cartoon, they are viewing a static image. If a photographer takes a still photo of a police officer's struggle to arrest a young man, for example, the denotativeDenotation (semiotics)
In semiotics, denotation is the surface or literal meaning encoded to a signifier, and the definition most likely to appear in a dictionary.-Discussion :Drawing from the original word or definition proposed by Saussure , a sign has two parts:...
meaning might be "there was a man dressed as a police officer placing his hand on the shoulder of another man of a certain age whilst a photographer took a picture." On the other hand, the connotative
Connotation (semiotics)
In semiotics, connotation arises when the denotative relationship between a signifier and its signified is inadequate to serve the needs of the community. A second level of meanings is termed connotative...
meanings might range from, "law enforcement in action" to "a heroic fight to subdue a dangerous terrorist about to release sarin gas," to "police use excessive force to arrest non-violent protesters," to "fancy dress party ends badly." The attribution of the specific subtext
Subtext
Subtext or undertone is content of a book, play, musical work, film, video game, or television series which is not announced explicitly by the characters but is implicit or becomes something understood by the observer of the work as the production unfolds. Subtext can also refer to the thoughts...
is left to the caption writer, the text accompanying the photo, and the audience.
Through repeated exposure, Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
argues that certain well-known photographs have become "ethical reference points," such as the many images depicting the victims and liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle...
(1977). From this perspective, the subtext of such images, though still connotatively open to interpretation, has been somewhat restrained by familiarity, predominant cultural beliefs regarding the Holocaust, and perhaps by overusage.
News reporting
If there is a motion picture or video recording of the previously-described scenario of a police officer arresting a man, the filmmakers, videographers, and editors have a great deal of latitude to reframe this scene, by fragmenting the recording, depicting it from different vantage points, editing the material, and reassembling these components. A film editor can produce a non-realistic
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
sequence of intercut, edited images, which forces the audience to interpret those images according to a different set of semiotic rules. Even without editing or alteration, a film or video recordings' mise en scène
Mise en scène
Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction...
and non-verbal signs become much more explicit and enable the audience to attribute meaning to the scenario.
The value
Value (semiotics)
In semiotics, the value of a sign depends on its position and relations in the system of signification and upon the particular codes being used.-Saussure's Value:Value is the sign as it is determined by the other signs in a semiotic system...
of this video as a signifier
Sign (semiotics)
A sign is understood as a discrete unit of meaning in semiotics. It is defined as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" It includes words, images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds – essentially all of the ways in which information can be...
will be determined by its relations to the other signifiers in the system. Thus, if the video is included in a reputable television news programme, it will acquire a greater claim to be indexical and its status is more likely to be considered reliable "evidence" of real world events. In semiotic terms, the words spoken by the television presenter will be symbolic, and the images will have both iconic and indexical qualities.
The "semiotic value" of the video will change if it is transposed into a polemical or satirical programme, presented by a commentator, or screened with on-screen captions (e.g.,"Crime Wave in the Streets", or "Protesters Brutalized by Police"). These substitute contexts form modality
Modality (semiotics)
In semiotics, a modality is a particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i.e. to the type of sign and to the status of reality ascribed to or claimed by a sign, text or genre. It is more closely associated with the semiotics of Charles Peirce than Saussure...
indicators that may help the viewer to assess the plausibility, credibility, or truthfulness of the content. The violence shown on-screen can be aestheticized by the values of the symbolical signs used by the news presenter, by captions placed on-screen, or by the relations with other signifiers in the same programme (e.g., if the arrest video is preceded by a report about "antisocial and criminal behaviour").
Fictional film or video
If a film or television director staged a similar scene, the audience will be predisposed to consider it less “real” because the scenario is being filtered through the film maker′s sensibilities and the outcome will reflect the director′s motives. Hence, the lighting, makeup, costumes, acting methods, cutting, and soundtrack
Soundtrack
A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...
music selection will combine to inform the audience about the film maker's intentions.
The culture industry
Culture industry
Culture industry is a term coined by critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer , who argued in the chapter of their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception' ; that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods...
′s mass produced texts and images about crime, violence, and war have been consolidated into genres. Film makers typically choose from a predictable range of narrative convention
Convention (norm)
A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms or criteria, often taking the form of a custom....
s and use stereotype
Stereotype
A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings...
d characters, and cliché
Cliché
A cliché or cliche is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning,...
d symbols and metaphors. Over time, certain styles and conventions of shooting and editing are standardised within a medium or a genre. Some conventions tend to naturalise the content and make it seem more real. Other methods deliberately breach convention to create an effect, such as the canted angles, rapid edits, and slow motion shots used in films with aestheticized violence.
Analysis of selected films
- The Accused: In this film (1988), filmmaker Jonathan KaplanJonathan KaplanJonathan Kaplan is an American film producer and director.Kaplan was born in Paris, France. He is the son of film composer Sol Kaplan and actress Frances Heflin; the nephew of actor Van Heflin. He is the brother of actresses Nora Heflin and Mady Kaplan...
stages a detailed rape scene to consider the moral and legal quality of the fictional spectators who, while not engaging in the rape, nevertheless shouted encouragement to those that were. Viewers were offended by the brutality of the scenes of the assault, but nonetheless accepted that the violence was contextualized and necessary to reinforce the social and political subtext of the script.
- Strange Days: Matthew Crowder analyzes the aestheticization of violence in Strange DaysStrange Days (film)Strange Days is a 1995 cyberpunk science fiction film directed by Kathryn Bigelow and produced and co-written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Michael Wincott and Vincent D'Onofrio. Despite positive reviews, the film was a...
, a film by director Kathryn BigelowKathryn BigelowKathryn Ann Bigelow is an American film director. Her best-known films are the cult horror film Near Dark , the surfer/bank robbery action picture Point Break , the science fiction/film noir Strange Days , the historical/mystery film The Weight of Water and the war drama The Hurt Locker...
(1995), particularly for a scene depicting the rape of a woman that is "...filmed in real-time using a first-person subjective camera." Strange Days tells the story of Lenny Nero, who sells an illegal, futuristic technology that allows people to record their sensory experiences onto a minidisc, so that other people can "play back" these sensory experiences and have them "wired" directly into their brain.- In the film, Max, a rapist, records his rape of a woman, Iris, and gives the recording to the unsuspecting Lenny. When Max, the "... perpetrator of violence is given control of the cinematic apparatus," this is "... referencing films such as Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1959) and Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)." Like "...Peeping Tom’s psychopathic killer, Max does seem to see himself as some kind of artist, recording the rape and sending it to Lenny."
- The "...first person perspective the filming of the rape scene is unrelenting, the camera never turns away from the fear and panic of Iris whose body is not only slung about by the unknown killer but also subjected to an unflinching gaze that the audience is punished with too, made complicit in the rape by their passivity." Crowder argues that "[t]he entire notion of the subjective camera - an aesthetic element of the film -, its scopophilic, voyeuristic and sadistic nature, is revealed in all its depravity." As such, "[t]he aesthetic experience of the [rape] scene is one of shock, horror, dislocation and passivity at the way the camera represents the helpless body of Iris as no more than an object."
- The film’s use of "playback" clips, as in the rape scene, causes a "...stylistic disruption of Hollywood codes and an even more important aesthetic effect: the disruption of the normal codes of identification with character and narrative."
- Bigelow was criticized for the rape scene by University of Maryland, College ParkUniversity of Maryland, College ParkThe University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...
professor Carla PetersonCarla PetersonCarla L. Peterson is a Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her expertise includes nineteenth-century African American women writers and speakers in the northern US, African American novelists in the post-Reconstruction era, and gender and culture in historical...
, in Peterson’s article ‘Director joins boys' club -- and it only costs her compassion’ (1995). Crowder claims that Peterson attacked Strange Days "... as misogynist and offensive because she [Peterson] feels that it tries to create an unproblematic, if slightly uncomfortable, spectacle out of rape." As such, Crowder argues that Peterson "... fails to see that the film concerns more than a logical narrative (which if anything grows increasingly incoherent)" and claims that Peterson has "...misread the scene out of context" and dismissed "...textual elements that clearly signal criticism of both Hollywood and the cinematic apparatus as a tool of masculinist domination." - Crowder "challenge[s] whether Peterson’s response is actually aesthetic, as she makes little reference to communication between work and audience." In contrast, Crowder interprets Strange Days in a feminist context, which he argues is "...perhaps its most persuasive aesthetic effect." Crowder holds that "...Strange Days can be seen as a self-conscious discourse on cinema and that part of this discourse concerns the act of aesthetic judgement." Furthermore, he states that the film’s "narrative can be seen to allegorise the problem of aesthetics and value."
- A Clockwork Orange: A Clockwork OrangeA Clockwork Orange (film)A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It was written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick...
is a 1971 film written, directed, and produced by Stanley KubrickStanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
and based on the novel of the same name by Anthony BurgessAnthony BurgessJohn Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
. The plot, which is set in a futuristic England (circa 1995, as imagined in 1965), follows the life of a teenage gang leader named Alex. In Alexander Cohen’s analysis of Kubrick’s film, he argues that the "ultra-violence" of the young protagonist, Alex, "...represents the breakdown of culture itself." In the film, gang members are "...[s]eeking idle de-contextualized violence as entertainment" as an escape from the emptiness of their dystopiaDystopiaA dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
n society.- Cohen claims that in the film, "...the violence of modern technology sees its reflection in Ultraviolence, beyond violence." When the protagonist murders a woman in her home, Cohen states that Kubrick presents a "[s]cene of aestheticized death" by setting the murder in a room filled with "...modern art which depict scenes of sexual intensity and bondage"; as such, the scene depicts a "...struggle between high-culture which has aestheticized violence and sex into a form of autonomous art, and the very image of post-modern mastery."
See also
- Anti-heroAnti-heroIn fiction, an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis in which the character is generally useless at being a hero or heroine when they're...
- Art of murder
- CatharticCatharticIn medicine, a cathartic is a substance that accelerates defecation. This is in contrast to a laxative, which is a substance which eases defecation, usually by softening feces. It is possible for a substance to be both a laxative and a cathartic...
- GladiatorGladiatorA gladiator was an armed combatant who entertained audiences in the Roman Republic and Roman Empire in violent confrontations with other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals. Some gladiators were volunteers who risked their legal and social standing and their lives by appearing in the...
- Graphic violenceGraphic violenceGraphic violence is the depiction of especially vivid, brutal and realistic acts of violence in visual media such as literature, film, television, and video games...
- SpectacleSpectacleIn general, spectacle refers to an event that is memorable for the appearance it creates. Derived in Middle English from c. 1340 as "specially prepared or arranged display" it was borrowed from Old French spectacle, itself a reflection of the Latin spectaculum "a show" from spectare "to view,...
Further reading
- Berkowitz, L. (ed) (1977; 1986): Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vols 10 & 19. New York: Academic Press
- Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (NY: Schocken Books, 1985)
- Black, Joel (1991) The Aesthetics of Murder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Feshbach, S. (1955): The Drive-Reducing Function of Fantasy Behaviour, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 50: 3-11
- Feshbach, S & Singer, R. D. (1971): Television and Aggression: An Experimental Field Study. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- Kelly, George. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Vol. I, II. Norton, New York. (2nd printing: 1991, Routledge, London, New York)
- Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931–58): Collected Writings. (Edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, & Arthur W Burks). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.