Watching Violence

 

In her first feature film, The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal managed to both make a faithful adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel of the same name and make the story her own. This achievement was in addition to her playing a range of notable female characters as an actress for years (my favorite is Eileen/Candy from The Deuce). As a result, one of the films I really looked forward to this year was The Bride!, her ambitious take on the story of The Bride of Frankenstein.

The Bride! was declared a misfire in many ways, which I don’t necessarily disagree with. If it wasn’t for its 80+ million-dollar budget (and financial loss), it could have been declared punk or experimental instead. Regardless, Gyllenhaal still managed to make the story her own, despite the crowded field of Frankenstein adaptations, and made some choices that are worth noting down. The choice I thought about the most after watching the film was the way the film depicted violence. Rather than brushing it off, the film’s main character, The Bride, acknowledges and puts weight on the violence inflicted by her or because of her actions.

 

In recent years, I have become more conscious of the violence I have been watching all my life as someone whose main hobby is watching stuff. It was long time coming, but the tipping point was watching The Sopranos for the first time in my 30s, even though I should also give credit to Game of Thrones (the TV show not the books) for this.

 

Being at home more during COVID days, I had more time on my hands. Rather than picking up baking bread like others seemed to be doing at the time, I decided it was time to finally watch Entourage and The Sopranos, two series I had never been super interested in watching but thought I should watch at some point due to both being cultural touchstones in their own right. In a way, this was like me doing my late homework.

By the time I got to the last season of The Sopranos, I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish this homework. I hit the limits of the amount of misogyny and violence I could stomach watching due to the show’s depiction of misogyny and violence amplifying with each season. People killing others due to receiving a homophobic slur from them, women being killed by men only to be forgotten, a closeted gay character finally deciding to leave his environment to be free to live his truth only to face one of the most brutal deaths in the show … The fake eating scenes, where characters aggressively use the fork on the pasta/ziti on their plates without eating anything, became the relief points.

I had to watch the first season of the L Word revival, where the characters discuss their issues via talking instead of killing, beating up, or psychologically manipulating each other, to wash away the lingering impact of the excessive misogyny/violence exposure after I was done with The Sopranos.

 

What if I had watched The Sopranos during the time it was aired with more time in between the episodes? Would it have been easier, even fun, to finish the show? In those days, I watched all sorts of things, mostly made by men, that aestheticized violence. I didn’t glorify it in my head but didn’t question or badly reacted to it either.

As I got older, my tolerance to watching (certain kinds of) violence got lower. In parallel, the scenes of violence became more mainstream as they moved from movies to TV.

 

I looked forward to the new Game of Thrones episodes like many others when the show aired. But Game of Thrones was also the first TV show that made me ask many times “Was this scene necessary?” There was even one episode that I thought I was going to puke in one of the scenes (Season 4 Episode 4 – Craster’s Keep scene) and paused it to take a break.

An argument for such scenes is that they follow the source material. Yet I don’t remember wanting to puke at any point while reading The Song of Ice & Fire series, and the scene I mentioned above was a creative choice made by the showrunners.

Another argument is that violence is part of our history and life. The Sopranos didn’t show anything that doesn’t happen in real life. Maybe that was why it was so hard for me to watch. But I don’t know how it was to watch for others who are fans of characters such as Tony Soprano, and his newer versions Don Draper (Mad Men) and Walter White (Breaking Bad).

 

Unlike The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or The Game of Thrones, Mad Men is one of my favorite TV shows. The show aired at the time I was in the early days of practicing my profession trying to find my place and voice among an army of boys/men. When people said, “this show is sexist”, I defended it for its depiction of sexism. For me, in those early days, watching the show was therapeutic because of its well-written female characters trying to make it among the Mad Men and through all the sexism. But then why did Don Draper have to be the show’s focus? Why did his story steal time from Peggy’s and Joan’s?

 

Does art become sexist, racist, homophobic for depicting sexism, racism, homophobia? Is it a matter of how the depiction is or how the characters inflicting it are treated?

When does depicting violence serve a purpose? Does it ever serve a purpose? Can it be an effective tool for depicting sexism, racism, homophobia? Or does it reinforce these things instead?

When/If depicting violence serves a purpose, when does it become “glorification”? Is that a matter of the perception of the viewer regardless of what the depiction intends?

 

My favorite genre is horror. I get catharsis from watching some of the horror films (e.g., Titane); they provide me with a cheap and intimate therapy experience, similar to Mad Men. Don’t we all need some tools to help us deal with both personal and this world’s horrors? Watching the news often feels more disturbing than any horror film I have ever watched. Plus, don’t many horror films/series/books offer smart political allegories?

I can give you a list of “favorite fight scenes.” At the top would be the scene from True Romance where Patricia Arquette is against a pre-Sopranos James Gandolfini. If it didn’t end the way it does, not sure if I would like that scene considering the amount of violence Arquette’s character, Alabama, endures. On the other hand, does it justify the violence she inflicts on Gandolfini’s character, Virgil, in return?  

In recent TV history, one of the characters I really enjoyed watching was Villanelle (Killing Eve). What makes Villanelle’s violence different from the one inflicted by any of the characters in The Sopranos? Is it because she isn’t fueled by misogyny? Am I more forgiving of women? Or is it just the rarity of watching an unapologetic woman who cannot be put in a box and is excellent at her job, which happens to be being an assassin?

John Wick films are a rare kind that put my mind in standby mode, and hence oddly help me relax, even though I acknowledge the excessive number of casualties that are in each of those films. In a recent podcast episode of Unspooled, the guest Jorma Taccone refers to a scene in the first John Wick film saying, “if they just cut to every single widow he has just made.” Does the ridiculousness of those scenes where John Wick is on binge-killing is the reason why my mind reacts less to them?

Similarly, none of the gory violence scenes in Terrifier 3 bother me as much as the scene where Sue is beating Elisabeth in The Substance. The Terrifier series is not really the type of horror I like, and I don’t intend to watch others in the series; the extremity of its violence makes it harder for me to take it seriously. On the other hand, The Substance is exactly the kind of horror movie I am interested in, body horror made by a female filmmaker. I understand the purpose of that beating scene, which is the reason why I take it more seriously, but I also wish that the movie kept that scene shorter. Does the extended duration of it help delivering its point better or does it turn into exploitation at that point?

 

It is also important to note down the alternative thoughtful and effective creative choices.

As mentioned in the beginning, The Bride! doesn’t accept casualties, unlike John Wick or most superhero films, and acknowledges the consequences of violence.

While still depicting a lot of violence and being a much grimmer show due to the subject matter, House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones spin-off, seems more careful about how and when it visualizes violence, especially violence toward women. It also seems to employ more female writers and directors behind the scenes. 

The first season of Jane Campion’s Top of The Lake has the topic of sexual assault engrained throughout its story without showing any scenes of it.

Paola Cortellesi’s C'è ancora domani switches to musical aesthetics and shows characters dancing rather than depicting violence during, what we clearly understand, the scenes of the lead character, Delia, being beaten by her husband.

Maybe more should think about such alternatives.

 

I know this is a heavily debated subject. I am not a film/TV scholar and don’t really have a thesis here, just my personal experience as someone who loves to watch things. I have no right to be didactic or claim high morals either; as mentioned above I do watch a range of things that include violence and love some of them. The best I can do is at least to question what I watch more carefully now and not simply accept scenes of violence for the sake of it.