To Bleed or Not To Bleed?

Last week, Mel Gibson’s latest gore-fest “Apocalypto” opened alongside “Blood Diamond,” the violent liberal ego-stroker by Edward M. Zwick ’74, and movie observers pointed to a trend of serious violence in movies. David Carr, the New York Times’ so-called “Carpetbagger” (Oscar observer), wrote a column about how many movies tagged with the speculative title of “Oscar-worthy” are filled with blood.

Of course Hollywood has become less bashful about painting movie screens red in recent decades, but does this violence necessarily make for better films? Not really. Few filmmakers this season have shown a real mastery of violence as an aesthetic technique.

These last months of the year are often a proving ground for movies shooting for awards, and many of these better films haven’t been bashful about their violent content. “The Departed” is easily the best film by Martin Scorsese in years (possibly since “Goodfellas”), while “Casino Royale” leaves most Bond films in the dust. But neither of these films is so good because of its violence. Indeed, the best action scene in “Casino Royale” is a beginning chase scene with practically no blood; “The Departed” works because of terrific acting by Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, and (especially) Leonardo DiCaprio.

The blood in “The Departed” actually weakens the better scenes in which tension is created through the threat of violence, not its execution. Nicholson’s best scene is a conversation with the duplicitous DiCaprio where the audience thinks that Jack might put a bullet through Leo’s pretty head no less than three times. When Scorsese indulges in splatters of blood similar to those that drowned “Gangs of New York,” I wished that the characters would stop shooting and start talking again.

The dialogue in “Casino Royale” is also more interesting than the action scenes (a hallmark of the Connery days). The same holds true of “V for Vendetta” and “Inside Man.” The problem with “V for Vendetta,” and with many of this year’s less successful films, is that burgeoning body counts don’t always correlate with increasing emotional tension.

The writers of “Casino Royale” include “Crash” writer/director Paul Haggis, who adds his effective (if overblown) dialogue to the film, but doesn’t try to convince you that the obscenely long and bloody chase sequence on a Miami runway has anything to do with plot or character development. This is disappointing—it holds “Casino Royale” back from being one of the greatest Bond films ever—but not horribly so. In other films where the interstitial space between blood splatters is less captivating, it’s crushing.

In “Apocalypto,” Mel Gibson doesn’t try to persuade you to care about the fall of the Mayan empire. He’s more interested in painting the last bit of blood on that recently eviscerated human heart. The violence in “Apocalypto” seems obscene because Gibson does nothing to justify or contextualize it. The main character (Jaguar Paw, played by Rudy Youngblood) is motivated largely by the fear of having his skin peeled off, literally.

In his aforementioned article, Carr quotes Robert Rosen, Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television: “Violence can be a corollary of gravity and seriousness… There is increasingly a choreography of violence, a way of aestheticizing it, that makes it more acceptable and worthy of recognition.” The problem with films like “Apocalypto” (and its forerunner, “The Passion of the Christ”) is that although they try to be serious, they invariably drown in the ‘aesthetics of violence’ and forget to explain the motivation or relevance for the violence.

Rosen might have amended his statement to say that violence can be a corollary of gravity and seriousness only if there is a coherent narrative motive. Otherwise, the film drifts into the horror genre where violence is composed as spectacle for shock value. “Flags of Our Fathers,” the Clint Eastwood historical drama about Marines at Iwo Jima, is possibly the most graphic war movie since “Saving Private Ryan.” But since the gore in both films finds its source in a historical event, the viewer doesn’t become skeptical or alienated when body parts start to fly. Gibson’s revisionist take on history is too fanciful to give “Apocalypto” or “The Passion of the Christ” the same firm grounding.

“Snakes on a Plane” was one of the most entertaining films of the summer because it knew exactly what it was doing: objectifying the violent deaths endured by the passengers. The filmmakers engineered the film to make viewers say, “Oh man! That snake totally just bit that guy’s dick off!” It’s more of a horror-comedy film than an actual action movie.

The only film this year to fully realize the aesthetic potential of violence is “The Last King of Scotland,” a movie in which the depicted killings serve as a metaphor for the Ugandan genocide and thus magnify the atrociousness of Forest Whitaker’s magnetic and terrifying Idi Amin. But even when you forget that the film is about a historical tragedy, you still anxiously feel that everyone in the film is a piece of meat waiting to be hacked to pieces; when the butcher comes, it feels disturbingly right.

—Columnist Kyle L.K. McAuley can be reached at kmcauley@fas.harvard.edu.