The Screen of the Crime: Judging the Affect of Cinematic Violence
| Published date | 01 March 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663908100331 |
| Date | 01 March 2009 |
| Author | Alison Young |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
JUDGING THE AFFECT OF
CINEMATIC VIOLENCE
ALISON YOUNG
University of Melbourne, Australia
ABSTRACT
Discussions of screen violence polarize around the question of whether images can
cause people to behave differently. Proponents of this position point to the influence
of images in other contexts; its critics reject the implication that individuals can be so
simplistically motivated. Such debate is intensified by events such as the Columbine
or Virginia Tech shootings, where cultural products are named as the causes of lethal
violence. This article engages with the assumption that the violence in violent imagery
is a relatively homogeneous category. It explores paradigms of cinematic violence
through the analysis of exemplary scenes from four representative films (The Matrix,
Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers and Elephant), each of which has been linked
to violence flowing in and from the image. Each shows multiple killings in highly
graphic ways, yet each deploys different representational techniques to produce a
range of affective responses in the spectator. As such, the article seeks to answer the
question of how to judge the affect of cinematic violence and to investigate the impli-
cation of the spectator in the affects and aesthetics of screen violence.
KEY WORDS
affect; cinema; judgment; media effects; regulation; screen violence
INTRODUCTION
DISCUSSIONS OF screen violence polarize around the question of
whether images can cause people to behave violently. Proponents of
this position point to the ready acceptance of the influence of images
in other contexts (such as advertising); critics reject the implication that
individuals can be so simplistically motivated, as if they were automatons
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC,
www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 18(1), 5–22
DOI: 10.1177/0964663908100331
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(1)
responding to the metaphorical press of a psychic button by violent imagery.1
Such debate is intensified by events in which the crimes committed have been
linked (either by the perpetrator, police or the news media) to the indirect
influence or direct causal effect of screen violence. These include the Port
Arthur massacre in Australia, in which 35 people were killed, carried out by
Martin Bryant in April 1996; the mass shootings of 32 people at Virginia Tech
in Blacksburg, Virginia, by Seung-Hui Cho in April 2007; and the shooting
of 13 people at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, by Eric Harris
and Dylan Klebold in April 1999. In 1997, when Michael Carneal fatally shot
three fellow students and wounded five others at his Kentucky high school,
prosecutors invoked The Basketball Diaries (1995, Mark Kalvert) as a cause
of his lethal violence.2
High-profile events such as these frequently lead to shifts in the regulation
or distribution of cultural products.3 However, this article engages less with
the intricacies of regulatory frameworks and more with their dependence
upon the assumption that the violence in violent imagery is a homogeneous
category. Regulation focuses upon structures through which to control the
distribution of violent images, while leaving unexamined the diversity of
violent images and resulting variations in the viewing experience for the spec-
tator. In contrast, this article thinks through the implications for the spectator
of the representation of violence in exemplary scenes from four paradigmatic
films, each of which has been linked to violence flowing in and from the image.
Its aim is not to ask ‘what can cinema tell us about violence?’, but rather to
propose to identify what takes place in the scene of cinematic violence that
can lend insight into ways in which we think and feel about violence.
PARADIGMS OF CINEMATIC VIOLENCE
The Matrix (1999, Andy and Larry Wachowski), released just before the
Columbine High massacre, has been invoked in discussions of what may
have caused that act of violence. Video certification for Reservoir Dogs (1992,
Quentin Tarantino) was delayed for two years in the wake of debates about
media violence after the murder of James Bulger, and in a later case news-
papers reported that two teenagers arrested for robbery had stated they
wanted to see what it would be like to be a character in that film (for example,
see de Lisle (1995)). Natural Born Killers (1994, Oliver Stone) has been impli-
cated in 15 murder cases, with the most infamous being the murders of four
people in Paris by Florence Ray and Audry Maupin, and in the United States
the killing of William Savage and injury of Patsy Ann Byers by Sarah
Edmondson and Benjamin Darras. Finally, Elephant (2003, Gus Van Sant) is
a re-staging of the Columbine High shootings and presents violent computer
games as a possible cause of violent behaviour. Elephant was also briefly
blamed as the cause of the Red Lake School massacre in Minnesota in March
2005, in which Jeffrey Weise killed seven and wounded 14 at his school. He
had viewed Elephant 17 days before the shootings, fast-forwarding to the
segments of the film which show the attacks being planned and carried out.
YOUNG: THE SCREEN OF THE CRIME
7
Each film shows multiple killings in highly graphic ways, yet each deploys
very different representational techniques. My reading of each violent scene
includes not only its content and context, but also its formal choreography
through cinematography, lighting, camera angle, music and editing, since the
spectator’s attachment to the violent image is brought about not only through
the narrative content and context of a scene’s unfolding, but also through the
nature and form of the cinematic medium itself. As such, I seek to address
the question of how to judge the affect of cinematic violence. The concept of
affect has received relatively little serious attention within criminological and
socio-legal scholarship (as examples, see Halsey and Young, 2006; Watson,
1999). Many commentators merge the idea of affect with emotion (terms
which are in no way interchangeable). Massumi writes: ‘In affect, we are never
alone. That’s because affects . . . are basically ways of connecting, to others
and to other situations . . . With intensified affect comes . . . a heightened sense
of belonging’ (Massumi, 2002: 214). In the cinematic context, Pisters puts it
thus: ‘the affection-image . . . works directly on the affective nervous system
that has its sensors everywhere in the flesh . . . Affection, where subject and
object . . . coincide, is the way the subject feels itself “from the inside”’ (2003:
70). Affect, therefore, has to do with intensity rather than identity; it is not so
much that a film’s spectator shares a point of view with a cinematic character
but rather that the spectator feels connected, at the level of sense, with an event
on the screen. Following the Deleuzian frame adopted in Bennett’s theoriza-
tion of affect in the context of viewing artworks, it can be proposed that a
cinematic scene of violence is an ‘encountered sign’: a ‘sign that is felt, rather
than recognized or perceived through cognition’ (Bennett, 2005: 7), in which
we find the body of the spectator registering sensations relating to what she
is seeing without undergoing or having undergone what is depicted.
Much has been written about the spectator’s corporeal response to the
cinematic image: for example, Sobchack describes her bodily reactions to the
opening scenes of The Piano (2004: 61–4), while Williams has written of
how the audience gasped, screamed and turned away from the image during
a screening of Psycho (1994: 15). These latter corporeal reactions to violent
imagery (the squirm, the scream) have become taken for granted, but little
has been said about other gestural responses to violence – the laugh, the wry
smile, or the ironically raised eyebrow. Such corporeal gestures might precede
the squirm or the scream, or might even co-exist alongside them, but their
affective function means that although the image confirms for the spectator
a disjunction from the depicted body, at the same time the encountered sign
insinuates a moment of desire for or identification with that body. Such a
moment corresponds to what Zˇizˇek calls subjectivization (1992: 251), in which
the spectator shares a common desire with the figure on the screen. Such
subjectivization is both expected and acceptable when those desires conform
to social norms; however, when such desire may be for lethal violence, then
that moment of identification is much more challenging. In this article, my
aim is not to look at how violence is depicted in various films (a question
simply of on-screen content), but rather to ask ‘how does the scene of violence
work?’; that is, to establish how a moment of desire, with all its affective and
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(1)
ethical implications, is achieved for the spectator within a scene. In reading
scenes in this way, I investigate the implication of the spectator in the affects
and aesthetics of screen violence.
LEGITIMATE(D) VIOLENCE
Guns. Lots of guns. (Neo, in The Matrix)
Violence is a cinematic staple. Within this common currency there exists a
pervasive paradox: that the violence of wrong-doing can be met with
violence. The key characteristic of this paradox is a normative one: the
violence of wrong-doing is wrong, whereas the violence which responds to
wrong-doing is righteous. Villainous violence is often represented as requir-
ing a violent response from a non-villainous character...
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