Session 10: Violence in Film
8th Global Conference
Monday 4th May – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
The Friend as Monster in Serial Killer Cinema
Anthony Metivier
York University, Canada
Drawing upon the three kinds of friendship defined by Aristotle in The Nichomachean Ethics, we see that friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue flourish even in the horror film. However, friendship reaches its most terrifying representation in serial killer cinema, a problem that has never been explored because stereotyping and media accounts tell us that “serial killers” do not have friends, most certainly not in the movies. Yet the phrase “serial killer” itself not only originates in FBI terminology from a cinematic conceit, but reifies the essence of evil into the bodies and minds of those individuals we label as serial murderers based on visual and linguistic presuppositions. Friendship implies similar forms of embodiment. Don’t we often see in our very best friends the perfect expression of the eternal essence of friendship based on similar presuppositions? We don’t use the term “Platonic friendship” by mistake, after all, and we can easily see the influence of classical Greek philosophy on our contemporary conceptions of friendship.
In this presentation, I take a brief tour through Aristotle’s three-tiered system and argue that in many instances serial killer cinema expresses, not merely our fear of violence and murder, but of the monstrous aspects of friendship. Friends may abandon one another as part of their pitch for survival in films such as Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon or even facilitate the death of the friend as part of an unconscious need for revenge as happens in The Cellar Door. Friends may also cause damage by failing to intervene with crucial information as does Detective Somerset regarding the pregnancy of his partner’s wife in the box office success Seven.
Whereas the forgoing films represent violence conducted through friendship by other means, however, we should also exam actual incidents of friendship between killers: the utility-based alliance between Hannibal Lecter and Francis Dollarhyde in Red Dragon, the assemblages of Wall Street tycoons in American Psycho, and most importantly, the friendship and tutelage of Otis in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. I argue that the mythical embodiment of the essence of evil and the essence of friendship often cohabit the same person in some of the most popular serial killer films ever released. This suggests not only that the pleasure we take in such films involves discovering the monstrosity of the friend, but that we desperately need to examine the role played by violence, hostility, and revenge in all cinematic representations of friendship for the ways they reflect and prescribe our personal interactions.
Undesirable and Placeless: Systemic Violence, Film Narrative and the Biopolitics of Disposability
Roger Bromley
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
In ‘The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern’, Agamben claims that ‘the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception becomes the rule’. This paper will show that the camp is not necessarily a space enclosed by barbed wire but one inhabited by displaced people reduced to bare life and subject to routine humiliation and systemic violence – the poor, the refugee, the disinherited. Systemic violence is the violence inherent in a system and its institutions (such as concepts of border), those forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination, inequality and exploitation, particularly in respect of the excluded and the disposable for whom hostility and violence are conditions of their existence.
It will be argued that a number of recent cinematic fictions – part of a cinema of destitution (e.g. La Promesse, Rosetta, The Seller of Roses, Ghosts, My Migrant Soul) – which deal with the marginal and the displaced, might also be used as resources for a narrative understanding of the new ‘global civilization’ brought about since 1990 by the combination of economic and cultural global capitalism and the mass migration of peoples across the world..
Together, these films form part of a new story that is still in the process of construction, a narrative of profoundly changing spatialities produced by globalization and territorialized in global cities. The movement of people across, and increasingly within, borders has contributed to the scale of spatial and socio-economic inequality found in these cities. What part can cinematic narrative play in producing versions of the ‘global’ which are dialogical, unconditional, inherently ethical, resistant to appropriation, and openly engaged with the distant and the different?
The films tell the stories of the ‘displaced’. But each of the figures in these texts – undesirable and placeless – is also a carrier of stories, their own interleaved with others; stories which unfold and add layers in the context of the narrative process, to a point where they become identifiable, subjects of value, rather than subject to market price. All experience loss of identity, memory and relationship but the very fact of their being storied is an act of witness itself. The films are, in all senses, about finding a language other than that which already forms the basis of the representational and symbolic repertoire of violence, articulating challenges to the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence: the always already narrated.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Communicating the ‘Unspeakability’ of Violent Acts in Cinema
Dirk de Bruyn
School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
This presentation explores the forensic testimony employed in James Benning’s experimental narrative film Landscape Suicide (1986, 16mm, color/so, 95min USA). As a belated example of ‘Trauma Cinema’ (Walker, 2005) this film in part re-enacts the court transcripts of two perpetrators of physical violence: Ed Gein and Michelle Protti. Teenager Protti killed a more popular student with a kitchen knife after having been subjected to bullying by a group of girls and Wisconsin farmer Gein shot a storekeeper’s wife, took the body home to then skin and dissect it. Gein’s case is said to have provided the model for the cinematic killers portrayed in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock 1960), The Silence of the Lambs (Johnathan Demme 1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper 1974). Protti and Gein’s court testimony is examined for its gaps, repetitions and denials that appear to mirror the impact and nature of traumatic remembering itself as is evident in Caruth’s concept of belatedness (Caruth, 1996) and Laub and Auerhahn’s spectrum of knowing and not knowing trauma (Laub and Auerhahn, 1993). In its strategy of communicating or representing the overwhelming and traumatic impact of violence cinematically Landscape Suicide is contrasted to the melodrama and shock of mainstream violence in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs for its ability to communicate ‘unspeakable’ aspects of overwhelming experience.
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