Discomfort in Hollywood as Carrey starts thinking
What degree of human suffering should we consume as entertainment, asks Jenny Mccartney
ACTOR Jim Carrey did something almost unthinkable in Hollywood last week: he publicly disassociated himself from a film in which he starred, Kick-Ass 2, because of its graphic brutality.
Carrey tweeted: “I did Kick-Ass a month before Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence.”
So what happened? I suspect that Carrey just started thinking.
He is an outspoken supporter of gun control, writing that people in the US need to “deal with our addiction and entitlement to violence”. The logical next step is to query the burgeoning addiction to extreme violence as entertainment.
Once, Hollywood blamed the gun lobby for making weapons freely available. The gun lobby hit out at movies for glamorising violence. Now it is finally dawning on people that this opposition is artificial — the intermingling of freely available weaponry and culturally malign influences is a cause for concern.
Alongside that sits a philosophical question for us all: What degree of human suffering should we consume vicariously as entertainment, why and in what form?
There are signs that Hollywood is getting uncomfortable. After the 2012 Colorado shooting in which James Holmes murdered 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.
Following the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in which 20 children and seven adults died, film mogul Harvey Weinstein cancelled the US premiere of the Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained. Yet these tentative gestures merely raised another question: If a film is too disturbing to see one week after a massacre, when is it acceptable?
The film world is more divided than it appears. Kristin Scott Thomas, lead actress in Nicolas Winding Refn’s violent Only God Forgives, told reporters that the film was “really not my kind of thing” and she did not enjoy watching films where “this kind of thing happens”. Again, an unusual admission for an actress. But she enjoyed the juicy role of a psychopathic mother.
Refn was frank about his love of violence: “My approach is somewhat pornographic — it’s what excites me that counts.” Their differing responses reflect the industry: one torn between quiet distaste and blatant, almost sexual, excitement.
Actors make unlikely crusaders on this issue. They are in an intensely competitive business and do not wish to limit offers by seeming to advocate censorship.
Still, some are voicing unease: Meryl Streep’s actress daughter, Mamie Gummer, recently spoke out against Tarantino’s “creepy fetishising” of gun violence.
When asked about it in a TV news interview, Tarantino angrily told the polite interviewer: “I’m shutting your butt down.”
For me, a disservice has long been done to the debate by simple protests about “violence” in films. The true problem is not the presence of violence per se — an undeniable fact of life and cinema — but the context of its portrayal. In my 13 years as a film critic, I have watched the emphasis gradually shift towards 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 as they experience when stuffing down popcorn.
Hit men are no longer villains, but charismatic stars. Even the heroes perform acts of grotesque vengeance that would once have been unthinkable. Too often, the viewer is nudged towards collusion with the psychopath.
I grew up amid violence, in ’70s Belfast in Northern Ireland, with nervy, armed British soldiers on every street corner and reports of fatal shootings constantly on the news. I have always been interested by the manifold delusions in which violence clothes itself and the way that a single act of destruction can whack numerous lives out of shape. There are films and TV series that have explored dark matter while stopping short of bathing in it for titillation — those, I applaud.
The fault with Hollywood films is that, far from being realistic, the portrayal is poisonously unrealistic. In real life, murder and torture are never consumed as fun. I am glad Carrey has been one of the few actors serious and brave enough to point that out. —© The Daily Telegraph, London