Part of the solution? Part of the problem?: Graphic violence, art, culture

Kenneth Turan's review of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto on NPR this morning has as its real subject what the levels of violence a culture allows to be depicted in its art says about that culture. Turan's claim that Gibson's film is in fact symptomatic of, rather than a warning about or antidote to, the very internal rot that the film seeks to warn us of is an intriguing one, and one to take seriously, I think. Whether that argument is correct, though, is another matter.

Given that the namesake for the blog you're visiting is unsparing in its depictions of acts of violence and their resulting carnage, yet (on the other hand) I refuse to see films whose sole reason for being seems to be depictions of violence (an eye-of-the-beholder sort of statement, I realize), I have found myself thinking about this subject quite often. I frankly don't know--and probably cannot know--whether my personal tastes in subject matter shape my larger, admittedly disorganized and probably contradictory conclusions about depictions of graphic violence in art and what that might say about culture.

That's why I'd like to invite my reader(s), in the fashion of Ariel's dormant(?) Blogger Limelight series, to post something on this subject at their own blogs. I encourage you to link to this post as you do so that those interested can find your posts.

Below the fold are some sketchy thoughts that came to mind as I thought about this subject this morning that you're welcome to steal use as inspiration:

*Gibson's Apocalypto and The Passion of the Christ (which Roger Ebert said was the most violent film he had ever seen) served as this morning's starting point. But as I thought (again) about Cormac McCarthy's work and also the criticism Flannery O'Connor received for the frequent, often brutal violence (by 1950s standards) in her stories, it occurred to me: Strange that all three of these artists are (or were) devout Catholics. Protestant art doesn't shy away from graphic violence (Hieronymus Bosch, anyone?), but as I quickly think about it, it seems more often concerned with depicting the violence associated with Hell's eternal torments visited upon the souls of the damned. The violence O'Connor, McCarthy and Gibson depict is inflicted on physical bodies in this world. Given Catholicism's traditional focus on Christ on the cross--that is, the ideas of sacrifice and mortality--does that present to Catholic artists a familiar entry into thinking about the metaphysics of violence? Along these lines: O'Connor answered those who criticized her stories' violence by saying that American culture had become so unseeing of evil that writers for whom that's a concern had no choice but to shock readers into awareness. My own sense of McCarthy's work is that he's very much in agreement with that notion as well, though, with the (possible) exception of The Road, McCarthy doesn't hold out much hope for moments of grace, as O'Connor does. But where do you see Gibson's use of violence fitting in here? If "apocalypse" means "revelation" as well as "destruction," what exactly does his depictions of the destruction of human bodies reveal? This, of course, is just a theological re-framing of this post's central question.

*I've been puzzled for a long time by what I see as America's cultural discomfort with graphic depictions of sex but not graphic depictions of violence. One anecdotal case in point: While I was living in Mobile, a group of churches threatened a boycott of the largest theater chain in town if it exhibited Showgirls, but no one had said a peep about Natural Born Killers's extended run not long before. Are our Puritan cultural roots to blame? Is the explanation that Americans have violence encoded in our cultural DNA, as Richard Slotkin argues in his books on the mythos of the frontier, such that one could argue that it is violence that gave birth to this nation (see in particular Slotkin's Regeneration through Violence--whereas sex-as-cultural-narrative is not celebrated but policed, more often than not (the story of John Smith and Pocahontas is, depending on how you look at it, either the exception that proves the rule or a story which has actually helped us gloss over our violent engendering at the expense of the Other)?

I look forward to hearing from you in comments and, even better, reading your own posts on this subject.

UPDATE: Via Randall of Musings from the Hinterland comes commentary from ShrinkWrapped on the same Turan review; his two chief points are that we should draw distinctions between depictions of violence and actual acts of violence perserved on film, and that other distinctions are to be made

between the occasional, necessary, and regrettable savagery of civilized men and the savagery of the primitive. Savages use violence and the threat of violence to cow and threaten and harm innocents. Civilized men will sometimes require savagery in order to protect those innocents from the savages.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Via 3 Quarks Daily comes this review of Apocalypto by Traci Adren that addresses another issue of interest for this post, violence done to historical and cultural representations of people:

I loved Gibson's film "Braveheart," I really did. But there is something very different about portraying a group of people, who are now recovering from 500 years of colonization, as violent and brutal. These are people who are living with the very real effects of persistent racism that at its heart sees them as less than human. To think that a movie about the 1,000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya--when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya--is in any way okay, entertaining, or helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic.

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Culture, Art, Violence, Religion, Catholicism, Protestantism, Film, American culture, Mel Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O' Connor, Apocalypto