Gore.

I fucking love it.

Jared has always given me shit for loving David Cronenberg. And the thing that I took from Cronenberg was never the body horror or the kinda-but-not-really misogyny or the Marshall McLuhan nonsense. The thing I took from Cronenberg is how in his best films the psychological always manifests as the physical.

Which is the point of action, isn’t it? If I sat down with Bruce Lee, I think he’d tell me as much.

What do we look for in action? We’re not looking for psychological and thematic significance. We’re looking to see shit get fucked up.

And I’m talking real action – not the idiotic Hollywood screenwriter crap of “AND THEN THEY FIGHT”. I’m not talking ridiculous showcases either. I don’t care how much money you spent on your fight choreographer. At the very least, action needs to be intellectually simulating. If only because we need to be invested when the action hits. But then, once that requirement is fulfilled? It’s because, to reiterate, we want to see shit get fucked up.

We want the Romita Jr Matt Murdock wading into a dozen men with a nightstick, blood spraying. We want Jason Bourne caving in a man’s sternum with a textbook. We want Chow Yun Fat and Brock Samson and Emma Peel and Omar Little and Batman.

But there’s something truly intriguing about the similarities and intersections between action and gore. Because they operate on the same principles – it’s a visceral reaction they’re going for. A need to shock, and by trying to hit the audience blindsided – the line is quickly crossed. Which, as a kind of answer to Curt Purcell’s position that the best horror avoids the splatter and aims for the psychological – I’d counter and say that in action it goes in the opposite direction.

Take Old Boy – which is neither horror or action, but writes the rules of how to do both. Old Boy is a movie thats clearly decided to do away with realism in order to speak to it’s audience in more direct terms. Old Boy is an exercise in extremes. It takes 2 hours showing us things we haven’t seen before, each scene radically turning left, maintaining a consistent tone by sheer force of will. Some of the most brutal torture I’ve ever seen on film is quickly followed by a melee fight sequence that resembles Final Fight more than anything else. The brutality on hand is shocking, but also incredibly satisfying. The audience is kept off-balance at all times, and the suspense/action tropes used throughout leads them to expect a bloody and spectacular finale. But these expectations are subverted – there is no glorious vengeance for Oh Daesu. The finale is a bloody mess, but the violence is no longer righteous. Quickly the cast is human wreckage and the audience is forced to asked themselves if bloody revenge isn’t just madness.

Back to Cronenberg – Scanners is kind of obvious, with the psychic/telekinesis angle, but at one point in the Brood someone comes out and says that the children are like this because of their mother’s emotional state. Videodrome consistently uses physical changes in James Wood’s physical state to illustrate his corruption, becoming a mindless weapon of whichever side of a pointless battle. The Fly is about fear of sex and other people, and Brundle physically deforms as he psychologically retreats inward – they are seen as one trajectory. Dead Ringers isn’t so much about twins, as it’s two sides of one incomplete personality.

And the thing that Cronenberg and John Carpenter and John Landis and Clive Barker and Paul Veerhoeven always seemed to get – the blood and the mess, it was always an element of the story.  It was never just a pornography of violence. Well, with Barker it was sometimes, but it wasn’t perfunctory. It wasn’t “oh here’s the scene where we cut the girl up”. It was always thematic, it was always a manifestation of the story.

(Of course, in one of the best and bloodiest movies ever made – Suspiria – it is nothing but perfunctory and pornographic. So lets skip over that.)

Ichi The Killer is a movie that seems to be about gore – ostensibly it’s a yakuza film, but that’s just the frame. The amount of blood onscreen is too much. At a certain point its hard to decide if this is most or least fun film you’ve ever seen. The movie is about excess and sadism. And as an audience, it’s implicating you in a half dozen ways.

I was gonna talk about Bruce Lee here, but maybe not now. How about I talk about one of the greatest fight scenes ever? It’s a scene in Deadwood season 3 – the scene where Dan Dority and Captain Turner fight in the thouroughfare. First, it’s one of the most realistic, profoundly violent moments in television history. It goes on too long, and quickly goes south. It’s the kind of fight that we rarely see – a slow one. It’s a battle of endurance. A “fair fight is different”, Swearingen says at the end of the episode. But it’s the perfect illustration of what I’m talking about – the fight is a fight between 2 men. But it’s also an illustration of these two men as the puppets of George Hearst and Al Swearingen, of Dority’s driving need to please Al, and his inability to express anything except through violence. And fuck, it’s got eye gouging.

I haven’t actually spoken about comics that much, have I? Done right, comics do reprehensible violence so much better than film. Gabriel Ba, Ben Templesmith, Eduardo Risso, Romita Jr, Steve Dillon, there are so many artists who portray physicality impossibly well. There’s something in the way you see Sean Phillips draw someone bleeding that feels more real than a film would. In Crossed, Jacen Burrows can inspire dread in a person’s stance, and in a book like Dark Blue he draws some of the most vile things I’ve ever seen people do to each other. Comics for some reason hit a lot harder – blood never looks fake, punches never get a foley-assist, because whats occuring is entirely a mental experience. Even when you show explicit detail, there’s cognitive work being done. The idea that alluding to something terrible off-camera involves the audience’s imagination changes with comics, because the imagination is consistenly engaged. So maybe thats why the violence in Preacher has stuck with me for so long, had been imprinted on me so much.

In comics, it’s real blood.

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More essays coming, not as quick as these past 4, simply becuase I need to settle on some decent topics. I’m doing these to avoid writing something awful and confessional and whiney about FD. Cause fuck that. Although the urge to just write fanboy rants about Umbrella Academy and the Brendan McCarthy issue of Solo is huge.