Thursday, May 7, 2020
Week 4: The Untold Story
Like many teenagers, I used to seek out the goriest, grossest horror movies or clips that I could find. It was thrilling to see that kind of extreme violence, and I guess I got some rebellious satisfaction out of sharing them with my friends. Most of those were in the slasher genre, which is super formulaic. There are rules to follow, and you can anticipate the nasty things that happen. I enjoyed that kind of thing because it was predictable and it didn't cross this weird line that Untold Story absolutely obliterates. This film's extreme violence hit different, and I enjoyed almost none of it. We talked a lot about western taboos in this last week's class meeting, particularly with two scenes: the long, drawn out rape/murder scene, and the family massacre scene. We talked about the same question that opens Jack Valenti's statement: How much is too much? It's a really good question, since too much can harm people. There was a lot of concern about children's content on YouTube a couple years ago, since content farms were creating these really really bizarre, violent, and reportedly traumatizing videos for children. With Bonnie and Clyde, the concern is the glorification of violence. Will this glorification make an impressionable audience act more violently? I don't think depictions of terrible things make people do terrible things, but seeing "too much" does something to us. That's what this filmmaker is going for, right? These scenes that depict the taboo elicit a visceral reaction from the viewer. It's not the artist's responsibility to make the experience comfortable, so I begin to think that "too much" is purely subjective and that the individual decides what they should and shouldn't see. However, I think back to the concerns with YouTube and other general concerns with children's' exposure to pornography and violence on the internet. I find myself agreeing that it is way too easy for kids to find this content. When is it our responsibility to protect our society from taboo in art, and when do we leave it to the individual? How do we decide what's harmful?
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I totally agree with you about how much worse this movie was vs a regular slasher which pretty heavy-handedly uses aestheticized violence to shock it's audience. Although this movie was disgusting and I wish I never saw it, I think HRPB made a pretty good example for two different kinds of violence —realistic vs aesthetically appealing— in films. The aestheticized violence talked about in this week's article (lower shutter speed to blur, slow motion, etc) was present in the first scene (when he is bashing that guy's head in) but absent from a lot of the others. Camille and I watched this together and in the first few minutes we were both in agreement that it was a pretty interesting movie-- the aestheticized head bashing was manageable and the storyline seemed promising. However, during the first (of this type) of many truly disgusting murders when the waitress was killed, the camera was static, the scene was lonnnnng (like 9 minutes vs the short opening scene!), and there didn't seem to be many visual effects to distance the audience from what was happening on screen. Although the reading argued that the first type of violence-- the kind with dramatic visual effects-- is supposed to be more frightening for the audience, I found the more "realistic" (although still obviously fake) and drawn out murders to be so much worse.
ReplyDeleteHey!! I think your question about kids access to violent/graphic content and how much responsibility is on artists is really interesting! I think the conversation around this has changed so much since Valenti's day because of huge technology advancements. Kids now have access to things like Youtube and even this movie way easier than they would have to a movie theater which can be regulated more. And there's just way more art being made which is both a great thing and potentially a harmful thing.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if some of our responses to this film have to do with the fact that it comes out of another cultural context. All horror is about pushing taboos but taboos are set by culture and context. I also think that Ilyana's comments are interesting in t his light because at any moment we can grab content from almost any context and time. How does this change our taboos.
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