I believe I was two years old when I witnessed my first murder while watching Star Wars in 1977. I have a very vague memory of the film, but I can see myself as an impressionable toddler staring at the screen in awe, watching the final attack on the Death Star, an action-packed set-piece filled with multiple killings of Storm Troopers and fighter pilots, all blown to smithereens. Those deaths fascinated me; the question is why? I assume there are many clinical explanations, but the more basic reason is: the scene was exciting, and the homicides added to that excitement. Some live, some die, and we are fine with it all.
In fact, according to David Thomson in his newest work, Murder and the Movies, published by Yale University Press, we are not only fine with homicide, we are seduced by its irresistibility. Filmmakers and producers write narratives revolving around it; we in turn spin our own narratives while watching. Thomson’s first chapter, one of several succinct essays on various aspects of cinematic slaughter, centers on a conversation with his wife about the deaths in the Netflix series Ozark — a narrative about a narrative about gruesome deaths of fictional characters, whom viewers oftentimes don’t treat as such and even get perplexingly attached to, so much so that they more than likely are not observing the dying or dead in world around them:
“In this book I examine those spaces — our room, our transformative screen on the wall, and the turmoil of the outer world it wants to organize and make acceptable. It is our dream that separation of the boxes will keep us safe, alive, and positive.”
Thomson says that when we “connoisseurs” of death are faced with a mass murderer like Jim Jones who wields authorship over the characters in his life, we find ways to distance ourselves from the reality of the “pain or individuality” that occurs when someone is murdered. The gap closes between character and the real human drinking the Kool Aid.
Are we then no better than the murderers? Thomson claims, “We cling to them and reenact their evil.” Furthermore, we see homicides regularly. By age 18, each of us has seen as many as 40,000 murders, watched them as entertainment, sometimes as dark comedy as in The Shining, sometimes with morbid fascination that leads to faint thoughts of Could I …? But after all, we are better, right? We understand that life is unfair and all we are doing is watching death in performance, experiencing it from a distance. But no: we aren’t better since we are enjoying the violence, we have sought out this experience, we do think about murder from time to time. All of us, in thinking about murder, are capable of doing it, and in some cases all it takes is a word, a movement, a Tweet, or cash.
Thomson unpacks the aspects of cinematic murder, and then adds up the consequences not only for the gazed-upon woman who gets eaten by a shark in Jaws or pushed from a bell tower in Vertigo or slashed by a serial killer (place title here), but also for those of us who believe that they would never hurt anyone. He persuasively illustrates how enjoyable and inspired murder and murderers can be. When discussing Se7en, he observes that the film “is a series of hysterically inventive murders in which the aura of cruelty cannot be distinguished from the calculation of the killer and the way the film is accomplice to that murderous superiority.” In a prior chapter, Thomson addresses The Silence of the Lambs, and how the film introduces Hannibal Lecter/Anthony Hopkins:
“You know this setup. You were introduced to it, I suppose, by Hannibal Lecter … in a high-tech isolation cell at the end of a dungeon corridor. That’s where Clarice Starling had to seek him out, as he sat in tethered splendor, as groomed as prison garb allowed, but still and saturnine as a Great Actor could be on his way to an Oscar for just twenty minutes of screen time. Authority oozed out of him, like a mix of eau de cologne and formalin.”
The authority of Thomson’s book comes from his recognition that murder in the movies is both a business and an art, and it happens for us in a place as banal as our local theater or our own living room. What makes this idea so intriguing, however, is that these killings, whether fictional or real, have now become so much a part of our everyday lives that we are no longer disturbed by the images. As Thomson says:
“Murder wants to be a drastic, dramatic assertion of man’s power — but it does not heal the humbling knowledge that everyone will die in some kind of confusion.”
Violent death is easy to observe without feeling sadness or remorse because it is both common and prolific. But Thomson also asks the question: Should we be feeling upset? He is never judgmental, simply pointing out the disquieting and striking nature of the murder-viewing experience. While talking about Strangers on a Train, he points out how its characters’ diabolical crisscross resembles our experience in the theater:
“It’s a sly allusion to the way we can watch a movie killing — observe it being planned and executed, sitting there alone — without taking the blame. Or feeling guilty.”
With wit and liveliness, Thomson shows us that we unsuccessfully play our roles as passive observers, since we are ultimately complicit in the deaths we are viewing. When faced with evil and blood, such as serial killing or battle scenes or representations of true crime, our morbid desires, the ones we generally suppress or disregard, are fulfilled, if on a slant. That is why Psycho is such a classic piece of cinema. We observe Marion Crane’s brutal death, the clean-up, her mutilated body placed in the trunk of her car, and the disposal of the evidence. Norman Bates pushes the car into the tar pit. Is the car going to sink or not? Glub, glub, glub. The sinking of the automobile relieves all involved. We not only watch Norman, we become Norman. As Thomson states, “Murder can be headlights in the night that turn us into deer.” Directors like Hitchcock, Fincher, Coppola, and even Woody Allen know this; they understand and exploit it our psyches without caring about the consequences. We have become so comfortable with screen-death that he is compelled to ask if movies will go ever further:
“Will they involve instructional rape and murder of infants? Will our present notions of pain and damage become sentimental? Will movies have crossed over the line and made a deal that allows them to kill actors, on camera, on our plain sight?”
My early Star Wars murders were produced through technology which, Thomson says, can create “computer-generated masses [that] are easier to hire and dispose of,” but what about real death filmed for our viewing pleasure? Just go to YouTube. Watch Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, cable television. In August, Ronnie McNutt, a veteran with PTSD, shot himself in the head with a shotgun while filming himself on TikTok. Five years ago, Alison Parker and Adam Ward of WDBJ in Virginia were shot and killed by a disgruntled employee who filmed the homicides and posted them to Facebook. Millions watched the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands and knees of police officers in Minneapolis. Inevitably, we will all encounter many more of these images.
I know I do and I have. What does that say about me? Thomson would argue that I am in the same boat as most others – and Murder and the Movies gives us permission to accept the fact that we are fascinated by death, occurring naturally or violently.
[Published by Yale University Press on august 5,, 2020, 240 pages, $26.00 hardcover]