By virtue of much academic deliberation, it is legitimately possible to separate screen violence into two distinct periods: that of classical and modern film (spanning roughly from the nineteen-thirties to the nineteen-fifties), which was imbued by its elegance and theatricality with innate meaning, and that of post modern film (the late sixties onwards), which was simply too obsessed with the act itself and how that violence could be exploited to have any of the classical meaning of its historical predecessor. Through example of three films: Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949), David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000), this essay intends to show how valued judgments about the measure of ‘meaning’ present in a depiction of violence based upon opposing classical or post modern cinematic treatments is entirely too insensitive to the subjective and philosophically nuanced nature of meaningfulness.

The first thing to be established is what constitutes classical and modern cinematic violence. Stephen Prince, in his introductory essay Graphic Violence in the Cinema: Origins, Aesthetics, Design, and Social Effects, quite stringently unifies this period of screen violence with Hollywood’s Production Code, an administrative board that operated up until the late sixties, reviewing all Hollywood film content and verifying that there were no socially irresponsible treatments of themes before approving its production. It was the Code that ensured, in Prince’s words, “[the] countless Westerns[’] and urban crime dramas[’]…shooting victims frowned and sunk gracefully out of frame, with their white shirts immaculate” (Prince 2000, 3).

With reference to the “urban crime dramas”, the films Prince discusses are from the early years of the gangster cycle, the thirties. This is because he is very interested in the social science of how screen violence affects its audience, and this period of films saw the birth of the so-dedicated Payne Fund Studies. However, it is interesting to note that even with these films emerging as early as 1930, the Production Code deemed them tasteful enough that they could be fit for public consumption.

This much stayed the same for a long time: after James Cagney’s chilling performance as gangster Tom Powers in The Public Enemy (1931), he could be found again playing a chilling Hollywood gangster eighteen years later in our first film of discussion, White Heat. Purely in relation to the aesthetics and design of the violence, Prince has this to say of White Heat’s climactic shoot-out:

[A] government sniper repeatedly shoots Cody Jarrett (James Cagney)… but Jarrett refuses to fall. He takes the high-powered shots without succumbing in an episode of sustained and brutal violence. The visual treatment, though, makes the violence implicit and surprisingly indirect. The action shows Jarrett at a distance, in longshots that make it difficult to see that he is, in fact, being shot repeatedly. Furthermore, in keeping with the period’s filmic norms, none of the bullet strikes on Jarrett are visualized. The pictorial treatment glosses the scene’s exceptional brutality by hiding its details (Prince 2000, 5)

What Prince seems to imply is that audiences may be freer to feel the thematic or visceral meaning of Cody Jarret’s death because, by virtue of cinematic treatment, we don’t have to think about the literal physicality of his bloody demise. Such an observation calls to mind other scenes of violence in White Heat: the suspenseful scene in the first act, for example, where Fallon is forced to resort to violence in the vaccination queue to avoid being recognized by Creel, or Jarrett’s execution of Parker where he simply fires a number of rounds through the boot of the car. These scenes of violence do, as Prince notes, “hide the details”, and their impact within the story fares very well for it.

As will be discussed with the next two films shortly, the narrative context of the film’s violence is equally important. White Heat is about the world of crime, and so the titillation of potential vicarious violence is a key factor in the film and why audiences would watch it. Probably the most ‘classical’ aspect of the film comes in the way Walsh chose to interpret this sense of titillation and anticipation in viewers: he applied it to the gangster character, not necessarily the gangster acts. While Cody Jarret has a number of violent scenes, they are indirectly handled and paced out over the entire film, and so what they lend their credence to is not violence as an act and a reality but Cody Jarrett as a scary and charismatically intense killer.

This is a fair approach to explaining the argument for post modern cinematic violence lacking meaning: it is, truthfully, more difficult to reconcile the thematic and characterized place of screen violence when it is impinging so directly on the visceral responses that undercut the cerebral (such as in graphic gore). However, this is where discussions about the subjective nature of meaningfulness must arise and seek to raise the question of whether ‘meaning’ in the cinema can legitimately transcend the boundaries of classical cinematic ideology and exist in the realm of the post modern and the metatextual.

In other words, can meaning be derived from the very literalness of post modern cinematic violence and its visceral effects? Prince, in another of his essays, notes that “[c]onsiderable evidence exists showing that viewers respond to media violence with increases in their levels of heart rate, skin temperature, and blood pressure, and that these responses have some duration – that they linger after the stimulus is gone” (Prince 2003, 249). While not the sole manner in which representations of violence in post modern film can illicit meaning, the act of witnessing such violence can be so visceral that the viewer themselves can’t control it, and succumbs to reacting to images with real fear. It could be argued that whereas the violence of White Heat achieves meaning by the measure of art on art’s terms – as a “work in its inert, objectal form… taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth” (Jameson 59) –violence such as that seen in Fight Club and Battle Royale may achieve meaning by the measure of art on life’s terms – as works that are not ultimately (or, at least, completely) replaced by vaster reality, but which corroborate with their audiences to reconcile themselves with that reality.

Naturally, of course, violence in post modern cinema can have greater and more multifaceted effects on an audience than the simple immediate shock of its image. With reference to Fight Club and Battle Royale, I’d like now to discuss how the aforementioned model for viewing post modern violence can be extrapolated. The ideas being expanded on here are that graphic or ‘gratuitous’ violence is not only capable of galvanizing meaning in the responses of viewers but across an entire society, and that even while remaining graphic and explicit, death and violence can retain some of the classical ‘meaning’ of modern cinema.

Fincher’s Fight Club, made half a century after White Heat, is a film that treats its violence in a most radically different manner to that of Walsh. As far as post modern cinema is concerned, Fight Club could almost be categorized in genre as ‘a violent film’, because it is about violence in every way, and refuses to treat it as merely a device or an aesthetic or even an act but some kind of ideology or philosophy. In Fight Club, we witness violence repeatedly, we witness violence having effect on not just the protagonist but an entire imagined society and generation, we are subjected to violent filmmaking techniques and soundtrack, and when none of this is happening, characters simply sit around and talk about violence. In its obsessive density, it is a film thoroughly concerned with the tenuous nature of masculine civilization as being drawn by some dark and violent siren. Here two manners in which the post modern representations of violence in Fight Club attain meaningfulness will be discussed.

The opening scene begins with an extended (beginning at molecular level) zoom-out from the brain-matter of the protagonist that concludes by intimately traversing the length of a gun-barrel until what we are left with is the head-on visual frame of a pistol, extended from the camera and into Edward Norton’s mouth. The intimacy is key – this entire sequence shows both a visual and thematic intimacy with violence, and also with cultural treatment of violence (the pistol is an automatic weapon for utmost sleekness and sexiness). Even the Narrator of the film is strangely intimate with and articulate about the most horrific of violent circumstances: “With a gun-barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels,” he informs us, by way of introduction.

Violent images in Fight Club continue with this trend, in that they are at their most graphic and ‘gratuitous’ when they correlate thematically with a heightened moment of ‘intimacy with violence’ for the Narrator. Here we can discern some of the methods of treatment that classical and modern films use for violence: as legitimate moments in storytelling that relate back to the central character. The post modern twist is that the moments in Fight Club are extreme and detailed, underscoring the intensity with which this particular central character skews his world violently, and making us all the more intimate with him: the blood-mask on the basement floor, the lye-branding scene, the climactic violent image of Edward Norton shooting himself through the face. All these scenes are brutal in their depictions, and all mark highly significant moments of the main character intimating himself with violence, for various purposes (to feel alive, to hit ‘rock bottom’, and finally to ‘kill’ Tyler Durdan).

So the meaning of the violence in Fight Club is, at least from a classical perspective, its own literalness in relation with the narrative. To be told this post modern fable, and to appreciate it in its entirety, it is imperative that we see the full extent of what the men of the film do to each other. And, the film is insistent: we see the Narrator treated for his grievous injuries, and his face remains in increasingly bruised and broken states of aftermath throughout. Angel Face (Jared Leto) emerges supremely symbolic in this light: a young and beautiful boy beaten nearly to death by the Narrator in a true instance of psychopathic aggression, and left for the rest of the film disfigured beyond all recognition. In both cases, images and aesthetics of violence (in the form of the wounded face) are present even when the physical act is past, which of course is what the lye-branding serves to galvanize. These images are all crucial to understanding how the Narrator and subsequently the film relate to violence as a condition of life, which underlies the more powerful moments of violent action.

Aside from the classically derived uses of graphic violence as meaningful to a narrative and to a character, Fight Club’s violence achieves another and much more post modern meaningfulness. It is simply of Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, glossed with seductive production that erupts with product placement, committing brutal and unconscionable acts of violence. This meaningfulness of violence is acknowledged in the film as ‘subversion’, but it is really something much more specific than that. What the representations of violence in Fight Club illuminate is that

this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror (Jameson 57)

Most principally, then, it is the application of post modern theories to the images of violence in Fincher’s film through which the violence can be read as meaningful. Handled as though it were a product of the very cultural memes it attacks with furious vigour, Fight Club’s violence seeks to puncture the bubble of American cultural “domination throughout the world” and impose upon it “the underside of culture”, the ugly truth about what societal problems may be attached to this cultural wave.

The theme of screen violence facilitating a satirical clash between societal problems and cultural waves is also prevalent in Battle Royale, made one year later and on the other side of the globe. Fukasaku’s film is not as grandly and brazenly post modern as Fincher’s, in that there is less evident metatextual awareness: Battle Royale frames characters who unreservedly take their world to be real and legitimate and it is only through our own perspective as audience that we can detect satirical element, whereas Fight Club has a Narrator aware he’s telling a story, characters that comment on the formal structure of the film and a joke that operates under the façade of a misplaced frame in the projected reel providing the movie’s images (which became even more post modern on VHS and DVD release).

Although its nature as a satire gives Battle Royale a post modern edge, the majority of post modernity in the film is more to do with the very gruesome attention paid to detail regarding violence. The almost torture-porn approach in the film to acts of violence caused considerable controversy during its release – it received an R15 rating in Japan, which Fukasaku strongly objected to (he appealed the rating to parliament) and it was never theatrically released in the US (Mes and Sharp 62).

The main controversy at work is the application of graphic and ‘gratuitous’ violence to children, and how that violence is used to demonize existing social and cultural institutions (national education system, contest-oriented cultural entertainment). It must be admitted, firstly, that the violent representations in Battle Royale, if they are demonizing institutions such as these, automatically achieve ‘meaning’ in the metatextual and post modern sense discussed above, because they are working in the minds of viewers as metaphorical devices.

However, the controversial element of Battle Royale had little to do with discussion over whether the violence of the film was meaningful, and more to do with whether it was appropriate. Battle Royale stands as a fine example of post modern screen violence not just because of its controversy but because it does indeed display meaningful post modern treatments of screen violence. Before talking too much more about this, we should briefly note that, similar to Fight Club, Fukasaku’s film supports the extremity of its violent acts with a more pervasive feel of a world skewed with violence.

The world of Battle Royale is some strange cross between rampant capitalist culture and strict totalitarian society – children are culled and kept in line by random mass death-matches, but a cheerful J-Pop-themed video demonstration is played to them first, and a news reporter waiting for the survivor after. For Nanahara, the film’s protagonist, his environment of violence is not just societal but domestic, having already been faced with his father’s auto-asphyxiated corpse on his first day of high school. In a school corridor, Nobu stabs Kitano almost arbitrarily, a simple ejaculation of violence for lack of anything else to express. Another interesting thing to note about the culture of social violence, or the “system of violence handed down from generation to generation” (Mes and Sharp 63) imagined in Battle Royale is that although unclear in the film, the source-material novel dictates that it portrays an alternate reality where Japan has won the second World War.

This establishment helps to legitimize the graphic screen violence of Battle Royale, because it assures us that, at least, the film is treating violence very seriously, and dealing with it more than visually. The way we begin to view its violent representations as meaningful in the context of the narrative is informed by this establishment, which ends more or less the moment the first death takes place. The scene is grotesque; that of a young girl pierced through the head with a pen-knife. However, its narrative meaningfulness is clear: it shocks the children, and clarifies for them the violent reality of their world. The next violent representation, of Nobu’s death collar blowing open his throat, is one of enormous narrative weight, as the protagonist’s best friend is killed.

Many key violent scenes (the axe in Nanahara’s classmate’s head, the lighthouse massacre, the final confrontation with Kitano) carry narrative weight nearly equal to that of these first scenes. They detail the protagonist not becoming intimate with violence, as in Fight Club, but become implicated in it. Battle Royale also does an exemplary job with using the kinetic theatricality of violence and the body to film the scenes with a grand performative air. A front-on shot of Nobu being punched in the face by an army officer sees his whole body spiralling into the pandemonic mass of children behind, in a physical take that resembles anime in construction.  We see other examples of this later on in the submissive-dominant powerplay between Mitsuko and Megumi, and in Kiriyama’s first killings. However, the representations of violence in Battle Royale achieve, for the most part, a much more post modern meaningfulness: one where aesthetics and design influence the real-world filters with which we view them.

Take, for example, the climactic scene of the shootout in the lighthouse – in one mutual burst of automatic gunfire, a high-angle camera shot allows us to see the three pubescent girls simultaneously collapse in a circle, the image a bloody and perverse take on the childhood institution of ‘Ring Around the Rosie’. Kiriyama manages the most blatantly post modern representation of violence, and one that is very relevant specifically to him: when he kills Mitsuko, the gun is held in front of the camera, as the camera stalks Mitsuko. The gun is the camera’s focus, the girl at its end reduced by framing to a mere representation, a body that jerks and tumbles every time the gun fires a round into it. This shot stylistically mirrors the interface of First Person Shooter games, and serves to reinforce the sociopathic nature of Kiriyima: he is a product of a culture of social violence, and he sees the wholesale slaughter of innocent children as entertainment indistinguishable from a violent videogame.

These are all perfect examples (especially the aforementioned narrative weight-bearing violence) of what Devin McKinney calls “strong violence”. Battle Royale’s violence is ‘strong’ through the conceptions of McKinney’s ideology because while “it often has the physical effect of the body genres, [it] also acts on the mind by refusing it glib comfort and immediate resolutions” (McKinney 100), and it “often enables…shifts in one’s moral positioning” (McKinney 106). None of the film’s violence, in other words, is without place or meaning in either the world of the narrative or the real world, which is the mark of McKinney’s “strong” violence, existing against the “weak”, which is violence purely for entertainment (blockbuster actions films are prime examples).

The representations of violence seen in White Heat, Fight Club and Battle Royale are all meaningful. What responses toward post modern screen violence being “gratuitous and meaningless” betray is a moral aversion to the idea of using violence knowingly and graphically, where in the past it had been used deftly and indirectly. The classical meaningfulness of Production Code-era films is a manifestation of the kinds of post modern meaningfulness that have also been discussed here; the period simply dictated certain restrictions that entailed a different stylistic approach. Filmmakers’ fascination with violence and insistence that representations of violence have a meaning in our society and culture have always been an innate quality of the medium, and filmmakers will continually seek to explore the potential meanings of violence in as many ways as they can.

Works Cited

Battle Royale. Dir. Kinji Fukasaku. Perf. Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto and Takeshi Kitano. Toei, 2000.

Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter. 20^th Century Fox, 1999.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1992.

McKinney, Devin. “Violence: The Strong and the Weak.” Screening Violence. Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Mes, Tom and Jasper, Sharp (ed.). “Kinji Fukasaku.” The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film. Stone Bridge Press, 2004.

Prince, Stephen. “Graphic Violence in the Cinema: Origins, Aesthetics, Design, and Social Effects.” Screening Violence. Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Prince, Stephen. “Violence and Psychophysiology in Horror Cinema.” Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

White Heat. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Perf. James Cagney, Virginia Mayo and Edmund O’Brien. Warner Bros, 1949.

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