Session 5: Gender and Violence

Session 5: Gender and Violence
Chair: Monika Schwarzler
“A Man’s Gotta Know His Limitations”: Cruel Humour and Self-Determination in Violent Films
Mike Doherty
London Consortium, London, United Kingdom

The one-liner parting shot with which a hero greets the death of his adversary has long been a fixture in violent films.  Villains, naturally, are also given to laughing when heroes are being tortured, or seemingly about to die.  Both combinations of laughter and violence serve the same psychological purpose, as instances of cruel humour.  My paper will use examples from popular film to examine the connections between cruel humour and violence as attempts to determine the self by shaming and dehumanizing the other.
While the “superiority theory,” which stretches back to Plato and Aristotle, may not account for every instance of humour, it does address cruel humour, which serves not to question one’s assumptions but to reinforce and communicate one’s sense of self simultaneously, asserting both detachment and superiority over another.  Similarly, violence itself has, especially in recent years, been seen as a attempt at self-determination.
Using James Gilligan’s theory of violence as an expression of the desire of the perpetrator to overcome feelings of shame, I will draw out the connections between laughter and violence, and show that the cycles of humour and violence continue until, and often beyond, the resolutions of movies’ plots.  Every villain’s cruel laugh deserves to be answered by a hero’s punch line.
My paper will examine instances from popular series of films where these cycles and narratives flourish, to demonstrate the way humour and laughter, in conjunction with violence, serve as alternately self-determining and dehumanizing forces.  It will take into account excerpts from Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and “Man with No Name” series, as well as James Bond and Terminator films; in all of these movies, the hero is both a viewer identification figure and — literally or figuratively — a killing machine.

Rape warfare remains a malingering symptom of the ways in which national and ethnic conflicts continue to be enacted through inflicting violation and traumas on women’s bodies. Yet, only in the 1990s did rape begin to be historicized. In my paper, I will focus on one particular instance of historicizing sexual violence: Helke Sander’s film, BeFreier und befreite [Liberators Take Liberties]. When this film premiered in Europe in 1991, it caused a minor sensation, primarily for 2 reasons: for breaking the silence surrounding a historical trauma: rape warfare on a mass scale at the end of WWII by occupying forces in Germany and 2) for presenting a context in which Germans could once again attempt to claim to the status of victim of WWII. I will argue that this important—and highly contested—film contributed both to wider understanding of sexual violence as a war crime and illustrates the ongoing difficulty of Germany’s struggle to come to terms with its past.
My analysis of this film will address three issues pertaining to representations of sexual violence. First, I will argue that contemporary films such as BeFreier und befreite [Liberators Take Liberties] are ethically vital to counteract the traumas of sexual violence. These films offer a necessary forum for women who are survivors of sexual violence during WWII. I will then analyze the relationship among facts, interpretation and representation as presented in Helke Sander’s film. Lastly, I will show how understanding the role and extent of sexual violence during WWII is necessary to understanding Germany’s past.