I offer, in my Introduction, a somewhat broad gesture that I will examine issues of both violence and power at the core of this book. This is a large claim, for these are gargantuan topics, seemingly insurmountable to tackle in one book alone. So, of course, I am not saying that these issues are the focus of the text; I am offering an argument as to how they work together to form messages of discontent and offering certain narratives as examples to explicate this point. Though the two enormous issues above are complex, I will begin by discussing why violence is so important to understanding blank art and the work of the late 1980sâearly 1990s.
Human interest in understanding violence is universal. Theorists within the humanities, policy makers in governments around the world, and social scientists, for example, all attempt to explore the causality of violence , its attraction, and its impact on different members of their society. To attempt to produce a new exploration of violence and culture is to enter into an already crowded academic arena, one in which great minds like Gandhi, Freud, and Foucault have already contributed groundbreaking ideas. The study of violence , however, is one that can continuously evolve and develop, and therefore new explorations of violence and culture must be produced. The discourse surrounding violence , such as, according to Foucault , that surrounding sexuality, is one that represents the shifting power structures of mainstream society. The way violence is presented within a culture shows us what is acceptable, what is Other , what is threatening, and what is expected. The following chapters explore these concepts by identifying the use of violence in particular forms of American literature and cinema from 1984 to roughly 1992, examining how violence is presented within this cultural context and for what purpose.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan first came to power , America was still dealing with the psychic damage that came with watching its troops fight a long, bloody, painful war on television . Vietnam , Watergate, the Iran Hostage situation, and the uncertain trailing off of the unifying power of the Civil Rights Movement, left citizens distrustful, demoralized, and, to some extent, apathetic. So much psychic violence at once is extraordinarily hard to take for one person or one nation. Thus we (and I will use âwe/us/ourâ possessives henceforth as I am writing from an American standpoint) handled it collectively in somewhat similar ways, yet as individuals, it is difficult to say just how. As there is no true hegemonic response to historical actions, I make no overarching claims, just a general overview of the state of the nationâs mood. The cure for our collective ills, it seems, through an examination of popular cultural norms, came in the form of a happy, positive government headed by an ex-actor who was convinced that if Gorbachev could simply see the US suburbs by air, he would renounce communism. Patriotism reigned and America was once again considering itself a nation of âwinners.â As the Reagan era blossomed, so came the slow silencing of such movements as the punk scene and its associated violent art and demonstrative rage. In its place sprang a new kind of popular music rooted in technology and a new romanticismâpop art. The âpop artâ world flourished and films relied on classic horror tropes and the angst of teen romance. Art in all forms became even more commodified 1 and money trumped social criticism when it came to artistic inspiration. The debate over the âpurityâ of artistic expression has, of course, been heated for thousands of years, but as technology developed, so too did the reification of artistic expression, leading to visual, literary, and musical pieces dependent more upon duplication and mass production than, as some may heatedly argue (I refuse to take part in this battle), on the individualistic endeavors of the artist. As theorists like Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard witnessed the seeming abolishment of critical discourse in culture, they decried the loss of affect, citing technology, late capitalism , and the loss of originality for a populace immersed in hyperreality , alienated and forced to exist in a society of surrounded by a culture steeped in superficiality and depthlessness . Baudrillard, in particular, saw the escalation of the amount of information available rising alongside the tremendous speed at which it could be accessed, which meant to him, that certainly, facts were forever lost, and a sense of the real gone forever in the postmodern age.
The popular concept derived from psychologists known as âde-sensitizationâ is frequently offered as an explanation for the increasing violence in film and television , or as a way of excusing the rates of violent crime in American culture. It is through examination of the popularity of this idea that one could argue that society has decided that Jameson is correct: we are so divorced from our centered selves and constructed ideas of subjectivity (the construction of the âbourgeois egoâ) that it is nearly impossible for us to respond in an emotionally correct manner to stimuli. If one accepts the theory of Jamesonâs waning of affect , then it is arguable that we need a constant barrage of high-impact stimuli in order to feel anything at all and this is how cultural products lose their individual affect. Though much of the culture of the mid-1980s works well as a reflection of these theories, emerging alongside the fiction of Stephen King and the Freddie Kruger films was a style of fiction and a style of cinema that conflicts with the idea that all postmodern culture suffered from this waning of affect . The authors of what has now become known as blank fiction , such as Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, and directors of films like Full Metal Jacket and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer , incorporate many of the same attributes of this style of fiction, creating art that is scathingly critical, not just of the style of art being produced during this time period, but also critical of the social, political, and economic forces that lead to its production. These novels and films are not like the other cultural products of the time with the intention to stimulate and nothing more.
Such novelists and filmmakers mock the shallow, tawdry style of their contemporaries, but the subtext of their work is rich in an effort to tap into the âpolitical unconsciousâ of its audience. The following chapters explore how authors and directors produce work that not only challenges Jamesonâs theory of the waning of affect in postmodern culture but provides incredibly important insight into the socio-political mindset of the 1980s, something that is missing in the overall body of scholarship covering US history. Ellis, for example, does this by using a literary style that openly mocks the rhetoric of the Reagan era with its use of catch phrases, brand names, and reliance on empty signs. The content of his novels, like Less Than Zero and American Psycho , explores the lives of those living the decadent lifestyle encouraged in Western late-market capitalism , interrogating the amorality 2 of the characters and problematizing the readersâ own consumption and lack of action.
The violence of Ellisâs characters is met with apathy all around, by perpetrators and victims alike, forcing the notion of inappropriate emotional response to the forefront of his work. The violence in Kubrickâs Full Metal Jacket does the same thing. In response to the onslaught of popular Vietnam War films that helped turn the war from a violent, devastating historical event into a âgeographically marginal conflict, a war flattened and emptied out to a basic layer of violence , mixed in with popular culture and TV,â 3 Kubrickâs cinematic techniques create a film that emphasizes the humanity and the inhumane destruction of it in war . His unusual approach to violence within this war film suggests criticism not just of the genre of war films, but of the social response to the actual War in Reaganâs America.
Blank fiction novelists and their counterpoints in cinema make use of a particular kind of violent figure in their work: the serial killer. The serial killer gained celebrity status in 1980s culture, and blank artists, through works such as American Psycho and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, were able to incorporate this figure of âevilâ into their own work in order to criticize the unexamined nature of white, male power in America, the nationâs apathy towards is...