Kali and the Bee Women

Recently, after having reread the contents of this Editors' Prize issue of TMR, I took a break by turning on the TV for a half hour of channel surfing. I had just noticed how much of the magazine's contents was a close, subtle look at that often-repeated life dilemma of change and one's resistance to it. I didn't expect television to be a close or subtle look at too many things, and it didn't disappoint me.

In fact, for that half hour it was mostly Death City. I happened across people being killed by trucks, cars, a pool cue, knives, rope, vampire bites, carpet-bombing, lightning emanating from eyeballs. By hands, fists, spinning fork-like objects, pistols, machine guns and finally, most terribly of all, having sex with naked women from outer space (Invasion of the Bee Girls). Such a high quotient of killing in so brief a time caused me to wonder about that greatly discussed issue—the pervasiveness of violence in entertainment. Has it gotten out of hand? Do we need to do something about violence as subject matter?

Alas, even a two-minute mental survey reminded me that violence is present not just in entertainment but also in history, art and religious mythology. The sixty or so channels of my television didn't invent the subject, as even a quick look at Western literature demonstrates. The top twenty works on Random House's list of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century deal with death by suicide—a popular form of death in twentieth-century literature—murder, starvation, war, racism and grotesque family dysfunction. The greatest early poems of both Greek and English literature, TheIliad and Beowulf, are as violent, far-fetched and full of carnage as a movie featuring the current governor of California. The earliest Greek tragedies and histories all concern violence, to others and to the self, often with an element of horror. In the King James version of the Bible the words "murder," "smite," "slay" and "slaughter" appear over 500 times. Some of these references are admonitions or prophecies, but the numbers of people killed or whose deaths are prophesied are specific and often large (42 people, 10,000, 70,000) with infants being "dashed" and men caused to "fall on their swords," often at the hands of an angry God. This isn't just the Jewish Bible but the Christian New Testament as well, from the apocalyptic aspect of Jesus' preaching right up to his crucifixion and the trials of the early Christian Church represented in Acts and the Epistles. To me, this doesn't suggest that the Bible needs to be censored but that it represents human, moral and tribal struggles in tough times.

The greatest work of Christian medieval literature, Dante's Inferno, is a panorama of torture. My favorite English work of that period, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, concerns a beheading game, a convention in knightly literature. Lose the contest and lose your head. Renaissance revenge tragedies offer war, rape, murder, suicide and brutality of every sort that can be staged. Shakespeare's evil ones include Iago, Claudius, Richard III, half the cast that infests KingLear (a play that gave me nightmares the first time I read it) and the Moor of Titus Andronicus, who faces his abundantly deserved execution by renouncing any good deed that he may accidentally have done.

One of the reasons for violence in storytelling seems obvious. Fighting and killing is the easiest way to make a story dramatic or, in the case of a lot of today's movies, the easiest way to simulate drama. Writers know that it works and, for lack of something more imaginative, pile it on. But this begs the question of why it works, of what is behind the dramatic value of violence.

A friend once suggested to me that the coolest guy in movies, ever, wasn't Steve McQueen or any of the usual recent candidates but Robert Duvall in his role as Bill Kilgore, the surfing helicopter colonel in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. It seems like an...