[...]
The aestheticization of violence in high culture art or mass media is the depiction of violence in what Indiana University film studies professor Margaret Bruder calls a "stylistically excessive", "significant and sustained way." When violence is depicted in this fashion in films, television shows, and other media, Bruder argues that audience members are able to connect references from the "play of images and signs" to artworks, genre conventions, cultural symbols, or concepts.
[...] High culture forms such as fine art and literature have aestheticized violence into a form of autonomous art. In 1991, University of Georgia literature professor Joel Black stated that "(if) any human act evokes the aesthetic experience of the sublime, certainly it is the act of murder." Black goes on to note that "...if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist — a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction." (1991: 14). This conception of an aesthetic element of murder has a long history; in 1890, Thomas de Quincey wrote that "Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle… and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it - that is, in relation to good taste."
[...] A number of filmmakers from the 20th century have used aestheticized depictions of violence. According to James Fox, filmmaker Donald Cammell "...looked upon violence as an artist might look on paint. [He asked:] What are its components? What's its nature? Its glamour?"[4] Thomas Harris created a fictional character called Hannibal Lecter, a cannibal and aesthete portrayed by Anthony Hopkins on screen. In the films The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Hannibal (2001), directors Jonathan Demme and Ridley Scott, respectively intentionally generate excitement and anticipation when Lecter is about to kill (and eat) a victim. In David Lynch's somewhat aestheticized Blue Velvet, the villain of the film, Frank Booth, is an excessivley violent man who obsesses over small fethishes (such as blue velvet) when he is attacking his victims.
In Xavier Morales' review of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1, entitled "Beauty and violence", he calls the film "a groundbreaking aestheticization of violence." Morales says that the film, which he calls "easily one of the most violent movies ever made" is "a breathtaking landscape in which art and violence coalesce into one unforgettable aesthetic experience".
Morales argues that "...Tarantino manages to do precisely what Alex de Large was trying to do in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange: he presents violence as a form of expressive art...[in which the]...violence is so physically graceful, visually dazzling and meticulously executed that our instinctual, emotional responses undermine any rational objections we may have. Tarantino is able to transform an object of moral outrage into one of aesthetic beauty...[, in which,]...like all art forms, the violence serves a communicative purpose apart from its aesthetic value." When the female sword-wielding protagonist "...skillfully slices and dices her way through...[the opposing fighters]...we get a sense that she is using them as a kind of canvas for her expression of revenge...[,]...like an artist who expresses herself through brush and paint,...[she]...expresses herself through sword and blood."[5]
Film critics analyzing violent film images that seek to aesthetically please the viewer mainly fall into two categories. Critics who see depictions of violence in film as superficial and exploitative argue that it leads audience members to become desensitized to brutality, thus increasing their aggression. On the other hand, critics who view violence as a type of content,or as a theme, claim it is cathartic and provides "acceptable outlets for anti-social impulses."[6] Adrian Martin argues that critics who hold violent cinema in high regard have developed a response to anti-violence advocates, "those who decry everything from Taxi Driver to Terminator 2 as dehumanising, desensitising cultural influences." Martin claims that critics that value aestheticized violence defend gory and shocking depictions onscreen on the grounds that "screen violence is not real violence, and should never be confused with it." He claims that their rebuttal also claims that "movie violence is fun, spectacle, make-believe; it's dramatic metaphor, or a necessary catharsis akin to that provided by Jacobean theatre; it's generic, pure sensation, pure fantasy. It has its own changing history, its codes, its precise aesthetic uses."[7]
Margaret Bruder, a film studies professor at Indiana University and the author of Aestheticizing Violence, or How To Do Things with Style proposes that there is a distinction between aestheticized violence and the use of gore and blood in mass market action or war films. She argues that "aestheticized violence is not merely the excessive use of violence in a film." Movies such as the popular action film Die Hard 2: Die Harder are very violent, but they do "not fall into the category of aestheticized violence because it is not stylistically excessive in a significant and sustained way."
However, films that use what she calls "stylized [e.g. aestheticized] violence "revel in guns, gore and explosions, exploiting mise-en-scene not so much to provide narrative environment as to create the appearance of a 'movie' atmosphere against which specifically cinematic spectacle can unfold." In movies with aestheticized violence, she argues that the "standard realist modes of editing and cinematography are violated in order to spectacularize the action being played out on the screen"; directors use "quick and awkward editing", "canted framings," shock cuts, and slow motion, to emphasize the impacts of bullets or the "spurting of blood."[6]
For viewers of films with aestheticized, such as John Woo’s movies, she claims that "One of the many pleasures" from watching Woo’s films, such as Hard Target is that it gets viewers to recognize how Woo plays with conventions "from other Woo films" and how it "connects up with films...which include imitations of or homages to Woo." Bruder argues that films with aestheticized violence such as "'Hard Target, True Romance' and 'Tombstone' are [filled] with... signs" and indicators, so that "the stylized violence they contain ultimately serves as... another interruption in the narrative drive" of the film.
[...] The artist Hieronymus Bosch, from the fifteenth and sixteenth century, used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man. The sixteenth-century artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder depicted "...the nightmarish imagery that reflect, if in an extreme fashion, popular dread of the Apocalypse and Hell."
[...] French postmodernist theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that whereas modern societies were "...organized around the production and consumption of commodities", "postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs." As such, in "...the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle." For Baudrillard, the West's "commercialization of the whole world...will turn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world — its cosmopolitan spectacularization, its transformation into images, its semiological organization." As a result, the "previously separate domains of the economy, art, politics, and sexuality" become "collapsed into each other", and art penetrates "all spheres of existence." Thus, Baudrillard argues that "
- ur society has given rise to a general aestheticization: all forms of culture — not excluding anti-cultural ones — are promoted and all models of representation and anti-representation are taken on board."
