Violence, Film and Sensitivity

Ever since the beginning of last century, it seems that war has come as a bitter shock to us. It started with World War I, where we found new toys like gas and machine-guns, and used them to great effect: viciously killing our own troops due to bad wind predictions, creating strategies (in the case of the Russians) that involved piling up bodies until the guns overheated, eventually (by the time Part 2 came around) tossing bombs at London or incinerating everyone in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Now, perhaps it was because our new toys bore to strongly the imprint of human ugliness. Or perhaps it was due to just the plain and simple fact that the ruling class (now the people) actually had to die horrific deaths because of war, rather than just walking around in the relative safety of armor. Or perhaps it was just because our poets were already succumbing to a certain madness because so many had rejected religion and therefore saw death as the worst thing that could happen to a man. But whatever reason, people began to hate war in a way that feels rather new and distinctly Modern. War was no longer a thing of honor, of duty, of risking one's life in order to defend that which one loves. Instead,

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
And help to half-a-crown.

(It is notable here that one of the biggest exceptions to this principle was a man himself utterly unfit for the battlefield, who after losing all his friends spent most of WWI in the hospital with a sickness quite likely magnified by his horror of war, of walking over the faces of fallen soldiers in the mud. But, then again, his biggest hero was Frodo: the man who goes into war gung-ho, and by the end of the war is a permanently-scarred pacifist.)

The interesting thing, though, is what the poets who spoke against war were (and still are) trying to do: they wanted to show the moral price that a man pays for the unnatural act of killing others. And, from a certain perspective, I think that they're right. Just look at how many people returned from Vietnam (or even our current Iraqui war) screwed up, suicidal, violent to their wives when they'd never been before, etc. But looking at history, it's hard to imagine that Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, experienced the same brokenness. As far as I can tell, he remained a compassionate and humane man, and one who had no problem with killing many in a fair fight for a good reason.

Which brings me to 2006, and a very different poetic reaction to war. To wit, cinema.

Now the traditional line about violent movies is that their moral threat is that they "desensitize" us to violence. And to an extent, that is indubitably true. As Rich Mullins pointed out, not only do lots of people die in the film Die Hard, but each time someone dies, the audience laughs. And I find it hard to imagine that someone could enjoy Saw while feeling any sort of compassion or sympathy for the characters who are being brutally hacked up on the screen. But for me, that's not the aspect of violence in films that I'm particularly concerned about.

Something changed in films, though I'm not sure what caused it or when exactly it happened. Certainly advances in computer animation made realistic violence a possibility in films for the first time, and perhaps that was part of it. But it seems that a greater number of mainstream films had violence that was "ultraviolent" in a way quite different from most earlier films. That is, (in many films at least) film violence became realistic, not only physically, but emotionally. Reviews of Letters from Iwo Jima discuss its brutality, not so much in terms of the body parts blasted across the screen (which many filmgoers have seen before), but in terms of the facial expressions and reactions of Japanese soldiers as they make the difficult decision to obey orders and throw themselves on their own grenades. The main adventure theme of Munich is not "can these guys continue to kill terrorists without themselves getting killed" but rather "how many guys can a group of good Jewish boys assassinate before they become as uncaring and uncivilized as the terrorists they fear?" One of the most memorable scenes from Black Hawk Down involves a child who accidentally guns down his father--and the American soldier who he tried to kill makes a split-second shrug before leaving the armed enemy behind. The result of watching such films (at least for me) certainly isn't insensitivity to violence so much as sensitivity to violence. That is, as I consider the reality of war, as I read news reports of traumatized veterans, I begin to think that if I were drafted for some new war, my struggle wouldn't be to overcome cowardice and stand valiantly for my country. My struggle would be to survive and continue to love my neighbor even as I killed him.

It all makes me wonder. In a sinful world, it certainly seems that lethal force is required to keep order and peace, and I certainly hold an immense respect for those willing to die for the relative liberty and security of others. And sometimes I wonder if art that points out the moral cost of violence (those who live by the sword will die by the soword) doesn't potentially undermine our ability to fight as a people. How can we serve God in a world of violence? For me, I suppose it just means trying to understand, and in the meantime living where God has placed me--and praying that He keeps me away from the necessity of violence. Because if we start to censor difficult ideas, then the humanly impossible call of Christ will soon be one of the first things to go.