When did film violence get ‘real,’ wonders Martin Amis in a personal history of big screen brutality in the Observer of 3 July 1994. ‘What happens now, if you drag out the old movies and look again at even their most violent violence?’ It all seems ‘tame,’ not least because, ‘in the interim, you have yawned and blinked your way through a 30-year Passchendaele of slaughter You have become, in other words, irreversibly desensitised.’.
All screen violence is stylised, in its own way. The violence today is ‘director-led, or auteur-led. ‘Films are violent because the talent wants it that way. Who else does, apart from me?’ asks Amis. Not film critic Michael Medved, author of Hollywood v America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values. In his view, the revision in 1966 of the Hays Code paved the way for the industry’s emphasis on sex and violence. Amis sees it differently: ‘Film edged closer to being a director’s medium, freer to go where the talent pushed it.’ And that meant pushing it ‘away from the mainstream of America and towards the mainstream of contemporary art, while playing to its strengths – action, immediacy, affect’.
Whether the medium’s treatment of violence offers a ‘window or a mirror’ is part of the debate. ‘I happen to like screen violence while steadily deploring its real-life counterpart,’ says Amis. But, in today’s postmodern age, ‘image and reality strangely interact’. Witness two recent, and sensational, murder trials: one of James Bulger, the toddler beaten to death by two 10-year-olds, the other of Suzanne Capper, a teenager who was kidnapped, tortured and set alight. ‘Both have involved discussion of the same rental video; namely Child’s Play 3.’ After watching it himself, Amis ‘felt no urge or prompting to go out and kill somebody’ And I knew why, too. It’s nothing to boast about, but because ‘there is too much going on in my head for Chucky to gain sway in there’. Imagine, instead, ‘a mind that, on exposure to Chucky, is already brimful of Chucky and things like Chucky’. In this case, Chucky ‘is unlikely to affect anything but the style of your subsequent atrocities.’ The killers of Suzanne Capper ‘chanted the catchphrase ‘I’m Chucky. Wanna play?’
