BATTLE OF THE MONSTER TERMINOLOGIES, Part 2

So in part 1 I established (but did not state) the existence of four basic permutations of violence as regards to intensity and narrative function. A work containing violence can be either:

"clean" and "spectacular"-- STAR WARS

"dirty" and "spectacular"-- ALIEN

"clean" and "functional"

"dirty" and "functional"

I'll soon supply two examples for my functional categories, but first, here's a little more justification for the utility of any such categories.

An old joke goes, "There are just two categories of people: those who put everything into two categories, and those who don't." Since in the history of this blog I've been leaning toward quaternities I don't know just where that puts me. I do know that I think James Twitchell is wrong to formulate his "preposterous violence" theory on the basis of what he calls "intensity of violence," and what I call the "dirtiness" or "messiness" of violence. For me the baseline in my "spectacular violence" concept is whether or not the violent actions in a given work go beyond their bare functionality in the plot, and Twitchell himself hints in this direction in the section of PREPOSTEROUS VIOLENCE quoted in part 1.

My reasons for making this categorical split are doubtless rooted in my own perception of spectatorial pleasures. When I grew up watching spectacular violence in the 60s, there really was barely any "dirty" violence available to me. But I did have a sense of the difference between realistic and exaggerated forms of violence, if only from adults. I clearly remember watching a TV showing of a Mexican masked-wrestler opus, where the now-obscure protagonist "Neutron" was wading through a collection of adversaries. My father, who loved Westerns and war adventures but didn't care for superheroes, dropped a disparaging comment along the lines of, "You know, it's really not that easy for a man to knock another man to the ground." But whether that particular thought had ever crossed my young mind at that time, I think I knew even then that heroes without powers, like Neutron and Tarzan, were just "fantastic" than someone like Superman in the department of showing fantastic, exaggerated forms of violence-- unlike the majority of Westerns and war films.

Based on these perceptions, I don't think that the "clean violence" of STAR WARS or NEUTRON VS. THE MANIAC is any less spectacle-oriented than a more graphic film, like the aforementioned ALIEN.

Moving on to the matter of how "functional violence" functions-- that is, as a spectacle that remains subordinate to plot and theme rather than becoming, in large part, the activity toward which the plot and theme are directed-- I tried to think of film-texts that were at least as well known as STAR WARS and ALIEN, as well as being within the same supergenre of science-fiction. What I came up, oddly, were both science-fiction stories that, unlike the works directed by George Lucas and Ridley Scott, began as books.

Jules Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA makes a good example of clean functional violence. Because Verne's tale is principally a story of a long (and sometimes quite tedious) undersea-voyage, with copious references to marine facts and trivia, there's actually little violence in the book at all. To the best of my memory, the only violent acts in the story are the same ones presented in the canonical Disney adaptation from 1954: the ramming attacks of Nemo's Nautilus against imperialist sailing-ships, and the battle of the submarine-sailors, Nemo and Ned Land against a giant squid. Again, though, I emphasize not the paucity of violent acts as the thing that marks it as in the functional mode: Verne does not allow any violence to occur that does not directly support the events of the plot.

Contrast with LEAGUES the profligacy of STAR WARS' spectacles. In a rough sense, the middle portion of the film, with the heroes infiltrating the Death Star, poses a dilemna for them parallel to the three heroes of LEAGUES: being stuck aboard a vessel full of real or potential enemies. But the SW heroes only need a brief subterfuge, and there then follows an escape with lots of spiffy laser-fire, an escape so improbable that Princess Leia has to burst the heroes' bubble by declaring that the heroes only escaped because "[the villains] let us go."

For an example of a dirty functional type, I turn to the novel (though not the film) of FRANKENSTEIN. Again, Mary Shelley, like Verne, wrote for an educated audience that would have eschewed too great a liberality of violence, but her book certainly does dish up some moments of grue-- the strangling of five-year-old William, the unjust hanging of the maid Justine (a fortuitous likeness to deSade's famous character of that name?), and, perhaps goriest of all, Victor Frankenstein's decision to dispense with his female creation-- not by mercifully putting the creature to death with drugs but by stabbing it to death.

Yet here too these "grim and gritty" scenes are entirely subordinate to the plot and the greater theme of Frankenstein's sins coming home to roost-- though some critics have commented that on some level of subconscious Freudian hostility, the monster kills off everyone in the creator's circle because Frankenstein wants them all dead. (Certainly he does little to prevent their deaths.) So these spectacles of horror remain far more controlled than the flagrant gore-by-the-gallons approach of Ridley Scott's extraterrestial stalker.

Having provided examples for all four categories, I plan to use these in a future essay on the evolution of mainstream comics from Juvenile to Adult Pulp.