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Image Credit: National Archives image (208-N-43888)

Part II: An Objection is Entertained

Last week I argued that suspense makes for more arresting visual effect than does what passes for “action” in Hollywood these days. My main point was that human frailty creates suspense and that psychological realism will do much to improve action cinema. Bigger visuals are not necessarily better at creating an emotional response in the viewer.

Now, you may say to me: Chris, you are not taking into sufficient account how big real visual events have become.

You act as if we lived in the forties still; you seem to want an action cinema which would treat destructive action as if it rarely happened. But it happens every day, and has happened diurnally for some time now, and a few times on a grand scale.

Admittedly, the world has gotten a lot more frightening; it is indeed, as Cormac McCarthy found a way to express it, no country for old men. All the more reason to adhere to psychological realism! When “death looks gigantically down” (Poe), we feel it more gigantically, I would argue, when it is measure against something like sanity, or just plain safety. Sheriff Bell provides that measure, in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005). The Coen brothers, who adapted McCarthy’s novel into the best action/suspense thriller of which I am aware, never lose sight of it either.

Note, for instance, how the camera “eyes” firearms in the scene excerpted below from the film version of No Country (2007). (Warning, the violence in this scene, unlike that of many action movies, is disturbing.)

Courtesy: No Country For Old Men (2007)

The viewer does not see the firearm until the penultimate moments. Instead, we see Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) eyeing something very uneasily. When a firearm discharges, it is a very frightful thing, even when you are certain you will not be shot. The vast majority of action movie makers have forgotten this, and they are to be blamed for their lapse. The Coen brothers and McCarthy, by contrast, eye a gun in the way that you would if it were in the room with you.

Hollywood, do you want to arrest the viewer’s attention: then treat guns as the awful instruments of destruction and nihilism that they are. A person is made of most supplicating flesh, and a bullet of the most indifferent lead.

It is true -- and this is our tragedy -- that very many of the world’s suffering denizens live intimately with the continual threat of firearms and even massive explosives. Weapons are not less frightening for being ubiquitous; they are all the more terrifying for that. As William Faulkner could say by 1950: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?” What McCarthy and the Coen brothers have shown is how this question becomes a problem of the spirit. You cannot show this, I think, with visual effect alone, hence the crucial importance to No Country of Sheriff Bell’s narrated monologues.  

Hollywood, I believe you are well aware of the Faulknerian condition; but I think you are going about exorcising our demons all the wrong way. Observe this scene from the highly entertaining but all too scopophilic Independence Day (1996):

Courtesy: Independence Day (1996)

What are we doing when we imagine the total destruction of famous buildings? We are warding off the evil spirits.

“But alas,” writes Mike Davis (Dead Cities and Other Tales, 2003) “they have come after all; brandishing box-cutters. Although movies, like kites and women’s faces, were banned in the Hindu Kush version of utopia, the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. (on September 11, 2001) were organized as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise-en-scène.” The U.S., in Davis’s view, has responded to cinematic terrorism cinematically: “The ‘Attack on America,’ and its sequels, ‘America Fights Back’ and ‘America Freaks Out,’ has continued to unspool as a succession of celluloid hallucinations, each of which can be rented from the corner video shop: The Siege, Independence Day, Executive Action, Outbreak, The Sum of All Fears, and so on.”

The dog which escapes the destruction in the scene excerpted from Independence Day (1996) says it all. Blow-em-up action cinema is every bit as much a response to the Faulknerian condition as is No Country For Old Men. But where that movie presents a problem of spirit, the blow-em-ups are trying to make us laugh it off; or are they trying to immunize us against our fears. Faulkner again: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.”

Please, Hollywood -- I do not plea with but beg of you --  do not compete with reality for grandiosity of visual effect! We are sick to death with the visual reality of unimaginable events, and the way to heal is not to match on the silver screen, in super high definition, each new cataclysm.