The hard thing about pinpointing a nadir in popular culture is knowing when you've hit bottom. Like knowing that you're in the middle of a Dark Age, as opposed to glancing backwards and saying “Ah-ha! Now that was really dark, by golly,” identifying the rock bottom while the trajectory is still heading downward requires a little imagination and a great deal of daring. Was it when the alien thing in the ocean chomped one of the guys off at the waist in Deepstar Six or, along those lines, was it when the shark gnawed off the leg of one of the goodies in the latest James Bond flick, Licence to Kill? And we're not even wholly done with the movies of 1989, so who knows what horrors await us by year's end?
Violence, as H. Rap Brown said long ago, is as American as apple pie. It's also as Moroccan as pigeon pie and as Japanese as sashimi, but we're talking here about the American cinema, which all the world admires and much of the world's film industry emulates. English-language film, to be more precise, since the significant product from Britain and the stuff from Australia and other once-British areas are much of a piece. In our day the violence quotient, like the sex quotient, has been ascending with the same rapidity and zeal as the imaginative level and originality of plot have plummeted.
Graphic Violence
Generalizations are invariably tricky, much beloved by those who find themselves compelled to be neat about things but frustrating when the data are huge, as they are in discussing movies. Still, a generalization or two are called for. Here are a few: 1) The no-holds-barred spirit of the times permits--no, evidently requires--excess in everything, from moronic throwaway items fit for juvenile minds corroded by rap music and TV sitcoms, to sexual explicitness that crosses beyond arousal to tedium, on to graphic violence that leaves not only nothing to the imagination but nothing to the spirit; 2) the technological advances in the cinema allow for depictions of action so seemingly real that almost anything conceivable by those who slap movies together can be presented on screen; 3)_subtleties of character having on more appeal to moviemakers today than ever in the past-and only nostalgic dreamers can make much of a case for any hefty does of subtlety in characterization in the films of yore-the lacunae in that department are most easily filled by massive dollops of exaggeration in situations, carnality, and sadism; and, finally, 4) there is simply no longer, if ever there was, a positive correlation between movies of quality and restraints in showing violence. The most wretched movies, often, and the most superlative movies, frequently, depend upon great glops of violence to give them, you'll pardon the expression, texture.
Culture of Cruelty
This is not film History 101 and there's no purpose, here, either engaging in compare-and-contrast triteness, however tempting that might be, especially to those of us who love the old movies and wish the newer ones were more civilized, or, for that matter, bemoaning the reality of today's cinema culture of cruelty. For cruelty is what it is: not simply earthy realism in order not to distort by prissiness, nor even boldness in order to Make A Statement-all the statements have surely by now been made. Much of movie violence slaps us in the face for no better reason than that the moviemakers feel like inflicting it upon us. And, don't forget, because moviegoers lop it up like
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