Stephen Hunter - Violent Screen: A Critics 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem

The Master Sniper

The Second Saldin

The Spanish Gambit

The Day Before Midnight

Point of Impact

Dirty White Boys

The publisher gratefully acknowledges permission to use the still photo from Reservoir Dogs, a film by Quentin Tarantino, for our cover photo.

Copyright 1995 by The Bancroft Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review. Published by The Bancroft Press, P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209. (410) 358-0658.

ISBN: 0-9635376-4-4 (Print)

Library of Congress Catalogue Number

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Melinda Russell Design, Baltimore, Maryland

Composed in Times Ten and Franklin Gothic

by Melinda Russell Design and the Bancroft Press

To the Baltimore Sun, which has allowed me to indulge myself as its film critic since 1982.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Baltimore Sun for permission to reprint the following pieces, in whose pages they originally appeared.

Thanks go too to my wife Lucy, who manned the home fires while I was spending too many nights in too many Multiplexes, and who maintained the family archives from which most of these pieces were picked.

The author would also like to thank his editors and supervisors over the past 14 years for their belief in his career and for their willingness to grant him the widest possible latitude in interpreting the concept of film critic. Kathy Lally, largely responsible for getting me the job, should be mentioned first of all; then, in no particular order, thanks go to Steve Parks, Rob Howe, Karol Menzies, Mary Curtis, Eric Siegel, Dennis Moore, Steve Proctor, Jan Warrington, Gil Watson, Karen Hunter, Kim Marcum and Tom Clifford. Apologies to anyone whose name has been pushed out of my brain by too many bad movies.

The author would also like to thank Dee Lyon, of the Baltimore Suns library staff, for helping him dig two dozen or so pieces out of the newspaper archives. They couldnt have appeared here otherwise.

Finally, the author would like to thank his publisher, Bruce Bortz, and his editor, Ann Sjoerdsma. Bruce thought this was a fine idea, and came up with the money and the production expertise to make it happen; it was Ann who delivered the idea of focusing on violent films, giving the collection an organizational spine as well as a meaning. She then pored over hundreds of reviews and essays, grouped them by category, wrote the title notes, and performed the line editing and the proofreading. Again, my gratitude to them both.

I write at a curious moment in the history of the republic. A little more than a month ago, some very bad boys blew up a federal building and killed 168 of their fellow citizens. One would think that such a thing would dampen Americas thirst for violence considerably. Yet, the No. 1 film in the country is Die Hard With a Vengeance, in which some very bad boys plant bombs in various precincts of New York City and detonate them. The smoke and debris and the body parts fly; it takes a keen eye to detect the difference between the special effects of Hollywood and the grotesque effects of hatred.

What a perfect microcosm for our complex responses to violence: We abhor the authentic stuff, and turn in national revulsion from it. Then we go pay seven bucks to watch it in Technicolor in the mall. In our heart of hearts, in our secret places, we crowd into dark, anonymous spaces and lose ourselves and our souls in its celebration.

In that way, movie violence divides us almost into halves: the half that tsk-tsks and tut-tuts its vulgarity, cravenness, rudeness, noise and gore, and the half that gets with the exact same values. Reconciling the two may be the movie critics most difficult dilemma, particularly a movie critic who doubles as a suspense novelist and in the private world of his fiction has killed hundreds. In fact, I would venture to suggest that I have more blood on my hands than any movie critic or movie killer in history.

I have even sold books to Hollywood, and if any ever get made into movies (doubtful, as I write, but who knows?), the screen will crackle with machine-gun fire, bullet strikes and blood puddles, and all across America people who look and think a lot like I do will write learned pieces on What It All Means.

Its even more difficult for a movie critic who writes violent novels whose own father was murdered; thus, in the most melancholy of ways, I have learned something of the squalor, devastation and immense sense of violation that a violent crime leaves in its wake and I know that its something the movies never, ever get right.

So when I examine what I have written on the subject of violent movies over close to a decade and a half on duty in Americas bijoux and look for a grand pattern, I come up empty-handed: no grand patterns, no deep and penetrating observations on the esthetics of violence in the American cinema, no meaningful conjectures on the influence of movie violence on real violence. Its too big and messy a subject for generalities; lets leave that to politicians seeking a goose in the polls.

But I have always felt it a point of honor as a movie critic not to pretend that, as an advanced thinker, I am somehow above the lure of violence in a film. Indeed, my best pieces here seem to be about movies where Ive made some emotional contact with violence and have let it sweep me away, fire off all my synapses, liberate my imagination. In fact, I think one of the reasons that we go to movies is FOR the violence: It enables us to project ourselves and our hostilities into some form of righteous rage and take charge of and triumph in a world of the imagination where a world of reality obdurately refuses to be taken charge of or to allow triumph.

Im not sure this is necessarily the bad thing that so many assume it to be. Critics of American movies love to zero in on the relatively few copycat killings that the odd picture will inspire, but nobodys able to chronicle the times that angry men have seethed toward violence but been released from its mandates when a story so gripped their imaginations that they lost hold of themselves and their anger in witnessing it. Thats one reason why stories novels as much as films will never die: In offering us a chance to enter another, more grandly imagined life, they also offer us a chance to forget the bitterness of our own smaller existences. Its escapism in the best possible sense.

Some of this has to do with the sheer dynamism of the medium. Thats why they call them movies, after all: The eye is drawn to action, and if its skillfully mounted, clearly photographed, gracefully choreographed and vividly edited, it viscerally draws you in. You are responding to the most basic of cues movement and sound, and at some primitive level, your excitement centers are stimulated and you cannot, no matter who you are, deny the urgings of your limbic system.

And yet violence as spectacle is never quite enough. The great films that happen also to be violent are great not because of the violence or in spite of it; rather, they are great because the violence amplifies the character and the conflict in the drama. Peckinpahs great The Wild Bunch is the ultimate case in point, as I argue in one of the pieces here. No one would or even could deny that its one of the most violent movies ever made, with its fetishists concentration on bullets blowing into and usually through bodies, and that its rhythms draw you in even more and more. But the violence, however gross, is never arbitrary: Its reflective of the corrosive nihilism that infects each of the cast members and compels him to celebrate his own extinction as he rides to the ultimate end of the road.