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Bleeding Realism Dry,
or How to Turn One's Back on a Tyrant
page 1, 2
In
the censorious era of classical Hollywood, the death gesture needed
to be devitalized, and thus made more like a religious event (the immaculate)
than a living one (the sinfully real). Blood was largely a forbidden
mango, and its natural appearance could (we presume) jolt audiences
starving for Busby Berkeleyesque fantasies into the reality of their
Depression (while the expression of sex, that which eased the Depression,
simultaneously instigated the Hays Code). Therefore, gladiatorial midget-impalings
and lion-maulings had to be trimmed along with lesbian coquetry in Sign
of the Cross (1932) by DeMille, who knew too well and craftily
that the Good Book was the best and most logical vehicle for skirting
the Creationist Hays Code's disavowal of physics and biology.9
But we conveniently forget that, long before Peckinpah, blood was occasionally
allowed in the generic war film, as emphatically heroic, inspirational,
and/or sentimental events, as in Wellman's Wings (1927),
Hughes's Hell's Angels (1930), Miller's Flying
Tigers (1942), or Garnett's Bataan (1943).
In these cases, blood was a stain applied with a brush, a goreless bullet
hole through a helmet, black-and-white crimson squeezed from a hidden
pouch in Wings, blood gurgling from a fighter pilot's
mouth in Tigers, a precocious blood squib in the arm
in the indulgently produced Angels, or smoke ominously
rising from a soldier's bullet wounds in Bataan.10
Here, the biology of blood, leavened with romantic jingoism, became
like baptismal waters cleansing life of its sinful offense, rendering
otherwise immoral blood — as an expression of militarism —
into an immaculate, virginal cause.
Before the standardization of transnational squib technology in the late 1960s, blood generally made its entrance in the shape of an ellipsis. For example, in the opening of Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960), a cartoonishly Mexicanized Eli Wallach blasts a foolhardy peasant armed only with a machete: as he is shot, the peasant-mime clutches his white-clothed chest in the spots where immaterial bullets are supposedly penetrating him, while no blood is seen. Cut back to Wallach, who is apparently pleased with his temporary Mexicanization. Cut back to the peasant, who is now face down in the dust with two large red exit wounds manifested in his back, courtesy of sneaky montage. How did they appear? Presumably from the brush of an angelic stagehand, descended during that smokescreen cut, who, despite the irrationalism of his faith-based existence, has better offscreen knowledge of reality than the screen allows us to witness.
At the same time, however, technology, in the form of the blood squib, was to be born again like the Christian convinced of his new perception of reality.11 Audiences in the 1950s were shocked to see a ballistic trajectory terminate in the skull of a man who was onscreen and not off in Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1957); years later, the asylum inmates in Fuller's The Big Red One (1980), a realistic film without blood squibs, would yell "I am one of you! I am sane!" only when wielding a machine gun — I cannot help but think the inmates are also the film's deluded audience, conditioned to expect jingoistic gore where only antiwar pacifism is offered.
Danish film program
for The Green Berets
In 1968, the childish paint-spilling of John Wayne's imperialistic Green Berets fallaciously signified the noble innocence of war, as if innocence were the unworldly ignorance into which one is born (the great lie of romanticism!) and not the true innocence that can only be gained (not regained) through wise experience.12 Yet the branch-impalement and throat-slitting of Green Berets were cordially afforded the naïvete of a G-rating (just after the MPAA rating system had been implemented) in accordance with the film's non-subversive politics and the traditional rightist allowances for heroic military blood. Hardly a charming anachronism, this irrationalism continues today in full force: Braveheart (1995) and The Patriot (2000) would merit NC-17 ratings were their violences not in the service of the militaristic, rabble-rousing propaganda required to perpetuate the rightist industrial complex — certainly these are more violent films than even the uncensored, X-rated rough cut of Woo's Hard Target (1993), a film whose violence was trimmed because its mildly deviant sentiments side with the underclass, the victims of industry.13 Similarly, the self-parodic, flag-waving blood squibbery of Tinu Verma's Kashmir-set Maa Tujhhe Salaam (2002) would be deemed pornographic, at least from the perspective of Indian censorship, if it did not glorify post-September 11th anti-Pakistani nationalism, particularly as the two nations try to out-cannon one another as we speak.
The Patriot
If rightist violence strives to romantically strip blood of its realism even as realism is its purported pretext, revolutionarily leftist tendencies in film violence have often opted for the opposite effect by exploiting real animal killings, shoving indigestibly, calculatedly raw realism down the throat of the bourgeois apparatus. We see this, obviously, in Eisenstein's Leninist Strike (1924), where the shot of a slaughtered bull disruptively interjects the climactic slaughter of the workers; in Franju's antifascist Blood of the Beasts (1949), where analogies between the postwar abattoir and the concentration camp are unmistakable; in Godard's Marxist Weekend (1967), where the death knells of a slaughtered pig and chicken announce a return from sterile, unnatural capitalism; or arguably in Deodato's allegedly anti-imperialist Cannibal Holocaust (1979), where colonialist filmmakers are consumed by the Third World noble savagery they wish to consume cinematically. Even if we accept these films' theses, the animal killing's artless symbolism — the "noble shock" — is more of a reminder than a revelation of the real, and takes childishly easy advantage of our alienations from reality and naturalness (presumably, an audience of professional slaughterhouse workers would not be terribly shocked by Blood of the Beasts). No, it is not the monkey's brains of the mondo film which are cleaved and scooped for the itinerant gourmand's delectation; rather, it is my own sanity's hold on the distinction between the real and the realistic that is devoured by a cinema believing realism is not merely a mode of representation but an illuminated passage to Truth. There must be better ways to prove that reality exists other than recording a snuffed animal's convincing death gesture — what exactly do we want to convince ourselves of?
Finally there is what I call centrist violence — what others
might call the new liberal violence — which defends itself
against fist-waving moralmongers not only through its realism but on the
basis of morality: the dire effects of violence must be shown to our precious
spawn, as if all brutalities were not beautified when framed and projected
a hundred foot across, invested with glorious but now socially responsible
squib technology. The moralistic realism of the squibs in Spielberg's
Saving Private Ryan (1998) became a manufactured publicity
event — not too far removed from the illicit orchestrations of Snuff
— assuring a self-aware, publicity-guided audience that it was about
to experience real Realism, or real technology, for the first
time.14 Even the most extraordinary
and well-meaning examples of this centrist, objective violence stumble
into embarrassing naïvete. After I attended a screening of T. F.
Mous' didactic WWII atrocity docudrama Man Behind the Sun
(1988), the director, in attendance that evening,15
expressed afterwards his bewilderment and dismay when the mostly collegiate
audience whooped, cheered, and applauded with delight the special-effects
scenes of prisoners of war being skinned, depressurized, frozen, and so
forth. But hasn't Mous learned the lessons of McLuhan? What right do we
have to be shocked by the applauding of technology, when all that matters
now is technology per se and not its representative contents? Still, even
with our cool alienations, we have come a long way. When drummers, trumpeters,
and pipers accompanied warriors on ancient battlefields, they furnished
war with a live soundtrack — and an organic one that might continually
fluctuate as musicians were killed in battle — that aestheticized
real violence not within a retrospective frame but during
the moment of its own creation. Compared to this, what are the responsibly
centrist reproductions of the media?
The Economics of Squib Technology
In his El Topo: The Book of the Film (1971), Alejandro Jodorowsky excitedly explains how using latex condoms for exploding blood squibs secretly approximates for him the burst of orgasm, though audiences unaware of the condom-based technology of squibbing may be excluded from the romance. When the blood supply for his low-budget production was exhausted, Jodorowsky hurled melons at the dwarves and cripples of El Topo's massacre finale, and then cut the film to show only crimson substances rebounding off their heads, creating an evidently unconvincing substitute for the squib.16 Which, then, is the greater secret orgasm — the technology of the diegesis (the physicality of bursting blood), or the formal technology of montage (splicing together melons)? And is one's inability to afford technology itself an economic castration, or is the clever overcoming of this lack the greatest gush of all? Which is the greater titillation — the realism of technology, or the ingenuities that overcome it?
The sheep's tongue-yanking scene
in Blood Feast
Before the standardization of violence in the mainstream feature, there had always been messy, destitute, underground attempts at exploring and explicating violence, from the gouged cat's eye in Dwain Esper's feverish Maniac (1934), to the fabled sheep's tongue-yanking in Lewis's sublime Blood Feast (1963), to the precocious make-up effects of Jose Mojica Marrins' Tonight I Paint in Flesh Color (1966). In amateur films that could not afford convincing technologies of realism, such as Lewis's, unconvincing death gestures — i.e., amateur acting — become equated with the butcher-shop technology undergirding them.17 Today, the conspicuousness of low-budget filmmaking's lacking gore technology is the elliptical use of blood after non-elliptical blood was released from its taboo. For example, the montage construction of Jon McBride's direct-to-video Cannibal Campout (1988) entails that shot A represents a screaming female head, shot B an axe swinging through the air, and shot C anonymous blood splashing across an onscreen speed limit sign; that the blood is clearly being hurled from a pail by an offscreen assistant rather than having it realistically pulse in arterial tempo is further evidence of its phallo-economic lack and, ultimately, paradoxical inability to be taken seriously as a socially rebellious, low-budget, alternative film.18 In a large budget film, where such effects are easily afforded, an intentional ellipsis of blood stands for classist subtlety and "good taste," such that demonstrations of "taste" become inversely proportional to techno-economic capability. In essence, this perfectly defines "taste": that which one is empowered to do but does not, as an ostentatious public demonstration of one's class position.
A more philosophically interesting example is afforded by a technical gaffe in Abel Ferrera's Ms. 45 (1981). When rape victim cum avenging feminist Ms. 45 shoots to death the sleazy photographer who wants to exploit her, we see squibs pop from beneath his clothes while gratuitous blood from offscreen is also squirted onto the wall behind him, as if it were coming from an exit wound. Yet the spray's trajectory is clearly coming from the wrong angle, so we imagine a poor production assistant with a tube of blood praying his offscreen squirt simply comes somewhere into the camera's diegetic field of view. Though the film is otherwise a textbook of successful low-budget filmmaking, the double tendency of this murder seems unable to reconcile the technology of realism with the low-budget lack of technology that cult films like Ms. 45 often demonstrate. In the context of a rape-revenge film, the double tendency becomes a gendered allegory wherein economic lack becomes the feminist's own desire to effect the "masculine" — or even sodomitic — technology of squib realism, while the film's insurrectionary potency is undermined by the very lack it strives to fill.
A Fool's Semiotics of Technological Violence
Through the relaxation of film censorship in the late 1960s — which in the U.S. went hand-in-glove with the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam protests, and other liberalisms — the technology of purported realism had arrived, one which would rectify the one crucial lack in the cinema's realism: the death gesture.19 The new liberal rationale of violence sought to transform blood from an occasional gesture of glamorous, patriotic rightism into a sensitized recognition of popular pain, as if a detonated condom would mitigate the violent unrest of newscasts whose documentarian realism slipped into comic juxtaposition every time Third World warfare was interrupted for First World toothpaste ads. (Such are the dangers of conquest — is it ironic or entirely fitting that the Teutonic climaxes of Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra are now used to peddle deodorant?)
Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch
The new blood realism needed to be purchased with both realist technology and material politics, and no longer came prepackaged with the medium as faith comes prearrived at belief. Ironically, the two American films which purported to the new realism of violence, Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), used their concurrent revival of antirealistic 1920s avant-garde techniques — namely, slow motion and a rhythmic montage far lovelier than that of 1920s Russian brutalism — to unrealize their realisms.20 This also coincided with the blood realism signified by the standardization of color film21 in the U.S., after the rare black-and-white successes of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and In Cold Blood (1967). For causes (the Vietnam War) to have effects (blood), the new evidence must be made colorfully convincing and lifelike, even in its illusions — and technology, be it that of blood squibs or nuclear missiles, is the art of wedding conviction to illusion.
 Pam Grier in Coffy  |
In
a context where it was being politicized so radically — as either
the blood of the innocent or the righteous extraction of deviant blood
— the squib could not remain a rarefied dramatic effect or occasional
shock event. It, like political unrest, spread everywhere and appetitively,
a constant reminder of blood responsibilities that remained unmet, a
reminder that because movies were real, human beings were, by extension,
now also real, and people bled in accordance with the new, race-rioting
realism. Blood was the new symbol of sociopolitical visibility, the
evidence that causes have effects, whether those causes be sexism, racism,
economic injustice — but not, obviously, homophobia, which in the
1970s needed to polymorphously absorb all other deviant villainies when
political correctness was curbing racism and misogyny. Ironically, the
homophobia of the Dirty Harry series increased only
when it tried to present itself as more liberal. In Magnum Force
(1973), Dirty Harry's far more violent and well-squibbed
sequel, writer John Milius redresses the criticisms of fascism aimed
at its predecessor by having Harry oppose the true fascism of vigilantism,
which, in predictable 1970s fashion, is conveniently equated with homosexual
cops run amok. Thus Harry is able to prove his relative yet valiant
centrism without jeopardizing his heterosexual sovereignty (in Death
Wish, the heteronormative center is obviously the bourgeoisie
itself and not its representatives, the police). Harry's hegemonic masculinity
is, however, represented more by technologies of sound dubbing than
the sizes of the squibs he produces: in the airplane shootout in Magnum
Force, in which Harry uses the villain's own gun to kill the
hijackers and not his signature .44, the sound of his gunfire is the
deep-throated, trademark sound of his own .44 cannon, even though the
appropriated gun he fires is clearly far smaller and thus incapable
of such masculine statements. Therefore, the manifestation of his masculinity,
and the salivating homophobia of the series proper, is displaced to
the sound technician's booth such that Harry's onscreen heterosexuality
should not waver as he faces down four gay vigilantes in Magnum
Force, a homosexual hippie terrorist filmed erotically from
the hip in the spuriously feministic The Enforcer (1976),
and an unrepentant dyke in Sudden Impact (1984).
In Asia, blood technology developed in a timeline parallel to the West but, without a civil rights movement to politicize it, blood in Asian genre films remained expressionistic, frequently hyperbolic, and removed from Western positivism.23 The violence of the samurai film, dating from Daisuke Ito's silents, reached its parodic yet logical end in the theatrically antirealist ocean of blood at end of Kurosawa's Sanjuro (1962), an effect that allowed Kenji Misumi (Lone Wolf and Cub) and countless others to create a dripping convention from the kimono-hidden blood-hose which equated feudalized, Kabukized murder with the porno-comic spurt of orgasm.24 In Hong Kong and Taiwan, the unconvincing yet generous, gelatinous ketchup of the Shaw Brothers studio made swordplay even less realistic than it had been before King Hu's Come Drink with Me (1965), Chang Cheh's One-Arm Swordsman (1967), and Ho Meng-hua's Killer Darts (1968) introduced bodily special effects in China. The glutinous blood of 1970s Shaw productions such as Vengeance! (1970) and Duel for Gold (1971) evoked the glowing orange regality of rippling flags and imperial robes; this was a monarchical blood divine, anti-democratic, and not even purporting to Western egalitarian realism — only Gods and Heroes could bleed this thickly, this magisterially, this naively. These violences could be called realistic when compared to only the most comical or inept of their predecessors — the expressionism of these bloods, like wires and trampolines in the martial arts film, would instead signify degrees of combat and gesture rather than biological reality exposed to daylight. Unlike the American positivism that defended the new violence as political experience, these East Asian examples, as extensions of indigenous folk myth and theatricalism, were under no pressure to exchange old superstitions for the new mythology of realism.
In
Hollywood, blood was brightly, optimistically red in the late 60s and
early 70s, a sign of the time's optimist politics and their dream of
a unified world, only to get darker and more "realistic" in
the bloodless Carter years, as the dream itself bled. After the fall
of the left in the U.S., the squib became different. Action films, the
generic courier of the squib,25
no longer needed to be political, eventful, or even realistic, but only
as banal, mechanical, and soulless as the hegemonic politics of a Reagan-Bush
America championing to a pornographic degree the embattled nuclear family.
"Reality" now manifested itself in the blue-collar Americanism denoted
by the neat masculinity of an adjective-noun title: Terminal Octane,
Mediocre Justice 2, etc. Action films no longer needed to be rightist
(Dirty Harry), leftist (Billy Jack),26
gendered (Pam Grier),27
or socioeconomic (every freewheeling bank robber movie by Roger Corman)
— they might be coincidentally or in accordance with pre-established
generics, but they no longer had to be. These new films — mostly
direct-to-video — had nothing except inherited technologies of
violence, now filtered through a lack of content, all designed to appease
the average video store customer, namely the hormonally unstable adolescent
boy whose competitively insecure sexuality (i.e., capitalism) and emotional
underdevelopment (i.e., sadism) adequately summarize American culture.
Tired of searching for meaning, I became a bureaucratic bookkeeper, resigned to enumerating sheer quantities of squibs, as if cataloguing numbers of finches or bluebirds, always understanding that masculinity — the ability to kill and make bleed — was being quantified by profusions of technological signs. So I counted: fifteen to twenty squibs in an action film was about average; twenty to thirty was respectable; thirty to forty-five was ambitious; and more than fifty was a special event, indicating that either the director was masturbatorily enjoying his technology (as much as the viewer masturbatorily enjoys it) or trying to manfully out-squib the competition. Of course, through sheer repetition the ejaculatory eventfulness of the squib withered, though now its variations — size, shape, color — and not mere fact afforded amusement in productions entirely bereft of any other quality imaginable. The new indoor sport of squibwatching was born.
At the risk of errant foolishness, I attempted a nationalized semiotics of squibbing: what will the squibs of each country's films tell me? Japanese squibs seem like giant, excavating chunks — do Japanese bleed the volcanic holes of their own insularity? In Rajiv Rai's Tridev (1989), each bullet hole seems to serve a thick tikka masala. In the Mexican Western, the cheap, earthy holes seem tilled not freshly by hot lead but messily with the faulty hoe of agrarian reform. And what of the pattern? Will it be the linear swath of the machinegun, or the plaid intrusions of the shotgun blast? The squib will be also accompanied by equality semiotic, overdubbed sounds. The looped sounds of spaghetti Western six-shooters inform us the Italians believe gunfire must sound like an especially high-pitched, coughing flatulence when transplanted to the primitive, uncouth American West.28 In Hollywood, a meat-slapping sound accompanies squib detonations — are Americans so bar-brawlingly crude that even when they shoot each other is sounds like a gut punch? In blade-wielding Hong Kong triad films, the bluntly dubbed din of gangland choppers hacking paths through human meat sounds like metal slashing sheets of thick plastic — humans are here simply inhuman — and often this slashing sound itself substitutes for the use of a blood effect,29 assisting the actor's death gesture by sound and not sight. Likewise, in Japan the noise of thwacked melons will accompany the death gesture of the chambara swordsman unaided by concealed Kenji Misumi-esque blood hoses. And now you will sometimes hear the flesh-tearing sound that accompanies a bullet squib without actually seeing a squib, an a posteriori trick which could only exist after the squib's conventionalization. Because the squib has become too generic to be realistic, it forces us to not merely redefine our illusions of realism but redefine the consensual "us" that perceives the signs of technology.
Dawn of the Dead
For example, Pauline Kael asserts that the squibs in Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) are "glaringly fake," yet Danny Peary claims the film's "special effects are convincing." 30 If the technology of realism is qualitatively subjective, how can realism even exist, considering it can be nothing more than a moment's consensus? Furthermore, the use of the word "convincing" is itself ambiguous, as we are unsure if the effects would be convincing in real life (doubtful) or if "convincing" euphemistically means they are convincing within the already unconvincing parameters of special effects technology.
When on the skin and not concealed beneath clothes, the squib generally appears on the victim's forehead, as if to demonstrate that the brain, that which perceives and judges realism, is not exempt from its signs. When squibs are placed beneath clothes, and if we are watching an action film, we may try to guess when an action scene will commence by spying for unseemly bulges beneath a shirt or a hairpiece. If the doomed supporting actor of an action film is thickset or obese, we wonder if some of the bumps beneath his clothes are the result of biology or technology, just one of the diversions superior to the actual film we invent when we become bored. The squib, now friendly as a dog bearing in its teeth the cyclical news of the day, has trained us to be Pavlovian machines salivating on command at the squib's priestly appearance, and to feel outrage, disbelief, or even betrayal when filmmakers fail to meet our deluded expectations.
When
not in the blue-collar film as a quantitative signifier disclosing
degrees of masculinity, the blood squib operates in the white collar
film as a qualitative signifier, appearing nearly as frequently,
if less fulsomely, in the award-winning films of the bourgeoisie. What
would The Godfather (1972) or Raging Bull
(1980) be without their noble bloods? Would, in fact, anyone
actually like The Godfather if it were not for Dick
Smith's top-drawer squibs, if it did not have violence professional
enough to convince us of its fearsomeness? This fearsomeness, then,
is represented by technology alone; without its blood, The Godfather
would be revealed in its true guise, as a succession of tough-talking
clichés, a parade of ethnographic stereotypes exacting clockwork
revenge on one another for uninteresting reasons, all handsomely crafted
— as if handsomeness excused a lack of content — yet impotent
without decoratively spilled fluids. Likewise, Raging Bull
without its bloodied Body and Soul (1947) boxing sequences
would be unmasked as yet another one of Scorcese's overdirected examinations
of Italian-American misogyny and domestic abuse given the art film black-and-whitewash.31
The most recent malefactor is, of course, Gladiator
(2000), whose horror-movie bloodletting is tamed by its Pentagonian
budget alone — money will buy off shame, alchemize the execrable
into the respectable, transubstantiate violence into technology, and
even quietly bleed content into form.
Epilogue: How My Neurosis Returned Unrepressed
in the Form of Videophilic Suicide
But what could I do when the squib, that minute technology into which I had filed all of my dreams and aspirations, which had delighted me in my youth in so many macabre, absurd, and even calming manifestations, was continuously slipping into banality? Squibwatching, that unnatural sport for those as alienated from nature as myself, had been doomed not by underpopulation but by excess. Sure enough, one day I finally saw the death of death, or, more accurately, the sign of the death of the sign of death: a thirty-minute psychic hotline infomercial, the main narrative of which demonstrated to the viewer that expertly trained psychics were granted special sight into the Civil War-era past. In the infomercial's recreation of American history, we see two soldiers shot and wounded, replete with the kind of dripping slow-motion blood squibs once the princely domain of the R-rated film. I was heartbroken. Stunned. Crestfallen. What had happened to my beautiful squibs, which only yesterday used to dance through the air like feathered birds fleeting through a secret jungle? So mundane, so shock-less were squibs now that infomercials were harvesting their unrestricted appeal. Once dangerously immoral, the squib was now hocking products on TV — the squib not only bought visibility and respectability, it now sold it too, and for the gaudiest of all superstitions. Beauty had revolted — my fantasy of antirealism was destroyed.
What does one do when the fabric of one's life unravels? I had sacrificed too many of my own hours — my blood — watching these films; it is only logical, then, that I should now sacrifice myself. I will briefly explain how I tried to do this.
 Walter Benjamin |
Naturally, I wish to take up arms against society, but knowing only the mendacious, squibbed appearances of death I immediately recognize the futility. So I decide to subject myself to the squib's trial, and see if I will pass.
When I shoot myself in the head, the sound of the explosion echoes metal and not organic tissue — my hands feel a wound in my temples, totally dry, and knocking of glass. I move over to the television, in whose blank picture tube I can see my wound's convex reflection: it is a perfect oval, letting no blood, but exposing to light a picture tube inside my head, on which plays a film — not letterboxed, of course — in which I am committing suicide. Looking into this doubly reflected film, I am disappointed, though not ashamed, that my cinematic suicide is Wertherian, and when I finally muster the courage to squeeze the trigger, the squib on my temples doesn't even detonate properly, only sparking bloodlessly. "It isn't believable!" I scream at the film. But I in the film, head shaking with a defective squib, simply laugh at myself, standing on the wrong side of the convexity.
I turned my back on the cinema, the tyrant of realism — and it was laughing at me in my own voice.
Notes
9. Old Testament violence reaches its acme (or nadir) in preacher-auteur Ron Ormond's If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971), a marvel of amateur fundamentalist Christian propaganda that fearlessly depicts the violence of a communist invasion of America.
10. Bataan's most famous moment of violence — the beheading — is of course suggestively executed with editing, not onscreen technology.
11. The squib in general, which may also detonate inanimate objects, should be differentiated from the blood squib, which is placed on human beings to assist them in the death gesture — squibs on inanimate objects had always been allowable because in real life we can see everyday objects break without the aid of bullets.
12. This doctrinaire romanticism has prevented blood squibs from appearing on children; notable exceptions include Ralph Nelson's The Wrath of God (1972) and Lam Man Wai's Mountain Warriors (1992).
13. I exaggerate slightly — Braveheart and Patriot are much more expensive films than Hard Target, and thus will suffer more if censored. Yet this economic censorship is consistent with the thesis of Hard Target, which itself becomes an "underclass film," apart from the underclass status of its characters.
14. Responding to the Saving Private Ryan media hype, Samuel Fuller sarcastically commented that the only way for the audience to experience the "realism" of battle would be for soldiers to barge into the cinema and massacre everyone inside.
15. At a screening at Toronto's "Fantasia Film Festival" in the summer of 1998.
16. Even if audiences are unaware of squib technology, it is obvious that there is a visual difference between the exploding squibs of the film's first half and the melon-chucking of the climax.
17. In 1972, following his self-reflexive opus The Wizard of Gore (1970), the taboo on mainstream gore was disappearing, and Lewis had little left to do but admit the unrealism of his films by turning to the chocolate-milk nipples of his swan song, the comedy The Gore Gore Girls, replete with a befuddled Henny Youngman and flash-fried dummy heads.
18. I cannot blame the film itself for this paradox, however — cult fans, wanting it both ways, embrace the social rebellion of the low budget but also demand good special effects.
19. There are scattered examples of the squib not purporting to realism, or at least naturalism — i.e. the parodic gore of Monty Python's mock-Peckinpah skit "Salad Days," or the surreal bullet wounds from which birds fly free in Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973).
20. Peckinpah's slow-motion montage generally operates on the principle that: 1) Shot A is in slow-motion; 2) cut to shot B, also in slow-motion; 3) cut back to shot A, the motion represented therein having not progressed forward in time during the cut to shot B, but picking up exactly where it had left off before the cut began. Therefore, time operates "unrealistically" not only because the montage slows time but because it suspends it indefinitely — the suspended moment of death becomes deified through its timelessness.
21. Blood in black and white films after the standardization of color is another issue. For example, consider the criticism Spielberg faced by filming Schindler's List (1993) in the alienated black-and-white of a phony newsreel. Or consider David Shipman's remark in The Story of Cinema that the "savagery" of Kobayashi's Seppuku (1962) would be "unthinkable in color." For the ultraprudish Shipman, "thinkable" and "acceptable" seem to be synonymous terms.
22. I.e., Nelson's hippie Soldier Blue (1970) and Penn's guilt-ridden Little Big Man (1970); Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid (1972) is more even-handed.
23. I stress the term "genre films"; obviously, some films which were not strictly generic, such as Ichikawa's Fires on the Plains (1959), were influential in the depiction of realistic violence.
24. Also consider a showing of Woo's The Killer (1989) at New York's Film Forum in 1991, before Woo was a household name in the U.S. With the burst of each slow-motion squib, the sold-out cult audience roared in paroxysms of sexual ecstasy. Woo, a devout Protestant, has always been coy and evasive about the sexual (i.e., aesthetic) extremes of his violence, arguably to the point of hypocrisy. See the interview with Woo in Stanley Kwan's Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (1996).
25. When squibs occur in non-generic films, it is only evidence of the easy possibilities of cross-generic pollination. For example, the confident squibs that punctuate the climax of Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992) are plagiarized from normative action-film models.
26. Steven Seagal is a unique exception. Nevertheless, his popularity immediately declined when his leftism became overly pronounced (c.f. On Deadly Ground [1994])
27. Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (1986) was said to have ushered in a new heroine, but, in addition to a futuristic scenario suggesting such heroines are not currently viable, she is unconventional only from the standpoint of character typology: her feminism has no economic dimension and is only concerned with her being capable of feats of strength and wartime courage equal to men. Although the maternalism she expresses is valid, it is presented as one side to a coin whose flipside one-dimensionally equates masculinity with violence.
28. Yet this flatulent sound, notably, has been retained as the national sound of gunfire in Italian gangster and crime films — yet they, too, generically borrow from uncouth American models anyway, so the sound of American flatulence should stick.
29. More often than not, if blood is used in a slashing-blade scene it is an "aftermath" effect achieved through editing and not seamless mise en scene. The repeated use of this technique plants the idea in the audience's head that a mise en scene slashing blood effect must be especially difficult or costly to achieve (c.f. the expensively bloody Conan the Barbarian), even if it is not. Hong Kong films came up with an inexpensive yet transparent solution, a "squeeze bag," concealed in the actor's hands, from which he squeezes blood after pretending to be sliced.
30. See Kael's New Yorker review of Dawn and Peary's entry for Dawn in Guide for the Film Fanatic.
31. In general, I really do think Scorsese has long overestimated the artistic value of representations of spousal abuse.
August 2002 | Issue 37
Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Grossman
ACCESS: Most of the films mentioned here can be rented or bought on VHS or DVD.
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