We, The Oppressed 
Cinema, Violence and War
There is one thing common to portrayals of violence in much of recent cinematic media : it always shows violence as something that Others do to Us, and thereby places Us in a state of primal innocence. Take, for example, the popularity of the 'catastrophe' theme. What is emphasised is the element of utter uncontrollability and unpredictability which is removed from the sphere of human interaction. It could be an aircraft disaster, a burning skyscraper, a havoc-wreaking typhoon, an industrial plague, a chemical leak, or an uncontrolled nuclear explosion; in short, the malfunctioning or even collapse at the edges or at the centre of a world based on complex technological systems. Catastrophe cinema plays on and draws out our vague sense of anxiety that in a sophisticated economically ‘advanced’ country (of ‘late capitalism’), anything can go wrong at any time and at any place. Out of this anxiety develops the detailed plots of the disaster stories, but the message is always the same : We are innocent, and it is They who have unleashed forces of pain, death and suffering on Us. Our hands are clean of any complicity in the matter : the shadowy They lurking in the background, the unrecognised enemy is behind it all.
Such cinema is embarrassing for many of us because of the accuracy with which it highlights some of our deepest neuroses. So we eagerly look forward to the next movie release and after watching it walk away with a shrug saying : ‘Oh, such things don't really happen.’ And here I refer not only to films with skyscraper fireworks such as Independence Day but also to those which pinpoint the intimate Stranger inside us such as The Exorcist. What if this world is full of hostile aliens whom we cannot see or touch and who are waiting to ambush us at any moment? Much of science-fiction is based on this perennial anxiety of humankind, and here too the emphasis remains the same : it is what They, in this case these nasty Aliens, do to us. We are the innocent earthlings at the mercy of forces unleashed on us by the evil aliens. In other words, what I am arguing is this. In such cinema, the power to hurt, damage and destroy is removed from human possession and transferred on to other agencies, be they aliens or complex technological institutions. We humans are sanitised from any moral compunctions and are clothed with a childish innocence. We never (actively) do evil, evil is always something that (passively) happens to Us. In this context, one can understand the popularity of films with the role of the possessed child (usually a girl), the child overpowered by diabolical forces. Children are seen as symbols of innocence and vulnerability, and we see ourselves in the position of these possessed children. We are being manipulated and controlled by forces with which we have no connection and for whose genesis we have no responsibility. So too we can understand why films with psychopathic killers in them are so popular. The mass murderer waits lurking in the shadows, at the edges of the ‘civilised’ city, waiting to spring upon us at any moment. He attacks those who are perceived as weak and vulnerable and given that it is women who are typically regarded as ‘weak and vulnerable’, it is not suprising that the victims in such films are usually young women (be they lawyers or doctors). In other words, we transfer our moral responsibilities to the Stranger lying at the fringes of the City. We gloss over the levels of domestic violence against women in day to day lives within our own families and instead pin the blame on forces that we claim we are not connected with. We comfort ourselves with the thought that such violence is always enacted by an agent who is outside the ordinary range of reasoned thought. Once again, violence is what is done to Us.
In short, this is the message of such films : violence ‘just happens’. There are no real human causes, no roots, no histories. Tremdendous destructive energies rush to the surface and overpower us, be they connected with psychopaths, possessed young girls, animals, aliens, or 'supernatural' forces. There is nothing we can do about it : these things have their own inner laws that we do not comprehend. Whenever such phenonemena happen, however, drastic measures have to be taken at once. The possessed have to be imprisoned, beaten up and isolated; the unstable woman has to be destroyed as a threat to social norms; animals have to be killed and mutilated. In general, They have to be exterminated and bombed. This will not count as ‘real’ violence, because it will be redefined as ‘unavoidable’ and ‘legitimate’ collateral damage. These are extreme circumstances and they demand dramatic responses from us.
Another way of putting the above is this. Catastrophe cinema points out the fantasy world we have steeped ourselves in and reflects a deep psychosis in our ‘rationality’. On the hand, we claim that we have rationalised all phenomena that we can come across and have left behind us the ‘irrationalities’ of the so-called Dark Ages. On the other hand, there is the deep fear that something has been left 'out of the picture', and much of contemporary cinema plays on this fear. Death, injury and pain have become unpredictable; we do not know when the next strike will take place, nor even where; we are being persecuted and it is always They (the chemical leak, the aliens, the Enemy) who are responsible for this state of affairs. Therefore, we need not have any moral qualms when dealing with Them : They are not moral agents like Us. Violence becomes a non-human phenomenon which always starts somewhere else, in the mysterious world ‘out there’. Violence does not exist ‘at home’. In some cases, the enemy just might reach the gates but they can never quite penetrate our citadel. Thus we stand at the tip of an iceberg proclaiming our free choices in a rational society, but are terrified that deep seething masses of irrationality might lie submerged under the waters.
Such cinema therefore expresses our mass fantasies of anxiety. What it reveals is our inability to see all of this in moral terms, as something that has to do with our lack of vision, our oppressive structures of power and also with our need to make sense of our lives. We are thereby rendered incapable of turning a critical eye onto ourselves and of asking how far this chronic insecurity is rooted in our own choices and preferences. Instead, we project our fears onto the vaguely understood They and refuse to deal with the situation in non-fatalistic terms. We indulge ourselves in a full flight from moral responsibility. Thus the European-North Atlantic world appears as one that is threatened, frightened, bullied, torn apart with contradictions, wounded, self-pitying and myopic, and contemporary cinema happens to be an accurate reflection of this state of paranoia. If we cannot recognise and criticise our actions as ours, we are trapped in a circle from within which we are too terrified to open our eyes outwards.
There is one thing common to portrayals of violence in much of recent cinematic media : it always shows violence as something that Others do to Us, and thereby places Us in a state of primal innocence. Take, for example, the popularity of the 'catastrophe' theme. What is emphasised is the element of utter uncontrollability and unpredictability which is removed from the sphere of human interaction. It could be an aircraft disaster, a burning skyscraper, a havoc-wreaking typhoon, an industrial plague, a chemical leak, or an uncontrolled nuclear explosion; in short, the malfunctioning or even collapse at the edges or at the centre of a world based on complex technological systems. Catastrophe cinema plays on and draws out our vague sense of anxiety that in a sophisticated economically ‘advanced’ country (of ‘late capitalism’), anything can go wrong at any time and at any place. Out of this anxiety develops the detailed plots of the disaster stories, but the message is always the same : We are innocent, and it is They who have unleashed forces of pain, death and suffering on Us. Our hands are clean of any complicity in the matter : the shadowy They lurking in the background, the unrecognised enemy is behind it all.
Such cinema is embarrassing for many of us because of the accuracy with which it highlights some of our deepest neuroses. So we eagerly look forward to the next movie release and after watching it walk away with a shrug saying : ‘Oh, such things don't really happen.’ And here I refer not only to films with skyscraper fireworks such as Independence Day but also to those which pinpoint the intimate Stranger inside us such as The Exorcist. What if this world is full of hostile aliens whom we cannot see or touch and who are waiting to ambush us at any moment? Much of science-fiction is based on this perennial anxiety of humankind, and here too the emphasis remains the same : it is what They, in this case these nasty Aliens, do to us. We are the innocent earthlings at the mercy of forces unleashed on us by the evil aliens. In other words, what I am arguing is this. In such cinema, the power to hurt, damage and destroy is removed from human possession and transferred on to other agencies, be they aliens or complex technological institutions. We humans are sanitised from any moral compunctions and are clothed with a childish innocence. We never (actively) do evil, evil is always something that (passively) happens to Us. In this context, one can understand the popularity of films with the role of the possessed child (usually a girl), the child overpowered by diabolical forces. Children are seen as symbols of innocence and vulnerability, and we see ourselves in the position of these possessed children. We are being manipulated and controlled by forces with which we have no connection and for whose genesis we have no responsibility. So too we can understand why films with psychopathic killers in them are so popular. The mass murderer waits lurking in the shadows, at the edges of the ‘civilised’ city, waiting to spring upon us at any moment. He attacks those who are perceived as weak and vulnerable and given that it is women who are typically regarded as ‘weak and vulnerable’, it is not suprising that the victims in such films are usually young women (be they lawyers or doctors). In other words, we transfer our moral responsibilities to the Stranger lying at the fringes of the City. We gloss over the levels of domestic violence against women in day to day lives within our own families and instead pin the blame on forces that we claim we are not connected with. We comfort ourselves with the thought that such violence is always enacted by an agent who is outside the ordinary range of reasoned thought. Once again, violence is what is done to Us.
In short, this is the message of such films : violence ‘just happens’. There are no real human causes, no roots, no histories. Tremdendous destructive energies rush to the surface and overpower us, be they connected with psychopaths, possessed young girls, animals, aliens, or 'supernatural' forces. There is nothing we can do about it : these things have their own inner laws that we do not comprehend. Whenever such phenonemena happen, however, drastic measures have to be taken at once. The possessed have to be imprisoned, beaten up and isolated; the unstable woman has to be destroyed as a threat to social norms; animals have to be killed and mutilated. In general, They have to be exterminated and bombed. This will not count as ‘real’ violence, because it will be redefined as ‘unavoidable’ and ‘legitimate’ collateral damage. These are extreme circumstances and they demand dramatic responses from us.
Another way of putting the above is this. Catastrophe cinema points out the fantasy world we have steeped ourselves in and reflects a deep psychosis in our ‘rationality’. On the hand, we claim that we have rationalised all phenomena that we can come across and have left behind us the ‘irrationalities’ of the so-called Dark Ages. On the other hand, there is the deep fear that something has been left 'out of the picture', and much of contemporary cinema plays on this fear. Death, injury and pain have become unpredictable; we do not know when the next strike will take place, nor even where; we are being persecuted and it is always They (the chemical leak, the aliens, the Enemy) who are responsible for this state of affairs. Therefore, we need not have any moral qualms when dealing with Them : They are not moral agents like Us. Violence becomes a non-human phenomenon which always starts somewhere else, in the mysterious world ‘out there’. Violence does not exist ‘at home’. In some cases, the enemy just might reach the gates but they can never quite penetrate our citadel. Thus we stand at the tip of an iceberg proclaiming our free choices in a rational society, but are terrified that deep seething masses of irrationality might lie submerged under the waters.
Such cinema therefore expresses our mass fantasies of anxiety. What it reveals is our inability to see all of this in moral terms, as something that has to do with our lack of vision, our oppressive structures of power and also with our need to make sense of our lives. We are thereby rendered incapable of turning a critical eye onto ourselves and of asking how far this chronic insecurity is rooted in our own choices and preferences. Instead, we project our fears onto the vaguely understood They and refuse to deal with the situation in non-fatalistic terms. We indulge ourselves in a full flight from moral responsibility. Thus the European-North Atlantic world appears as one that is threatened, frightened, bullied, torn apart with contradictions, wounded, self-pitying and myopic, and contemporary cinema happens to be an accurate reflection of this state of paranoia. If we cannot recognise and criticise our actions as ours, we are trapped in a circle from within which we are too terrified to open our eyes outwards.
The very notion of ‘nuclear deterrence’ is sought to be justified on such an understanding. It must always be the Other who is the real aggressor and We are simply the innocent victims, forced by the Other to retaliate as a consequence of the terrible forces unleashed on Us by Them. In other words, building nuclear weapons is not really Our decision; rather, we are compelled to do so by the Other. It is the Other who calls the shots and we simply follow our ‘historical destiny’. The ‘rationality’ with which we build weapons disguises the deep ‘irrationality’ that allows us to think of ourselves as passive and mute pawns on the chessboard of an ill-defined Destiny. In other words, there is a close and spiraling connection between our obsession with catastrophe cinema and our anxieties in a war-threatened society. The more we have these anxieties, the more we produce such films to help us to salve our consciences. And yet these films only increase the extent of our collective nightmares. In this manner, cinema is performing the negative function of allowing us to live in our constructed innocence. What all this amounts to is that we have lost the ability to mourn, to feel with compassion the enormities of death and violence pervasively present through our own societies. A hopelessness and a sickness of soul have taken over us. Violence has simply been drained off from the European ‘theatre’ to other far-away lands, and conflicts between the major powers are fought out on other people's lands. European lives are preserved at the cost of more expendable human resources in Africa, Latin America and Asia. It might be an involvement in a civil war (Angola, Vietnam) or ‘stabilising’ a monstrous government which is opposed to one's rivals. Thus the so-called Third World becomes a hostage to the display of the First World's fire-play, and this siphoning out of violence means that the people who really pay the price are not the contestants themselves but those on whose lands this high diplomatic drama is played out.
posted by The Transparent Ironist @ 8:01 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home