With Clint Eastwood's Mystic River and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill both near the top of box office charts around the world, the nature of screen violence is once again the central intellectual question in western cinema.
In Eastwood's early spaghetti westerns and mid-period Dirty Harry films, we saw brutal killings but neither their psychological causes nor social effects. By the early 1990s, with Unforgiven, the actor-director had undergone a change of heart. In a key scene, a gunman is shown to be worried about having killed an innocent man. Eastwood's recent Mystic River continues this recantation, the slowest apology in modern American cinema. In it, the sexual abuse of a child leads inexorably to other crimes in later generations. It flows through America like the river in the title.
The problem with the film, one of Eastwood's best, is that out here in the real world we already know that violence has consequences. He is among the few still discovering this. If he is to advance at all as a filmmaker in the final phase of his career, he must address the question of how the apparent inexorability of violence can be stopped.
Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino's latest film, one of the most violent ever released in Britain, is Mystic River's intellectual correlative. Where Eastwood has progressed to the point where he understands that violence matters, Tarantino presents it abstractly, like music. In several interviews, he has said that he films his swordfighting scenes of decapitation and multiple amputations as if they are musical numbers. It has always been aesthetically interesting to borrow form and apply it to unfamiliar content in this way, but his doing so ignores the obvious fact that in musical numbers people dance, where in fight scenes they die. The consequence of the former is tiredness; of the latter bereavement and trauma. Tarantino's scenes are structured like those of Gene Kelly, as a crescendo. They finish without repercussions.
This sounds like I'm taking Kill Bill too seriously. It is, after all, offered up as comic book neo-violence, its purpose being to exhilarate. An artist has a right to choose whether or not his work is social and psychological. But Kill Bill is plainly not a comic book. It is photographed, not drawn. It is far more representational than cartoon violence. Unlike the visuals of Tom and Jerry, its images capture the texture of Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu's skin, and present these on a massive screen. That is the magic of film. It is tied to the real world in a way that drawings only partially are and music is not at all.
This is not to say that film must be serious or literal in its depiction of human suffering. Scary Movie 3, which has just broken box office records in the US, features the slaughter of gormless teenagers, but is plainly a comedy. The films of Sam Peckinpah were among the first to find balletic beauty in violent death, but the agonies of those deaths were clearly apparent. Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho both found something thrilling about the slaughter of a vulnerable woman, but that thrill, it is revealed, expressed the impulses of a voyeur. Kill Bill is neither ironic, savage nor voyeuristic. It has no point of view whatsoever. Some have argued that as its action hero is a woman, it is a work of revenge feminism, but to be feminist you need first to be human. Despite its photographic representationalism, it never manages to be so.
Film theorists have long debated this relationship between the representational and abstract elements in cinema. The most distinguished contribution came from Andr? Bazin, whose starting point was that "photography affects like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or snowflake." His central claim, elaborated in more than 2,000 ontological articles, was that this meant that cinema has an innate, inescapable duty towards the real. With this in mind he saw Orson Welles, Roberto Rossellini and Jean Renoir as central to the canon, but his argument applies to all but the most purely experimental abstract cinema. So influential was this ethical position that, as Colin McCabe's new book on Jean-Luc Godard shows, it became the founding principle of Godard's work and the new wave as a whole.
In one scene near the beginning of Kill Bill, Tarantino appears to be on the verge of acknowledging Bazin's insight. As Thurman brutally stabs and murders a young woman, he cuts to the victim's small daughter, who has been watching the mayhem. Even if the idea that photographed cinema can be a comic book was tenable - which it isn't - surely this hint at the consequence of witnessing a violent act undermines the argument. Rather, while acknowledging that damage will be done, Tarantino shows that he isn't interested in that damage. This callousness wounds us, because Bazin was right. Cinema affects us like nature.
Bazin would have approved of Mystic River on ethical if not artistic grounds, but it seems likely that he would have detested Kill Bill. The irony is that Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart after Godard's Bande ? part. Godard would hate the dishonesty of Tarantino's vision and his absurd conflation of dance and death.
