Violence and Sentimentality in the Movies: Which is More Dangerous?

Richard Brody at The Front Row has this interesting reflection on violence and the movies/media in general:

"There does seem to be a great deal of research on the question of violence and of quantity of viewing; but very little, if any, on the subject of treacle. I do worry about the effect of violent films on children, but I worry just as much about the emotional debility, the sentimentalization of kids who watch only child-friendly works. In general, children watch much too much television and see far too many movies in which everyone smiles too much and talks as if they’re on sugar highs—or, simply, where there isn’t enough ambiguity or mystery. The oversimplification of life into tangy bite-sized morsels is as much of a danger, for individuals and generations, as stoked aggression."

I'm fascinated by the critique of sentimentality - and while some may legitimately suggest that I am guilt of such over-egging the emotional pudding myself, I think it's entirely appropriate.  At the same time, the way we tell stories in which violence plays a significant role requires sustained attention.  My starting point: Is there a qualitative difference between the violence of 'Inglourious Basterds', 'The Dirty Dozen', 'Lethal Weapon', 'Saving Private Ryan', 'Home Alone' and 'Cache'?  Of course there is.  What's the purpose of movie violence?  What are its effects?  Can it be cathartic?  Can it nurture more real-world violence? And I've come to the view that the human race can no longer afford representations of the myth of redemptive violence for entertainment's sake alone.  If you'll join me in the comments section, let's talk about why.

The Beginnings of What Happens Next

My friend Dawn Purvis has made a surprising intervention in a debate about the causes of the conflict in northern Ireland.  Henry Kelly writes about it here - if you're interested in the politics and peacemaking of my home society, I'd encourage you to read this article.  If you're not, but you care about how we handle history, and especially how it has become almost impossible for truth to get past party interests, I'd recommend it just as much.  Are we willing to remember things that make us look bad if it helps other people to heal?

'New' Irish Cinema - The Paradox of 'Turning Green'

You know, we like to be friendly round here, but if you've been in the neighbourhood for any length of time, you'll also know that I often grieve the lack of imagination in most films.  Robots kill some people/people kill more robots; abs-ridden guy meets cute girl/conflict/unification; bloke changes, you know the deal.  So it's a pleasant surprise to see 'Turning Green', your none-too-typical American boy grows up in a small West of Ireland village/competes with the local gangster by selling porn magazines (illegal in the eyes of the State and shameful in the eyes of the Church)/and makes witty comments about what's wrong with the land of my birth while Timothy Hutton, an actor I like a great deal, snarls at him from under a pork pie hat.

'Turning Green' was made four years ago - a runner up in the first season of 'Project Greenlight' - and is only now being released, with the absurdly misleading poster above.  To tell you the truth, it's one of the strangest films I've seen - on the one hand trying to make a decent job of assessing Ireland's paradox, or at least its paradox thirty years ago, when the film is set: the fecund literary culture and freedom narratives of Beckett, Joyce, and Heaney co-mingling with the obsessive puritanism enshrined by the State; on the other, it offers a series of cliches about 'Oirishness' - the angry priest, the aul fella who seems glued to the end of the bar, the visions of Mary turned into a kind of foreplay.  It doesn't help that the movie seems unsure of its tone - is it a dramatic entertainment in the tradition of 'The Quiet Man', a comedy in the style of 'Waking Ned', or a gangster thriller that should have been re-titled 'Mystic O'River'?  You get parts of all three here; with a shade or two of Tarantino, and a little Woody Allen neurotic cynicism in the voiceover.

Writer-directors John G Hoffman and Michael Aimette do enough to make this northern Irish writer laugh - sometimes; but also enough to make me feel condescended to, sometimes.  Ireland has been poor, sure; Ireland has been oppressive for some, absolutely; Ireland has a long string of little villages where everybody knows everybody else, of this there is no doubt.  But the lack of any empathetic characters in 'Turning Green' has the effect of suggesting there's no reason to care; and for me, Ireland needs a vision of what we can be, rather than yet more dwelling on what's wrong with us.

And yet, I found myself almost beguiled by the depiction of my home; and grateful that I wasn't watching another 'Troubles' film or a 'Ryan's Daughter'-style over-romanticisation - there's a smart little film trying to escape from 'Turning Green', one in which the double standard of moral hypocrisy is the heart of the story.  It's not a stretch to say that cultures that freak out over nudity while people are being killed in their name need a mirror; 'Turning Green' offers a very blunt one in an exchange of dialogue that, for me, was worth the weaknesses of the rest of the movie.  When an old man is having trouble describing the package he's gone to pick up from the post office, the domineering priest in line behind our anti-hero James (played with appropriate detachment by Donal Gallery) huffs and puffs about how ridiculous it is to be wasting his time.  James responds with a line that one imagines was the writers' intended motto for the whole film:

'If these people aren't bombing women and children or starving the homeless, they're making small talk at the post office'.

Despite the fact that the film doesn't hang together, glimpses of this coruscating raised eyebrow can be seen throughout; 'Turning Green' seems not be a complete work, but it has signs of moving in the right direction.  And it's a better film than I'd make right now.  (For what it's worth, 'Turning Green' pales in comparison to another film that carries similar themes - the far superior 'Garage', Lenny Abrahamson's Tarkovskian/Rohmeresque film about an Irish petrol station attendant and the encroachment of the Celtic Tiger.)

Meantime, in other Irish news, 'Prods and Pom-Poms', the lovely short documentary about Sandy Row cheerleaders will get its local TV debut for Northern Ireland viewers tomorrow night - you can see it on UTV at 10.35pm, Friday 6th November; and if you're outside the reach of northern Irish television transmitters, DVDs are still available from its makers.

Problem of the Day: Has Martin Scorsese made a Ghost Story? And if so, What am I going to do about it?

So I was up early this morning having slept restlessly after watching the end of 'Battlestar Galactica' last night (no spoilers - suffice it to say that fans of Richard Dawkins and Thomas Merton may find themselves both satisfied; I certainly was).  Cylons colonised my repose (for some reason the early models, one of whose bosses is depicted above, were the stuff of my childhood nightmares), but I managed to avoid the bad dream I might otherwise have had when I was younger and less apt to resist imagining the imminent doom of the planet.  I have a sensitive constitution, as they say.  Which segues neatly into the reason for this post: why I am about to let you, dear reader, down.

Over at The Film Talk, my genial co-host and I are busy as usual in TFT Central, grafting away at the plans for Episode 98, which will - must - feature 'This is It' (and if you heard our preview at the end of Episode 97 you'll know just how much we're looking forward to that particular endeavor, although early reviews are surprisingly good), and 'Paranormal Activity', (image below) the once-every-ten-years-straight-outta-the-gate-micro-budget-huge-audience-scare-the-life-from-you-neo-Blair-Witch-Project, cleverly marketed with midnight screenings before opening wide wide WIDE.  It will be unavoidable for the next few weeks.

And here's the problem:

I hate scary movies.

I spent the better part of 'The Sixth Sense' (and, yes, before you jump in, there was a better part - and we tend to like Shyamalan round here, no matter how unpopular it makes us) employing the time-honored tactic of removing my glasses and staring at my left foot, thereby reducing the height that I would be propelled out of my seat when whatever Mr S wanted to frighten me with appeared on screen.

I got as far as being picked up by my friend Alex and half-way to the theatre before I decided that I couldn't go through with our previous arrangement to see 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose'; I was sure it would be an ordeal.  (Note to the snark police: I mean for good reasons; I'm told the movie's not bad at all.)

I even found my viewing of 'The Black Hole' at Escapism last week to be problematic - Maximillian Schell made me jump on more than one occasion, and the final sequence in which he is possessed by the spirit of his pet robot to rule over Hades is just about as much as my resolution can take.

So, to the presenting issue:

Jett wants us to review 'Paranormal Activity' this week.  I can't face seeing it.  I think I can address the ethical question by carrying out one of our patented q&a reviews; and I'll devote some serious attention to thinking 'em up; but I just don't think I can sustain the emotional assault course of watching the movie.

This isn't just for reasons of psycho-spiritual balance, although I do tend to think that there's enough struggle in most days to make me less than apt to subject myself to more for entertainment's sake.  And I'm not averse to horror films per se - 'The Exorcist', 'The Shining', 'Quiz Show' (trust me - it's a horror movie about the potential collapse of a man's soul) each find their way into my roster of re-watchable movies, most of the time.  No, I guess my resistance to 'Paranormal Activity' resides in a combination of the emotional terrain questions I've just raised, and the fact that it seems this apparently very accomplished film chooses to present the mystery of spirit as a threat.  We've mentioned on the show before that no less a philosophical artist than Stanley Kubrick considered the tale of Jack Torrance, the hotel, and the tricycle to be 'an optimistic story', because, he said, any story that posits the existence of an afterlife for human beings must therefore include hope.  Fair point, Stanley, even though I think he was slightly joking.  Of course, 'The Shining' doesn't exactly present its vision in an optimistic way.  Nor, I'm told, does 'Paranormal Activity'.  [SPOILER BELOW THE PICTURE]

We see a young couple killed by ghosts.  It's supposed to thrill us.  Next week, we will watch angels try to save humans from their selfishness in 'Wings of Desire'.  It will feel transcendent to watch it again.  It will thrill me.  And I don't think I'll have missed anything by not seeing 'Paranormal Activity'.

Now, I've read that Orin Peli, the director of 'Paranormal Activity' used to be afraid of ghosts, and that he made the movie as an attempt at catharthsis.  Good for him.  I'm pretty sure, however, that it wouldn't be cathartic for me.

So here are my five questions to you - I'd appreciate any advice you can give:

Can any of you convince me to see 'Paranormal Activity' before we record on Friday morning?

What is the purpose of horror fiction?

Does horror on film create, reduce, nurture, or ignore horror in real life?

Is it a good thing to pay to be frightened?

And, given that Martin Scorsese's 'Shutter Island' looks like a serial killer/scary mental institution/murderous-rage-from-beyond-the-grave film, is there any advice you can offer to help me prepare for the inevitable repeat of my pre-emptive angst when that movie is released next year?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYVrHkYoY80]

Mental Illness and the Movies

Just a brief post from me as I'm on my way to Nashville to, among other things, meet up with the maestro for a screening of recent cult film 'The Room' at the glorious Belcourt Theatre. Meantime, I'd like to recommend the gutsy article at the Huffington Post from Glenn Close on the cinematic portrayal of mental illness. It's a significant moment when anyone is prepared to criticise their own work, especially when that work is among the most successful and iconic they've done, but Close all but disassociates herself from 'Fatal Attraction' because the way it turned a human being with a personality disorder who needed help into a monster whom the audience was supposed to consider worthy only of being spectacularly murdered.

There are, as Close writes, notable exceptions (such as 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', above) to the superficiality or demonising portrayals of mental illness; but for the most part, the contours of the mind in the movies are subject to the same kind of over-simplification or plain ignorance that shows up every time the term 'schizophrenic' is used to describe 'split personality' (an entirely different condition) or, more disturbing, when 'psychotic' is used interchangeably with the accurate term given to the extremely rare phenomenon of 'psychopathy'. According to the Native American scholar Joe Gone, 48% of US Americans have a diagnosable mental illness, and so Close's points about ignorance not helping any of us are just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm not an expert in any of this, although like most of us, have not been untouched by mental illness in my friends, my family, myself; I'd love to have a conversation here about the portrayal of psychological conditions in cinema - any particularly good examples of accuracy, or bad examples of egregious misunderstanding?  If mental illness is frequently rooted in conflicted desire and expectation, and if cinema is about desire, is it possible that the movies might actually have the power to make us sick?  Or to heal us?