Session 5: Cinematic Evil I

Session 5: Cinematic Evil I
Chair: Rob Butler

Murder Made Beautiful: Crime Scene Aesthetics in Contemporary Media
Ann Danilevich
Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Canada

While cop shows and films have long featured images of murder, the publication of image-driven coffee table books such as Law & Order Crime Scenes (Wolf and Burstein, 2003) and High Fashion Crime Scenes (Pullen, 2005) mark a new interest in the crime scene as an important site of cultural production. These visually sumptuous books represent an aestheticization of the image of murder, an infinitely variable act that has achieved a new valence in contemporary media. Photographer Melanie Pullen, for example, recreates historical crime scenes, but adds a modern twist to the events she re-stages by dressing her victims in the latest haute couture. The photographs are sensationally staged and deeply disturbing: beautiful women hang from real or imagined nooses; gorgeously dressed victims are submerged in pools or rivers; femmes fatales are found dead inside taxis. Through the process of aestheticization, murder is made fantastic and even glamorous; it is elevated to the realm of high art in viewers’ minds and is therefore dissociated from the brutal reality of the act depicted. Elisabeth Bronfen states that “the aesthetic representation of death lets us repress our knowledge of death precisely because here death occurs at someone else’s body and as an image” (Bronfen, 1992). In addition, there is a sexualization to many aesthetic images of murder and this is concomitant with a commodification of unnatural death. This paper explores the aestheticization of murder, focusing on the interpretation and reception of crime scene imagery. The argument centres on the photography of Melanie Pullen, but is supplemented with other examples from contemporary media texts, Law & Order Crime Scenes being one.

Decoding the Iconography of the Rwandan Genocide: How Films Interpret the Moral Significance of Ethnic Cleansing
Ann-Marie Cook
Independent Scholar, London, United Kingdom

In the wake of the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, the films Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004), Shooting Dogs (Michael Caton-Jones, 2005) and Sometimes in April (Raoul Peck, 2005) have played a crucial role in educating international audiences about the circumstances that led to the massacre of over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by extremist Hutu militia groups between April and July 1994.  Though all three highlight the moral culpability of the western media for failing to report the extent of the atrocities as well as the United Nations and western governments for refusing to intervene, each film blends historical fact and creative license to tell the story of the genocide from a different perspective.  Because of the ignorance and apathy that characterised the west’s response to this humanitarian catastrophe, simply telling story of Rwanda’s victims and survivors constitutes an act of political and ideological significance.  Thus, the purpose of this paper is to assess how these cinematic texts draw upon a core set of visual and thematic motifs to construct divergent interpretations of the moral significance of the genocide.  Our analysis will distinguish between icons of genocide in general and icons whose indexical meanings locate them within the particular context of the Rwandan conflict.  We will then examine how the appropriation of the iconography of genocide operates within the respective narratives to construct discourses concerning the historical facts of the ethnic cleansing, the response by the United Nations, the response by the western media, the response by the Catholic church and the responses of the moderate Hutu and white characters at the centre of the films.

Be Not Overcome by Evil But Overcome Evil With Good (Rom. 12:21): The Theology of Evil in ‘Man on Fire’
Paul Davies
University of Passau, Germany

It is the purpose of this talk to demonstrate how Tony Scott’s Man on Fire (2004) is a meditation on St Paul’s above injunction. Its starting point is ex-killer John Creasy and the negative answer he gives to his own question of whether God will ever forgive him for what he has done. Creasy is spiritually ‘dead’ and living in a condition of despair at the beginning of the film because of his remorse at his past deeds. Pita, the girl he is body-guarding, teaches him that “it is ok to live again,” “live” in this context meaning to forgive yourself. But then her kidnappers steal his chance of salvation/redemption, leading Creasy into a despair beyond remorse. After the kidnapping Creasy makes a conscious choice to kill everyone involved in it, a choice to overcome evil with evil and thereby succumbing to and being overcome by it.
Creasy’s rampage paradoxically becomes a sacrifice though. While it means giving up his chance of salvation/redemption and becoming the same man he was before, his death for the release of Pita does exchange “a life for a life.” The film’s final sequence is appropriately ambiguous because Creasy is rewarded for his descent into evil by the miraculous return of the girl, and because his comment that he’s “going home” could mean either entering heaven/forgiveness or damnation in the kidnappers’ evil realm of violence and greed.
Yet if avoiding being overcome by evil is difficult enough, then overcoming it with good is extremely difficult in the world of Man on Fire where we don’t/can’t see God “face to face” but at best “through a glass darkly” in a multi-layered and fractured world.
But in a world where God’s will is opaque and cannot be discerned, the question of evil acquires a new dimension in that the film posits the human being as someone who by definition does not have access to whatever God’s notion of evil might be. That is: the characters are responsible for actions which may be evil in terms of human perceptions but whose ultimate value as evil or good lies in God’s unknowable judgment.  What we do is therefore ultimately more important than what we think or how we feel and whether we have successfully combated evil is a matter for God to decide

Download Conference Paper –