“The Human Centipede 2,” released last year, was met with the same reception as its predecessor: horror, bans and laughs. Some viewed it as a disgusting example of how far our viewing standards have dropped, while others saw it as an artistic expression or just funny — it was only a movie after all. No harm done then, right?
The underlying assumption by critics of the movie is that the movie was somehow “too violent,” that it crossed the line from the permissibly gory to the unviewable.
Standards for what constitutes the unviewable have been declining since the advent of film. Even as standards are loosened, they are still in place and the MPAA shows no signs of disappearing.
So it’s worth asking: At what point does something become too violent? There is no clear line in the sand, but is there one at all?
Many of the movies we know and love contain firefights, stabbings and other depictions of death by countless other means. And we love it. What would “Scarface” be without the movie’s namesake unloading his “little friend”? “The Departed” without (both of) the protagonists’ out-of-the-blue deaths? “Pulp Fiction” without Zedd’s murder?
These and other, more brutal scenes of violence are mainstays of the contemporary movie industry. And we love them. Our movies would be flatter and less fun without them.
The question is, why do we love them? Is it because we know they are just actors and they will arise from their deaths to act another day? Do the credits, as the bow at the end of a play, provide the audience with the reminder that death is, at least for now, temporary?
Regardless of the fakeness of the death we see, it still excites us. “300” gets our adrenaline pumping; the romanticized portrayal of war and death draws us in.
There is something about death and the causation of death that we enjoy. Maybe it’s not simply that we somehow know that it is impermanent; perhaps it is because that death exists outside the realm of societal consequences.
Freed from the bonds of civilization, life is, to paraphrase a famous philosopher, ugly, brutish and short. It is a dog-eat-dog, might-makes-right world. You take what is yours. Death is no weighty matter in the wild; is a predator traumatized by the death of its prey?
The imposition of government and social norms aims to make death a serious issue. Chinese philosophers urged rulers to make subjects look upon death with fear. It would cause order. And today, social order is the norm, death is seen culturally as “the ultimate sacrifice” and causing death results in jail time, or, ironically, the death penalty.
But the fascination — perhaps the innate predatory instinct within us — is not gone. We cover it up with laws and sate it through proxies, but it is still there. Absent those strictures, how would the urge be satisfied? Even with them in place, we still barely manage to hide it.
We may pretend that death only fascinates us so long as it is pretend. But what if you didn’t know if it was pretend? What if those people we saw dying on screen were really dying and never coming back? It is only because so many lines have been drawn by so many societal institutions that they have formed a network of barriers. They separate the civil from the uncivil, proxy from reality.
But lurking behind every movie ticket we buy and bloodbath we drink in is the atavistic draw of death.