Take One (Mar 1978)

ME TARZAN, YOU JUNK The Paranoia Film—inhabited by the One Right Man, the Treacherous Woman, and Them | —can make people violent, teach them violence. By Bruce Kawin One of the most effective ways a movie has to teach us its view of the world, its system of values, is to control the *‘thematic energy’’ of catharsis. Many of the most widely-distributed American films of the last twenty-five years have been pushing the message that violence can be justified in terms of some ‘‘higher’’ system of values, and have been making the point in terms that are not so much violence-orientated as they are sexist. In the most juvenile of these films—McCabe and Mrs. Miller, for instance, or Straw Dogs—the apparent enemy is a Cluster of violent men, but the important enemy is a selfish woman. To get a handle on this slippery, stupid and dangerous message, I’d like to reopen the question of how catharsis works and what it does. Drama in general appears to work by creating tension in the audience, by increasing that tension, and then releasing it. This tension is usually attached, by the artist, to some kind of issue or emotion, theme or dominant mood, so that at the moment of climax one has an intense experience of thematic energy. In a ‘‘triumph of love’’ movie like Intolerence, for instance, the audience is supposed to be washed through with a pure sense of joy-at-thetriumph-of-love when the Dear One saves the Boy from the hangman. Dramatic climax is like sexual climax: at the moment we surrender to the energy and let it flood us, the energy is dispersed. In that moment of release, the accumulated tension and its attendant emotions—and ethics—are profoundly and personally felt. The question is, does this purgative process, which purges only what it introduces to our systems, free us from the aroused emotions or deeply teach them to us? Were the Greeks more stable for having watched Medea, the Victorians more sensitive to the pains of the poor for having read Dickens—and what is it, exactly, that makes Americans associate violence and heart-wrenching with directorial competence—in Little Big Man’s snowy Indian massacre sequence, for example? A violent climax floods us with violence. A love climax floods us with love. After deeply experiencing the release of violence (attacking the Other) we are not left full of love (accepting the Other). We are left relaxed. What we have accepted is our violence. Peckinpah has argued that his violent films, because they are cathartic, release his audiences from their inside violence.. I think it more likely that Straw Dogs, anyway, can make people violent, deeply teach them violence. The compromise position—that catharsis helps us live with an emotion we have been led through—makes sense too. The rest of the point, however, is that cathartic violence is often the vehicle of an ethic, and that it is really the ethic that is learned, that is applied, that affects both the self-image and the politics of the audience. I am not saying that we should not be exposed to violence, or that we should be out of touch with anger. I am saying that catharsis reinforces as it disperses; it teaches acceptance of the energy it releases, gives us a guided tour of that emotion. Anger, of course, is not the same thing as murder. Yelling at the students who demand all her energy and giving nothing back, Jean, the heroine of The Trial of Billy Jack, teaches us how to accept and release an extraordinary anger. Beating the rat-catcher to death like a rat, David, the hero of Straw Dogs, teaches us how to enjoy murder. In fact, he does more: he teaches the one thing we must believe if we are to murder—that the enemy is not as human as ourselves, but merely some kind of inconvenient animal. And The Trial of Billy Jack (despite the unfortunate fact 29