Violence Enhanced Through Story & Character
Despite my best efforts I got sucked into a 9/11 article on Salon yesterday. It was a (fairly comprehensive) list of movies and books influenced or directly about the destruction of the trade centre towers and the war in Iraq.
In particular I was interested in how they were connecting those events to The Dark Knight, which I just watched for the second time recently.
More interesting, though, was this sentence in their synopsis:
… the film's extremely dark PG-13 violence and images of vigilante violence and necessary torture...
"PG-13, that can't be right?" I thought. Not with all the pencils disappearing into eyes, knives in mouths and pool cue beatings; not to mention facial burns that would make Freddy Kruger wince. This movie was surely rated R.
But when I really thought about it, it wasn't gory or overly violent. Certainly not like The Raid is going to be (thanks @darrennorthcott).
There's no spatter when the Joker rams a thugs head into a pencil eyeball first. Pool cue beatings happen in your mind, since Nolan ends the scene just before the beatings start. People are shot, punched, kicked and dropped off high buildings and manage to have their insides inside.
I imagined it was more violent because I was set up to believe the setting and characters in it were capable of horrible things. Nolan's Gotham City is corrupt and dirty. Its villains – and heroes – loathsome sociopaths.
By the time Batman breaks Maroni's legs by dropping him from a ledge we don't even need the cracking sounds.
Before this I'd not considered that the same hallmarks of great horror direction – off-frame violence, bait-and-switch intensity – could be used in other genres. And not just through the lens. It could be the characters and story that make us trick ourselves.
Great writing makes cruel actions traumatic, and vengeance a touchdown by your favourite football team. Great storytelling amplifies everything in the movie. Real or perceived.
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