ABSTRACT
The scene of violence in much contemporary cinema provides pleasure to its viewer in part because it occurs within a narrative promising that violence will be judged, punished and prevented. A punitive response is counterposed to it, or violence is depicted within a framework designed to elicit condemnation or provide a sense of legitimation soothing to the anxiety of watching the violent crime-image. Thus Frank Booth’s sexual assault of Dorothy in Blue Velvet establishes him plainly as the villain who must be punished (in this instance, by being killed); John Doe’s elaborate methods of committing murder in Seven are portrayed as indicators of his pathology; and the shooting of security guards by Neo and Trinity in The Matrix is framed as the rescue of a freedom fighter rather than as mass murder. And these devices certainly constitute the dominant means used by films about violence to depict violence. But scattered throughout the hundreds of films which make use of these devices of reassurance for spectatorial anxiety can be found a number of films, some of which have been mentioned or discussed in this book, whose crime-images of violence are less comfortable to watch. Thus, Elephant meticulously depicts both the randomness of a school shooting and the impossibility of knowing ‘why’ it happened, and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer uses its eponymous evocation of the genre of the ‘portrait’ to provide a detailed representation of a serial killer whose acts of violence do not seem to prompt any answering response from the agencies of criminal justice.
