No.160007
I am skeptical of the moral attitudes commonly held towards violence in art. It makes perfect sense to me that a teenage boy would be interested in art that features extreme depictions of violence. What brutal ultraviolence shares with naive nonviolence is how both repress the reality of violence. Violence is often nothing like what you might see in *Berserk;* it's just as immature and naive as the childishly cozy world of *Animal Crossing,* where nothing bad ever happens and conflict is practically nonexistent.
This is because art paradoxically can't accurately depict violence without some form of distance. *Joker* is a good example: actual moments of violence take up relatively little screen time, and yet the film still feels extremely violent throughout. Violence, when depicted, is very stylized and dramatic; but such moments actually serve to make the violence more realistic: they are sudden, shocking outbursts that deflate meaning. It's no coincidence that once Arthur fully assumes the Joker persona and kills Murray, he compensates for the deflation that follows with an eerily light-hearted attitude, prancing over to the camera and delivering a final quip before the television stream is cut.
This contradiction is most obvious when we examine depictions of war in particular. War is simultaneously the total death of innocence and the most naive experience–both ultra-mature and ultra-immature–for war is what happens when there are no adults in the room, and so everyone is forced to grow up. It's the highest form of art and the total absence of art, for it combines every extreme of perception–smoke and ruin, the stench of death, screaming and wailing, the searing pain of a shrapnel wound–with the suppression of any alternative forms of expression; a transcendental experience that obliterates the very subjectivity needed to process said experience. Theatres of war deliver the worst performances.
Consequentially, no straightforward narrative can ever do it justice. Even anti-war films that attempt to portray war as fundamentally meaningless still end up failing, because they ultimately depict war through the stories of people. The only honest depiction of war is paradoxically one in which the failure of storytelling itself is told.
For example, there is a scene near the end of *Come and See* where the protagonist, Flyora, repeatedly shoots a portrait of Hitler lying in the mud. The montage that plays while he shoots the portrait flips the storytelling logic on its head: time is reversed up until it reaches the moment where Hitler is at his most innocent–a baby on his mother's lap–and he stops shooting. The irony is that it's only here, in the interstice of violence, where the penultimate truth of war reveals itself.
The world is full of stories that we tell ourselves to give it meaning, but they are all just that: stories. What really caused World War II? There was a desperate need to give coherence to the total mess that lead up to the war–the Great Depression, the incomplete revolution, the open wounds of World War I, and so on. Hitler gave the German people a story.
In the end, Flyora ends up marching off into the woods with the other partisans. He has no choice but to ultimately become naught but another anonymous figure in the crowd of traumatized men. He, and his story, dissolve into a sea of weary faces. This is the ultimate truth of war.