Posts Tagged violence
The Messenger: jmag review
Here’s my apologetic review of The Messenger from the latest issue of triple j magazine. I somehow missed this entirely when it was playing in cinemas, and it turned out to be much more interesting than expected. (Also – just in case it kills you like it did me – hey, that’s Eli from Freaks and Geeks!)
THE MESSENGER
Director: Oren Moverman
Starring: Ben Foster, Samantha Morton, Woody Harrelson
Do you hate your job? Well, suck it up. In The Messenger, injured soldier Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) is assigned to one of the worst jobs on earth: the Casualty Notification Team that informs the next of kin that a loved one has died in combat. They’re tough, tattooed soldiers who stick expressionlessly to a script. (Rule #1: no hugging.)
Will is taught the ropes by an eccentric mentor, played by Woody Harrelson as 50% laid-back charmer, 50% snorting bull. He’s good, but I was more amazed by Ben Foster’s jittery performance as Ben. Even when he sweetly connects with a new widow (Samantha Morton), he never seems less than dangerous. Director Oren Moverman was a writer first (including penning the Bob Dylan kinda-but-not-really biopic I’m Not There) and he doesn’t rely on battle flashbacks for instant drama. He just lets the characters tell their stories in long, painful takes.
If you skipped The Messenger because you were expecting another preachy anti-war weepy – it’s not. It’s unpredictable, moving, often mesmerising.
Other reviews this month: a rave for Aronofsky’s Black Swan, a boo for Romero’s Survival of the Dead, and a suspicious ‘huh?’ for Catfish.
Issue #47 on sale now.
This Is Not A Gun
When I heard about the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, I was reading Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction. It’s about American politics in the year 2044 and – despite being written back in the Stone Age of 1988 – often reads as eerily prophetic.
Early on in the novel, a political agent is targeted by a “homicidal lunatic”. Why? Because his enemies have software that automatically generates hate-mongering messages about him and forwards them to those who’ll be most influenced:
“That’s spam from a junk mailbot. I’ve seen some junkbots that are pretty sophisticated, they can generate a halfway decent ad spiel. But that stuff is pure chain-mail ware. It can’t even punctuate!”
“Well, your core-target violent paranoiac, he might not notice the misspellings.”
There’s no need for Manchurian Candidates in Distraction; you just bombard those “core-targets” with the right messages and wait for someone to snap and pull the trigger. Is this the sci-fi version of illustrating a map of your political opponents with gun targets, or telling your supporters to reload instead of retreating?
I don’t really have anything coherent to add to the sea of what’s already been said about the possible links between violent rhetoric and violent action. I do think it’s both fascinating and awful, though, that the shooter was also obsessed with the cause-and-effect of language. As Bob Rehak wrote: “I think some virus of language did finally get to Loughner; I think words ate him alive.”
In Australia’s last federal election, the media’s weapon of choice was a knife. When Julia Gillard replaced her predecessor Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, we were told over and over again that Rudd had been “knifed” by Gillard. Every appearance, every press conference, journalists wailed about Rudd’s knifing. Eventually you had to wonder if the metaphor had escaped them. Maybe they honestly thought he’d been stabbed, literally if not fatally. Why else would they be so determined to use the word, again and again? They must’ve been wondering why the police didn’t take their panicked phone calls!
Keith Olbermann called for the end of gun metaphors in politics, and many subsequently pointed out that violent political metaphor is nothing new. Sports are the same. One team winning, one team losing? That’s just not interesting enough. A quick google search for “football” plus “demolished” or “obliterated” or “destroyed” shows how many teams apparently disintegrated upon loss, never to play again.
(Don’t even get me started on “I’d hit that” as a substitute for “I’d like to have sex with her”, or the casual “George Lucas raped my childhood!” school of internet commentary.)
Perhaps I’m too cynical even for politics – man, that’s a depressing thought, isn’t it? – but I don’t think politicians honestly want their opponents dead. It’s almost sadder than that. I think it’s just the desperate hyperbole of those who think their audiences are drifting away.
We compare elections to sporting matches. We compare sporting matches to all-out war. Do veterans flinch to hear their horrifying experiences described in the same terms we use for teams of men running a ball back and forth across a field for an afternoon?
I can’t seem to make myself watch the videos left by the Arizona shooter, but I’m haunted after reading this statement: “All humans are in need of sleep. Jared Loughner is a human. Hence, Jared Loughner is in need of sleep.”
A man using words to try to convince himself he’s a human being.
The Walking Dead: Zombie Pathos
One: the pilot episode of The Walking Dead might be the best thing Frank Darbont has ever done.
Two: the subsequent episodes never quite lived up to the pilot, but remained pretty entertaining.
Three: it’s fascinating to watch how Mad Men-style classiness pops and fizzes when it comes into contact with the staples of cheesy, late-night genre TV.
I was already a fan of Robert Kirkman’s comic book. In fact, it’s about the only zombie narrative that still remotely interests me. I, officially, have zombie burn-out. I flinched when I saw that three of the unproduced screenplays on the annual ‘what’s hot’ blacklist contain zombies, so Hollywood’s obviously betting their popularity will last a few more years yet.
(Imagine dying, right now, and reanimating as a zombie. You stagger up off the ground, holding in your intestines, moaning incoherently… only to find that you’ve missed the zeitgeist and everyone’s moved on to being terrified of other, cooler monsters. You’d be so embarrassed you’d be glad that your higher brain functions were gone.)
I think I’m just tired of cannon fodder. Of zombies – dull as individuals, frightening as crowds – existing only to provide opportunities for what Zombieland called its “Zombie Kill of the Week”. The final battle of Zombieland was set at an amusement park for a reason, right?
Whatever resonant metaphors zombies usually provide seem to have grown stale. I did enjoy Chuck Klosterman’s recent piece in the New York Times, however, where he turns the metaphorical focus onto the audience, pointing out that a “lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.” And, riffing further: “Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have.”
So far, The Walking Dead focuses less on killing and more on character. (Or, less favourably, more on bickering and camping and soap opera.) Despite some hackneyed dialogue and odd pacing, though, there’s one thing I really admire about it.
From the legless woman Rick (Andrew Lincoln) puts down to the once-mother, still scrabbling at the door of her family home on blind instinct – The Walking Dead’s zombies are just so goddamn sad.
Here’s the worst of it: Andrea (Laurie Holden) waits by the corpse of her just-bitten sister, Amy (Emma Bell). She refuses to let anyone dispose of the body. Eventually, her sister ‘wakes up’. Her eyes open. Her limbs twitch. Amy reaches out to Andrea, lost, childlike. We’re all waiting for the horror-movie moment where the reanimated Amy flies into furious action and chomps down on Andrea’s neck, but the moment doesn’t arrive. Instead, Amy claws ineffectually at Andrea’s hair, until Andrea says that she loves her, and then shoots Amy in the head.
It’s not like George Romero’s classic zombies were all opportunities for happy headshots, either. I feel like the satirical subtext of 1978′s Dawn of the Dead has been overstated over the years. The mall-bound undead riding escalators are good for a chuckle, sure, but it’s mostly just awful to see them blindly wandering the aisles. When the living clean out the mall, turning live corpses into dead ones, it’s hardly a victory. And it’s the polar opposite of Zack Snyder’s trigger-happy Dawn of the Dead remake.
The Walking Dead’s zombies stand for something other than contagion or consumerism or unwanted conversations. They’re your mourning; they’re your grief; they’re your old life and loved ones, kept alive by your wish to have them back.
My zombie apocalypse is a total buzz-kill, isn’t it? If it makes you feel better, here’s every zombie kill of The Walking Dead’s first season condensed into little more than a minute of mayhem.
You’re welcome.
Jack Bauer: No More Fun
Here’s another expanded chunk of my ACMI lecture on ‘Loveable Murderers’. (You can read the first piece here.) Who knew that 24 would finally come to an end between now and then?
Back in 2007, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan said: “The disturbing thing is that, although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.” When even the military asked producers to tone down torture on 24, it’s sometimes difficult to explain why I watched all eight seasons.
In fact, I confused some of the ACMI audience by accidentally sounding so pro-death penalty. In fiction, it’s surprisingly easy to say that some people ‘deserve to die’. In reality, I’m a bleeding-heart liberal crybaby. But I still enjoyed much of 24’s car crashes and inexplicable traitors and clenched fists and, yeah, even torture scenes. I guess I’m with Sarah Vowell, who wrote back in 2006 that “…there is a jarring disconnect between what I want my real-life intelligence officers to be doing versus what I want my fake TV intelligence officers to be doing.”
My lecture mostly focused on Showtime’s Dexter as the pin-up boy for loveable murderers everywhere. (Come on, he’s pretty dreamy.) But what’s the real difference between Dexter Morgan and Jack Bauer? Is there a slippery slope between how Dexter justifies his kills with ‘Harry’s Code’ and how Jack Bauer tortures in the name of patriotism?
I asked Dr. Jessica Wolfendale. She’s an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at West Virginia University, and the author of the book Torture and the Military Profession. You can listen to her response here:
Jack vs Dexter
In essence, what separates these men is that Dexter enjoys what he does, and Jack does not.
Further, as Derek Johnson noted recently, 24 does happily suggest torture results in “actionable intelligence”, but it also shows us what it does to the torturer. “Jack may repeatedly stop terrorist attacks,” he writes, “but at the expense of his loved ones, the health of the American political institution, and ultimately, his own humanity.”
As it continued, it was fascinating to see 24 slowly begin a new war – one against its own perceived politics. Season seven introduced a barrage of ways to address qualms over Jack’s actions. Jack was called to government hearings to justify his violence; he offended and befriended an Islamic imam; he explained that while he knows that laws have to be the most important thing, his heart won’t let him stand back when he thinks something needs to be done.
The series’ final shot – Jack, staring up into the camera of a high-flying spy drone, saying goodbye – was a suitable finish. Jack doesn’t get a happy ending. No well-deserved peace. Like John Wayne, walking away from the family he’s helped reunite at the end of The Searchers, he’s got too much blood on his hands to re-enter civilization.
(And the surveillance aspect was fitting, too, considering the obsession with mediated communication required for 24’s real-time gimmick to function.)
But it’s the ending of the penultimate episode, though, that might’ve sealed Jack’s fate. Pushed too far, out for revenge, Jack gets an old enemy in the crosshairs of his sniper rifle. Just before the familiar ticking clock ends the episode, we see him smile.
Jack’s enjoying himself. Suddenly, he’s Dexter Morgan.