It’s time to yell ‘cut’ on screen violence
Critic applauds Jim Carrey’s stance against his own movie
Jim Carrey did something almost unthinkable in Hollywood last Sunday, sending little waves of shock across the film industry: The actor publicly disassociated himself from a film in which he stars, Kick-Ass 2, because of its level of graphic brutality.
Carrey wrote on Twitter: “I did Kick-Ass (2) a month before Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. Recent events have caused a change in my heart.”
Executive producer Mark Millar, the creator of the KickAss comic books, said he was “baffled” since there is nothing in the film that wasn’t in the screenplay 18 months earlier, when Carrey was on board.
So what happened to Carrey? I suppose he just started thinking.
Canadian-born Carrey, a longtime U.S. resident, is an outspoken supporter of gun control, writing last April that people in the U.S. needed to “deal with our addiction and entitlement to violence.”
The logical next step is to question the burgeoning “addiction and entitlement” to extreme violence as entertainment.
Once, Hollywood blamed the gun lobby for making weapons freely available, and the gun lobby hit out at movies for glamorizing violence. Now, it is dawning on people that this opposition is artificial: The intermingling of freely available weaponry and culturally malign influences is a powerful cause of concern.
There are signs of Hollywood beginning to shift uncomfortably in its seat. After the 2012 Colorado shootings, in which James Holmes mimicked The Joker to murder 12 people at a screening of a Batman film, Warner Brothers postponed the release of Gangster Squad until scenes of mobsters machine-gunning a cinema audience could be cut. After the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shootings, in which 20 children and seven adults died, film mogul Harvey Weinstein cancelled the U.S. première of the Tarantino film Django Unchained. Yet these tentative gestures merely raised more questions: If a film is too disturbing to see one week after a massacre, precisely when does it become decontaminated?
The film world is more divided than it appears. When director Nicolas Winding Refn’s explicitly violent film Only God Forgives had its première at Cannes in May, actress Kristin Scott Thomas said the film is “really not my kind of thing,” admitting she did not enjoy watching films where “this kind of thing happens.”
But, she said, she enjoyed the juicy role of a psychopathic mother and the opportunity to work with Winding Refn.
The director, meanwhile, was frank on where his predilections on violence lie: “My approach is somewhat pornographic — it’s what excites me that counts,” he said. Their differing responses reflect an industry torn between quiet distaste and blatant, almost sexual excitement.
Actors make unlikely crusaders on this issue. Meryl Streep’s actress daughter, Mamie Gummer, recently spoke out at Sundance Film Festival against Tarantino’s “creepy fetishizing” of gun violence.
Tarantino himself, when asked about the topic earlier this year, became angrily incoherent, threatening the polite interviewer with: “I’m shutting your butt down.”
In my 13 years as a film critic for Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, I have watched the emphasis gradually shift toward the consumption of extreme screen brutality as a simple, almost sensual pleasure: Audiences are invited to relish a man’s head being blasted apart in loving slow motion with the same unquestioning satisfaction they experience when stuffing down popcorn.
If Hollywood films increasingly have a fault, it is not that they are too realistic in their depiction of violence, but poisonously unrealistic. In real life, murder and torture are rarely consumed or experienced as fun.
I’m glad Jim Carrey, best known as a comedian, has been one of the few actors serious and brave enough to point that out.