Thursday, April 27, 2017

Give the people what the people want (Part 1)



Aka an examination of the escalation of violence in modern media exemplified by Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead

Warning: extensive discussion of violence, including torture, sexual abuse and gore

A good friend of mine has written her Bachelor’s thesis on “Violence in Game of Thrones” and thus inspired me to write my own short analysis of violence in modern media. Since this is just a blog post and not a paper, I can’t hope to be anywhere near as extensive and academic as she was in her thesis. I’ll try to keep this comprehensible and still feature most if not all of my thoughts on the matter. Have fun!

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People tend to enjoy watching violence from a safe distance. This seems to be a fact that has been true for many centuries. Public executions from ages past were made into a spectacle for cheering crowds and nowadays the TV and movie screens are awash with it. The reasons for this are varied. Medieval crowds as well as modern movie audiences both relish in the feeling of seeing people punished that seemingly deserved it (note how a number of horror movie characters are assholes just so seeing them die will be rewarding). There’s also a distinct feeling of ‘thankfully it’s them and not me’. Violence when it happens to other people in a safe distance instills a sense of relief that one is safe at home (or in the crowd), which also is rewarding. And maybe watching violence speaks to sadistic and aggressive tendencies in each of us that we are too civilized to let bleed into our everyday life.

I’m not exempt from this, far from it. I enjoy Tarantino’s movies, which are famously violent and bloody. Seeing the brutal R-rated Logan was more fun than any Logan appearance before had been (the fact that Logan was allowed to be brutal is often cited as one of the reasons for the movie’s success). And we all know that Deadpool would’ve sucked so bad had it not been filled with hilarious and gruesome fight scenes. Hannibal is teeming with gore and extreme – if creative – violence in such a way that you’d have to edit out whole episodes if you’d attempt to censor it (which you shouldn’t, of course, Hannibal is a brilliant show and every scene is a work of art). Daredevil’s fight scenes feel so real, because they are violent.

But what I want to talk about is not the presence of violence in movies or TV shows in general, but the escalation of it. I’m also not here to talk about torture porn in horror movies, because A) I never watch those movies and thus can’t really talk about them and B) it’s a completely different topic.

The escalation of violence is best observed in shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones that both got famous for their excessive depiction of violence. I’m sure a lot of people have written essays or articles about it already, this is just me adding my two cents. TWD und GoT differ from similar shows in terms of their rating, which allows them to show violence to a degree that other shows cannot. Another thing they have in common is that due to fact that they got popular in part because of their violent nature (at least this is often emphasized in articles), violence is expected by the audience. Additionally both shows have not shied away from (permanently) killing beloved main characters and have both been praised for it. The producers and screenwriters therefore strive to meet the audience-expectations. The problem is that people by now have become largely desensitized to violence (that’s another post I’d like to write: “how the shocking became mainstream”) and it’s very difficult to truly shock a modern day audience. So if you have a reputation of being a shocking show, what are you to do?

The answer, in both cases, apparently is to up the ante. An audience that was shocked at the sudden death of what they assumed to be the main character at the end of season 1 in GoT, will be used to main characters dying by season 3. To make such a death shocking it needs to be much more dramatic than the relatively tame execution of Ned Stark. The so-called Red Wedding is undoubtly shocking. Even for book readers already familiar with what to come. The camera at this point doesn’t pan away from the violence anymore but shows the murders that are happening in detail. Those that suffer are innocent and do not deserve to die in such a gruesome way. They are betrayed by people that swore their allegiance and killed by their hosts (a feat which in the GoT verse is an egregious blasphemy). A pregnant woman is stabbed multiple times in the stomach and her pain as well as the pain of her husband and his mother are shown extensively. The scene’s purpose – apart from its main purpose of being this season’s shocking show-defining scene – is to properly hammer home the fact that no one is safe, nowhere is safe and you shouldn’t trust anyone.

The theme of ‘nowhere is safe’ is so prevalent in TWD that it has been ridiculed. Seemingly every season the little band of survivors finds a new place to stay only to have that temporary safety taken away from them again, be it by zombies or ruthless antagonists. It is a zombie apocalypse after all, so the constant danger isn’t unbelievable. What makes it ridiculous is the repetition of very similar story arcs. Search for new haven – brief happiness in the new haven – violent destruction – repeat. To keep things interesting and not lose viewers to boredom the producers need to include some form of variety or – as they apparently prefer – escalation. Their first camp is destroyed by a brutal zombie attack that costs a part of the group their lives. In contrast to GoT, TWD already started out with an in depth depiction of violence. The audience is from episode one onwards privy to close-ups of rotting corpses, zombies eating people alive and other types of violence. This, of course, makes it even harder for the producers to keep their content shocking for the viewer. The second season, which is spent mostly on a farm in relative safety, is consequently regarded as the most boring one by many fans (even though it features the death of a child, and further people being eaten alive). Season 3 again manages to intensify the violence by adding torture, mutilation and similar to the repertoire.

But naturally the audience gets used to that, too. If you believe that the shock value is the only thing keeping your show going, you have to dig deeper. The keyword here is ‘believe’. Both GoT and TWD have other things going for them (interesting characters for example) and as a person somewhere else has pointed out in a fitting analysis, bad things happening is only interesting if it constitutes a deviation from the norm (https://i-am-of-the-stars.tumblr.com/post/155633738523/ifitwerentforthatmeddlingkid-bethanyactually). Screen-writers often don’t seem to share this opinion. In addition to that most TV shows that don’t rely on case-of-the-week episodes typically tend to feature some form of escalation (that very often unfortunately has the show spiraling widely out of control and quality). So, I get where TWD’s and GoT’s screen-writers are coming from.

(Another justification for the violence is the simple fact that a lot of the violent things happening in the shows are happening in the source material, a comic and book series respectively, too. The important difference hereby is in how the violence is portrayed – also keep in mind that seeing a violent act on screen is different from reading about it in a book. Additionally both shows did diverge from the source material more or less drastically and added even more violent scenes.) 

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This post has gotten so long that I decided to split it in two. So, this is only part one. If you're interested in more keep on the look-out for the second part.

About Me

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I am in my mid 20s and finished my university career. My areas of study included media analysis, literary and cultural studies, linguistics, and history. I like reading, drawing, writing, movies, TV, friends, traveling, dancing and all kinds of small things that make me happy. Just trying to spread some love.

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