Active discussions

Please or to access all these features

Add post

Watch this thread

Save thread

Start a new thread

Flip thread

Hide thread

My feed

Saved Active Unanswered threads

Getting started FAQ's

Unanswered threads Acronyms Talk guidelines

Hide shortcut buttons

Talk

Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Flip

1 2 3 4 5 6

Extreme images of violence against women. "Moral and edgy" or vile misogynist cliche?

133 replies

Eleison · 04/06/2010 06:20

"The assumption is now ? and it seems to be correct ? that audiences are happy to watch their heroines being beaten and gagged, and to stare at explicitly rendered photographs of women cut and splayed and killed."

Great article by Natasha Walton in the Guardian today about the intense and lingering depiction of violence against women in films and TV programmes that habitually excuse their horrific images by presenting them in stories that are 'moral' because they narrate the investigation, condemnation, and punishment of the crime.

When Stephen Griffiths describes himself in court by the 'crossbow cannibal' tag that a newspaper gave him, don't we have to see that the conventional excited and graphic presentation of the murder of women in the media in news reports and in drama feeds back into reality, nourishing the fantasies and encouraging the actions not just of serial killers but of common-or-garden misogynists?

OP posts:

Report

Eleison · 04/06/2010 09:23

I complained to ITV about a crime drama a few months ago that had 'crime scene' photos of a mutilated woman that were harrowingly explicit. There response was pretty much 'It is ok because that is what viewers expect in that kind of programme'

The justification that there might once have been for such images is that they were truly shocking, truly made us think about the reality of the crime, because of their radical UNfamiliarity. Not now.

There is supposed to be a gritty sort of realism to these police-evidence photos pinned up on coppers' walls in TV dramas to go with the alleged realism of the 'police procedural' style of drama but in fact they have become the opposite of realism, a slick stylised convention, put there just because that's what's expected in a drama of a certain sort. Meanwhile we all get numbed to the horror and chow it down with the sofa snacks.

OP posts:

AMumInScotland · 04/06/2010 10:02

Vile misogynist cliche, definitely. Women as victims, women's bodies as lumps of flesh to be tortured for titillation. Then a quick "And we caught the nasty killer so that proves that good triumphs after all" to add a thin veneer of morality to the story.

I just don't watch them, but it sickens me that stuff like this has become "mainstream" instead of the under-the-counter videos you'd have had to buy to access this sort of muck 20 years ago.

Prolesworth · 04/06/2010 11:07

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn

Eleison · 04/06/2010 11:33

Yes, I turned Luther off after 1 min viewing of first episode, because the shocking images were SO reduced to a painting-by-numbers make-a-TV-drama kit.

OP posts:

comixminx · 06/06/2010 11:10

Kermode and Mayo discussed "Killer Inside Me" very interestingly the other day - summarized by Kermode here. I'm with Mayo in principle (though haven't seen the film myself). I can see the argument that if you are depicting violence against women, depicting it in a non-glamorous way is more moral than doing it in a way that glamourises violence, but I can't say that having those images out in the world either helps anyone or puts forward any very useful moral arguments, really.

(I do like the fact that Kermode and Mayo both consider it routine and normal to discuss issues of misogyny in film, rather than not considering it at all because they're men.)

Prolesworth · 06/06/2010 11:42

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn

comixminx · 06/06/2010 12:01

Haven't seen Funny Games, no, but I think that's not a bad way to do violence in film if you're gonna do it - off-camera. Kermode / Winterbottom were arguing w.r.t. Killer Inside Me that the violence against men was all off-screen because the killer didn't care about them, whereas the violence against women was on-screen because those were much more central to the killer's self-image and identity, or something (can't quite reconstruct the argument). But again I'm not convinced that works for me as an argument; I'd've thought you could make it work and still have the violence off-screen.

Part of the thing is that people will take stuff out of the original context, and show just the image itself, or a short clip, so even if it's not glamourised in its original setting that doesn't mean it won't be so in later usage. Another part is that it can be hard to know how other people will take your original image / creation. For instance, when 2000AD started out, the creators thought of Judge Dredd as a clear anti-hero - he shot people for jaywalking and consuming sugar, for crying out loud! But he very quickly became an actual cult quasi-hero despite that.

BoneyBackJefferson · 06/06/2010 13:25

maybe one of the points of the film is to get people talking/thinking about violence, many mainstream programs contain violence, including violence against both genders. As comixminx pionted out it doesn't take much for violence to become to norm.

Eleison · 06/06/2010 20:45

I was trying to think of films/TV progs that do succeed in lingering on images of violence toward women in a moral way. The only one that comes to mind is the Jodie Foster film, The Accused, which covers the rape scene in very great length. It is detailed but the details chosen aren't the sensational, fetishied images of a damaged or violated body, or a humiliated person.
They are the details that forensically establish the truth of the victim's version of events.

So I don't think it is impossible to show violence morally, just that there is usually little will to, and a great many incentives to show it immorally

OP posts:

Eleison · 06/06/2010 20:52

oh, and is there the extra difficulty that fantasy very often becomes formulaic? It's how fantasy works - a familiar sequence of images that have been thoroughly associated with gratification in the past and which therefore become a rut that the image-maker's mind works in. I suppose that might mean that there is a great deal of 'inertia' that causes fantasy images to be reproduced unreflectively in unoriginal image-making? Which in turn is overlaid by the sound commercial reasons for falling in with the rut of the viewers' minds.

OP posts:

policywonk · 06/06/2010 21:02

Agree that the Kermode/Mayo prog (which I love anyway) is refeshingly pro-woman on the whole. And I did feel pathetically grateful to Mayo for obviously having had such a viscerally hostile response to the Winterbottom film.

Winterbottom's argument seems to be that anyone who routinely consumes images of violence towards women - which he accepts are prevalent in popular TV/films - has no right to complain about the scenes in his film. So, for those of us who go out of our way not to consume those images, is it OK for us to say that his film is a stinking pile of old cock, even if we haven't seen it and never will? Somehow I doubt he'd accept that line of argument either.

One thing that really angers me about Winterbottom's arguments is that they're all centred on the central male character, his motivation, blah blah. How it's a tragedy really because he's driven to destroy the women who love him (ie not a tragedy because he's murdering people). This absolutely routine insistence on seeing everything through the eyes of the male aggressor, while the women are just collections of body parts with no interior life, just hanging around waiting to be raped and murdered.

Eleison · 06/06/2010 21:08

Yes, absolutely, re your last paragraph. Sickening that film after film, TV show anfter TV show, makes this great icon of the Mind of the Killer. Their motivation generally is going to be fucked up and cliche-driven and stupid, and in the case of psychopaths monumentally determined by their blindness to other people's reality, a blindness that, as you say, the film-maker's etc have towards the victims' reality.

OP posts:

policywonk · 06/06/2010 21:12

Yes. Which leads back to your point about Stephen Griffiths - we'll all hear a lot more about him than we ever will about the women he murdered. It's a fast route to celebrity for every woman-hating loser out there (and let's face it there are a frighteningly large number of those).

Eleison · 06/06/2010 21:43

yes. And I feel anxious about the fact that SG was studying murderers for his PhD. I wonder whether the serial killer has become so honoured by attention across the board that even academe (as well as news reports, as well as TV, as well as film, as well at novels) is a way for inadequates like him to burrow further into fantasy and self-aggrandisement.

OP posts:

comixminx · 06/06/2010 22:49

Good point re it all being centred around the male character, policywonk. I'm not sure if I would necessarily want to see a film centred around the woman's tragedy of being raped / murdered either on the other hand - even if there was clearly-depicted agency / interior life on her part, say in coping with the aftermath - but it would be more unusual and possibly more uplifting. (perhaps it would be rather more like the Jodie Foster film referred to above - I might still not want to watch it, but it might be a film I was happier to see exist, IYSWIM.)

Prolesworth · 07/06/2010 11:36

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn

ElephantsAndMiasmas · 07/06/2010 11:48

Did anyone else read Rachel Cooke's interview with MW in the observer: here

Alison Graham did a great article about violene against women on TV here too which is well worth reading. She reviews this crap for a living and is fed up with it.

ElephantsAndMiasmas · 07/06/2010 11:57

Good point Proles. Wasn't a massive fan of the film as a whole, but the ending was extremely powerful and made you really feel what had happened, rather than just know about it.

I don't know what we're supposed to learn by seeing this kind of shocking violence anyway. If directors concentrated less on the violence and more on the characters it is visited upon (beforehand) and the reactions of the relatives/friends etc (afterwards) the emotional response would be far greater. If we're supposed to be learning a lesson about the terrible things that men do to women, in visceral detail, then why is it dramatised? Why not a documentary? It's not like it's a fictional circumstance is it.

The only message to be got from a story like this (true or false) is that violence against women is totally unacceptable, and that victims need to be given every opportunity and help to escape from the danger they are living with.

Repeatedly showing women enjoying - even finding a turn on - the violence inflicted on them, is a staple of extreme porn - that should tell you something about who this film is made for, and at whose expense.

ImSoNotTelling · 07/06/2010 12:05

All you have to do is watch CSI and see the camera lovingly linger on the naked breasts of teh dead young woman on the mortuary slab, to see that there is a problem with all of this.

Violence against women = mainstream
Sexual violence against women = mainstream

It wasn't this way 20 years ago. Many films now seem to feel the need to include a rape scene in the story, often randomly, as its just what you do now.

Eleison · 07/06/2010 12:18

I'm glad of that Alison Graham article (thanks for the link). She is a very very mainstream reviewer who might very readily be taken to reflect the views of many many TV viewers, so I hope it will make programme makers take notice.

It is saddening that a woman dramatist (La Plante) did much to begin this TV trend. True, it was shocking, because novel, in Prime Suspect, and the shock had some moral value. But not enough to justify what it has let in in its wake.

Luther seems particularly offensive. It doesn't even seem to try to pretend that its by-numbers horrors have any point onther than to tick the boxes of the genre's component parts.

OP posts:

policywonk · 07/06/2010 13:15

That Alison Graham article puts it very well. Especially the bit about emphasising how women shouldn't ever feel safe, anywhere, not even in their own homes with their children playing at their feet. This is one of the consequences of this repetitive broadcasting of sadistic violence against women - it has the effect of making us all feel, at some level, unsafe.

ImSoNotTelling · 07/06/2010 17:51

Thinking about this earlier

On threads about women/men/violence, when people talk about violence against women, there are always people who come on to say that statistically men are more likely to be the victims of violent crime than women

And yet when we have this television thing (reading the comments in reponse to one of the links), it seems that on television and in films, violence against women is depiceted so frequently as most violence is inflicted by men on women.

I suspect that the people making the first argument are likely to be the same people as make the second argument.

But this is clearly totally contrdictory. If dramas are to mirror real life, then surely we need to see a lot more people being the victims of violent crime at chucking out time, and the victims should be men. Strangely, dramas usually choose to portray sexual violence against women.

Hmmmm.

policywonk · 07/06/2010 19:11

Hello ISNT. Yes, exactly, I was thinking the same thing earlier on too. Why exactly is it so terrifically culturally important to render sexual violence in forensic detail, again and again, when far more common violent crimes are rarely depicted so lovingly?

Realistically, it's either because the auteur/writer/whatever thinks that sexual violence is somehow more profound than other violence, or because s/he is too cliche-ridden to do something the fuck else, or because s/he gets off on it. What other explanation can there be?

sethstarkaddersmum · 07/06/2010 19:19

I do agree that this 'actually it's moral' is a load of tripe.
If all the film makers who made these films were constantly to be found campaigning and fundraising against violence against women I might believe they were concerned about it, but you never hear them making that connection.
I think Elephants puts it very well with '
I don't know what we're supposed to learn by seeing this kind of shocking violence anyway' and 'why not a documentary?'

I would love to know if this kind of stuff is watched more by women or men.

booyhoo · 07/06/2010 19:25

i have to say whenever i see programmes or films with graphic scenes like the ones described in OP, i think it is nothing more than the sick fantasy of the person who wrote it. and it feeds the sick fantasies of people who would be inclined to act on such thoughts. if someone was found to have stories such as this on their homw computer or in a diary, eyebrows would be raised but because it is under the guise of drama or 'entertainment' (how that could ever be entertainment is beyond me)it is deemed totally acceptable.

i do worry about the minds of the people who come up with the stuff.

Flip

1 2 3 4 5 6

Please create an account

To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.