And Justice for All: The Cultural Work of Film Violence by Geoff Carter

By Geoff Carter

Movies are by far the dominant popular art form in American. Books have become nearly passe. Theater is hanging on, not quite dead yet, but definitely not the force it used to be. Sports, particularly football and basketball, are still popular, but the laconic and deliberate former national pastime—baseball—has been bleeding fans for years.

But movies. Movies are fun, action-packed, beautiful, and visionary. Right? Sometimes, but not all the time. Movies can often be banal, predictable, and shallow. Preeminent film director Martin Scorsese has compared modern superhero movies to amusement park rides—and he’s not far off. Gratuitous action and excessive violence supported by glossy CGI seem to be the order of the day. It’s what the people want—right? All you have to do is look to the superhero genre. There are a total of forty films in the Marvel Universe—forty. That’s not even starting to look at the DC Universe.

In her scholastic work Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins coined the term “cultural work”, which defines the impact books and films have on culture. She maintains fiction (or film narrative) works as a way for “providing society with a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions” (200). She also avers that fiction—as well as cinema—cannot be divorced from the culture from which it sprang, a point-of-view that differs with traditional modernist definitions of art.

So where does that put us in terms of today’s cinema? What sort of cultural work is done by The Avengers or The Black Panther or Die Hard or The Hate U Give? One could argue that our collective conception of right and wrong or good and evil is reflected in The Avengers or any of the Spiderman incarnations, and that violence as a means of serving justice is acceptable—even preferable, especially when one considers that the villains in some of these films are beyond reason. Who could argue with Thanos or Ares or The Green Goblin? They’re driven to evil because of madness, whether it’s self-induced, like the Green Goblin or The Lizard, or whether it springs from megalomaniacal psychoses as in archvillains like Thanos or Ares.

Some villains, however, like the antagonists in Die Hard, are not mad. They are thieves posing as terrorists, deliberate and rational in their evil, yet the justice served them is every bit as violent as that served to the madman. Reason doesn’t seem to matter. Violence works on any of the bad guys, and this is a reflection of a long-standing trope in our culture that goes all the way back to the Western. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a film that embodied the quintessential battle between violence and the law, Ransom Stoddard, the rational attorney, still had to shoot the titular villain. Violence won out over the law.

In today’s cinema, justice still often reflects the cultural values of the law of the gun—that might makes right. Granted, to many, this is a much more satisfying process to watch than the drudgery of democratic decision making seen in a film like Women Talking, even though that film’s cultural work is more realistic—and probably more important than another gun battle or superhero melee.

When justice is directly addressed in modern cinema in works like Till or Just Mercy or The Hate U Give, or If Beale Street Could Talk, the narratives address the struggle to correct the wrongs inflicted by a misguided and often racist society—an obvious reflection of the current state of race relations in our culture. If the aim of the filmmakers is to educate as well as to light a fire for change, they seem to be accomplishing their purpose.

Somewhat related to this sort of cultural work was the release of Marvel’s The Black Panther, a film which self-consciously (and self-righteously) proclaimed it as “a cultural moment” and as a film which highlighted a superhero from an African nation. African American fans turned out in droves to see it. It became a tangible and not just an implicit cultural event.

Other films, like Hell or High Water or The Old Man & The Gun question the nature of justice itself as it exists in a corrupt and morally bankrupt system. Films like these provide a rationale for the existence of—even the necessity for—the outlaw and reflect many Americans’ frustrations with their lives. They provide a fantasy template for escape. Who hasn’t fantasized about being a noble—and perhaps lovable—outlaw? Recent legal dramas like Trial of the Chicago Seven, Marshall, or On the Basis of Sex also focus on the impact of the legal system on the marginalized and discriminated and the limited recourses available to those victims.

In the same vein, films like Call Jane, Women Talking, or Hidden Figures take on the problems—and solutions—women encounter in their struggles for equality, recognition, and simple survival. Solutions are manifold. Some can simply do it better, as the women in Hidden Figures do, or do it together—organize—as the women in Women Speakingdo, or do it illegally, like the women in Call Jane do. It is significant to note that all the above films are based on true stories. This desire to build a narrative on real-life events to further this cultural work supporting women’s rights might speak to the very possibility of gaining equality. It’s been done, so let’s do it again. Or it may, by informing the audience to the difficulties of the struggles, stoke determination.

The cultural work of movies might affirm or question our cultural values. Some tropes like the Western hero have been around in one incarnation or another, forever. What is John McClane but a cowboy? He even calls himself Roy Rogers. Battles between good and evil are often—too often—settled with a gun. This is yet another holdover from the Western.

While these themes are deeply embedded in many of our new films, other more current tropes are appearing. Women, minorities, and other marginalized groups are not only finding voices in the new cinema, they are at the forefront of a body of cultural work that not only questions but specifies courses of action. They are templates for a changing society.

And while the supers battle evil in yet another incarnation of the same story we’ve heard time and again, other films are exploring the (re)definitions of citizenship, womanhood, friendships, sexuality, and more. Generally speaking, these films tend to humanize their characters, to render them and their struggles accessible to everyday people. Films don’t have to just be a carnival ride on a closed loop; they can take us places we never dreamed of.