Cruelty With a Point: Finding Stories In Suffering

In life and in depictions of life, when is it better to look directly at instances of suffering, and when to turn away? When is looking a form of violation, and when is it a moral imperative? As the documentary image proliferates, so, too, does a discussion that has preoccupied feature storytelling: When it comes to images of violence and brutality, what needs to be seen to be believed, and which representations can't be justified? Major news outlets now air images of death and suffering as matters of course; in a culture of mass documentation and dissemination, images that exist exist to be seen. Social-media platforms put kitten frolics and beheading videos on an equal footing. "Viewer discretion" and trigger warnings only grow more elaborate, even as they become superfluous: Who now sits down in front of any sort of screen, at any time and with even the most benign intentions, unprepared for some form of visual assault?

Sometimes a viewer reaches a line, or draws it; in such a world it's more likely that the line will find her first. She discovers that bodycam footage and lunch at one's desk don't pair well, and culls her browser tabs accordingly. She learns to skip the cinematic retellings of sexual predation that have opened so many #MeToo exposés. She decides that the depictions of violence and oppression that had electrified her last year have this year come to feel more like status quo exploitation. The prerogative to choose, a cherished ideal of the consumer society, is dulled by a sense of inundation, if not compulsion, such that it can take longer than it should for a weary viewer to release her jaw, unclawher toes, and ask herself: Why am I watching this shit?

This spring, the second season of The Handmaid's Tale, a Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel, prompted a flurry of responses in which critics explained why they would no longer watch the show. Where the first season, though graphic in its depiction of the torture and rape of enslaved female surrogates, "captured a moment in time and successfully funneled its rage outwards at a world in which women are indeed silenced, controlled and killed by men," wrote Fiona Sturges in the Guardian this summer, the second season "stripped away all hope, swallowed its fury, abandoned Atwood's social commentary and descended into cynical, pointless cruelty." This feminist juggernaut had abruptly become its own antithesis, Sturges complained, joining popular entertainment's long tradition of celebrating "artful depictions of lady corpses, all alabaster skin and wonkily splayed limbs," along with the men who "stand over them[,] stifling their erections."

When they don't serve a larger vision—preferably optimistic and humane—Sturges implies, depictions of abuse and cruelty serve mainly to reduce viewers to their most basic impulses. In its second season, The Handmaid's Tale "has left us as mere rubberneckers, peering stupidly at the carnage." It's not just that the show is bad, in other words, it thinks you are bad as well.

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What might cruelty with a point look like? One could argue, and many artists have, that graphic depictions of violence are designed to caution and condemn, to function as a critique. "Violence in my films is shown as it really is," said Michael Haneke, a director (The Piano Teacher, Funny Games) known to depict human suffering in detail that might be described as not just graphic but lavish, loving. "That's why the films are often experienced as painful." When a student at Brigham Young University complained that writer and professor Brian Evenson's fiction condoned a certain "enjoyment" of violence, Evenson wrote a thirteen-page response. If his stories are indeed dark, full of brute force and bodily mutilation, he sought not to revel in such imagery but "to paint violence in its true colors and to let it reveal for itself how terrible it is."

In The Art of Cruelty, her investigation of our...