In the introduction to part I, I suggested that the approaches discussed in the previous chapters represent dominant positions on the subject of screen violence. With the exception of empiricism, they are neither research methodologies, nor are they as compartmentalized as the present survey may seem to indicate. In analytical practice, elements overlap and intersect. In spite of possible objections, I have nevertheless chosen such an outline, for these fallacies typify predominant approaches to thinking and writing about film violence. Their logic and concepts provide the terms and conditions –the discursive framework – for how scholars come to understand media...

Audiovisual fiction that shows us death by violence is embroiled in a curious contradiction. By presenting death as violent form, the film violates – or, rather, curtails – its own act of representation. Nagisa Oshima says that “filmmakers want to shoot the dying” (257), but in doing so they also terminate the conditions for the possibility of representation as such. Film violence, therefore, is in a sense a subject that tests the limits of representationality and by implication narrativity. Marking the beginning of infinite stasis, violent death is conceptually at the opposite pole from representation, which involves being. Death and...

Consider this paradox: in Scarface, The Shame of the Nation, violence is virtually all encompassing, yet it is a film from an era before American movies became really violent. There are no graphic close-ups of bullet wounds or slow-motion dissections of agonized faces and bodies, only a series of abrupt, almost perfunctory liquidations seemingly devoid of the heat and passion of the spastic Lyle Gorch in The Wild Bunch or the anguished Mr. Orange, slowly bleeding to death, in Reservoir Dogs. Nonetheless, as Bernie Cook correctly points out, Scarface is the most violent of all the gangster films of the...

As far as the issues of violence and mortality are concerned, the work of Kubrick exhibits none of the neurotic prevarication which both Daney and Coursodon claim characterizes the Hawksian approach. Kubrick’s films have leaned toward a kind of reluctant misanthropy which reveals the capability for self-destruction as the linchpin of man’s existential predicament. Some of the most memorable images and defining moments in Kubrick’s cinema foreground this nexus of violence and civilization: the seven-minute long execution sequence in Paths of Glory, the nuclear montage which concludes Dr. Strangelove (1964), the confrontation between the prehistoric apes in 2001: A Space...

Even more than Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch represented a definite departure from classical cinema’s euphemistic portrayals of the violated and wounded body. By showing the vulnerability of the flesh, as well as the “physical fact of death by violence” (Pechter 92), Hollywood cinema was finally able to produce an image ofrealbodies. It is difficult to overstate the historical and cultural importance of The Wild Bunch. Signifying is in Peckinpah’s film illimitable, its structure nearly collapsing from the weight of its own narrative vision. Hyperbolically praised as the Moby Dick of westerns (Slotkin,Gunfighter Nation594),¹ and...

Violent films, like the public and critical turbulence they generate, seldom emerge in cycles. The peak of screen mayhem that was part of the New American Cinema – and whose token conclusion arrived with Scorsese’s Taxi Driver – left in its wake a hiatus in the evolution of violent form. Perhaps the most conspicuous legacy of the Renaissance films in the field of violence was the injection of increasingly graphic depictions into what David Robinson calls “prestige productions” that were distributed by major companies (76). Prior to Peckinpah’s challenging of the norms for rendering violence in the classical cinema, such...

One of the most memorable performances of masculine bravado in classical Hollywood cinema takes place in Ford’s “Irish” epic The Quiet Man (1952), in which the character of Sean Thornton (John Wayne) instigates a mock fistfight with his brother-in-law Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen). As the two men pummel each other around haystacks, streams, and hillsides, even stopping for a pint at a nearby pub, they seem to respect what I believe is the seventh rule of Fight Club: “fights will go on as long as they have to.” Conceptually as well as rhetorically, this particular sequence from Ford’s movie comes...