Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema

Introduction: The Mainstreaming of Hollywood Screen Violence

1 introduction the mainstreaming of hollywood screen violence “violence goes mainstream”—or so declared the bold headline on the cover of the April 1, 1991, issue of Newsweek magazine. As visual accompaniment to this declaration, the editors chose to run a dramatic, close-up image of the face of Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer played by Anthony Hopkins in Jonathan Demme’s recently released and hugely popular The Silence of the Lambs (1991). All we can see is the bridge of Lecter’s nose and his intently wide-open, penetrating eyes, alight with a feverish intensity that makes it immediately clear why “Hannibal the Cannibal ” had already become a pop-culture icon, as both mythic nightmare and subversive antihero. At the same time, those eyes, positioned as they are just beneath the sensational word “violence” in ragged font, indict the reader and his or her fascination with violent subject matter: Are those Hannibal Lecter’s eyes penetrating his next victim, or are they our own, gazing in rapt excitement at the latest bout of Hollywood bloodshed? At the bottom of the cover, a sub-headline pointedly asked, “Movies, Music, Books—Are There Any Limits Left?,” suggesting that mediated violence had escaped whatever cage to which it had previously been confined and was now breaking taboos and crossing the previously demarcated limits that separate “us” from the base instincts that define the uncivilized “others” from whom we need to be protected. The accompanying article says just as much: “Sure, ultraviolent fare has always been out there—but up until now, it’s always been out there, on the fringes of mass culture. Now it’s the station-wagon set, bumper to bumper at the local Cinema 1–2–3–4–5, that yearns to be titillated by the latest schlocky horror picture show” (Plagens, Miller, Foote, and Yoffe 46). The title of the Newsweek article—“Violence in Our Culture”—subconsciously paints screen INTRODUCTION 2 violence as an invading force, a contagion, breaking into “our” previously protected spaces and infecting them. In sounding the alarm about the breakdown of limits and the “appalling accretion of violent entertainment” (Plagens, Miller, Foote, and Yoffe 46), Newsweek had its finger firmly on the pulse of American entertainment at the dawn of the 1990s, especially mainstream Hollywood movies, many of 1. Cover of Newsweek, April 1, 1991. Cover copyright Newsweek, 1991 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the material without express written permission is prohibited. Image from The Silence of the Lambs, copyright 1991 Orion Pictures Corporation. All rights reserved. Courtesy of MGM Clip+Still. INTRODUCTION 3 which were undeniably violent. However, the magazine was wrong in asserting that violence was “going mainstream” in the spring of 1991. Rather, violence had already gone mainstream, and the films, television shows, rock and rap albums, and books cited throughout the article were, in fact, just a particularly explicit manifestation—darker shades, you might say—of what had, in some form or another, been long accepted by the general American population: In all its many shades, screen bloodshed is entertainment. In fact, some two and a half decades earlier, Esquire had sounded a similar alarm with its infamous cover image of a beautiful model with a Band-Aid over her left eyebrow just beneath a seemingly simple, direct question: “Why are we suddenly so obsessed with violence?” Numerous authors, critics, and pundits attempted to answer that question throughout the special issue of July 1967, including Bonnie and Clyde (1967) screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton, who inflamed the generation gap by suggesting that anyone who couldn’t enjoy “the fun” of violence was out of step with the times (55). In the same issue, journalist Tom Wolfe coined the term “porno-violence,” which he used to describe a kind of mediated violence in American entertainment that was not confined to a single point of view or a particular moral perspective . Despite this term’s pejorative nature and its failure to catch on in the national dialogue, “porno-violence,” as defined by Wolfe, is really quite appropriate in describing the role of violence in popular entertainment. As John Fraser argues in Violence in the Arts, the complexity of mediated violence is immense, and it can fulfill and has fulfilled...