posted
I am really upset today. One of my milk goats came down with tetanus and after a week of treatments went into full body paralysis. But she was fully conscious and in great amounts of pain. As I did not have a gun I had to use an axe to kill her. (Why somebody wiuld willingly want to kill something for sport just boggles me. I don't know) I have killed animals before. But this one really bothered me- the goat did not feel the axe she was dead on the first blow. But I gave three more quck blows to make sure. Basically I cut the back and side of her head off to destroy the brain instantly. But the amount of blood, spray, and then the nervous twitches of the body dying made me sick. God I need to buy a gun.
Even with all that I could not stand to see her freezing, in great pain, and paralyzed on the muddy ground.
You know it made me realize that we sometimes don't see the true cost of violence in books and movies because the acts are sanitized. To be honest I prefer it that way. I don't want the reality of the horror to really sieze my readers. Not the way I was siezed by this morning.
Is there a way to really show the cost of violence without the mess and nastiness?
posted
I think most rational people know the cost of violence without having to see the real thing first hand. You only have to open your eyes to the world around you to see the pain and suffering it causes.
posted
I agree...I prefer not to know about the blood spray and mess. The gruesome details, though, aren't the cost of violence. Your cost of violence rang through crystal clear -- it was how you felt as you put the goat down. I'd say whether you know it or not, you already have an inherent knowledge of how to do what you're asking.
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posted
I don't know, I was reading the wiki on the A team the other day, and it made much of the "sanitized violence" that people came to enjoy. On the other hand, many consumers are so exposed to violence, they seek more and more graphic depictions of it, so I don't really want to get involved in that either. Your description of the circumstances and effect of the death are much more interesting to me than the gory details. You had been trying to save the goat's life for a week, and finally came to realize you had to put it out of its suffering.
I think the depiction of death that stays with me, which was merely described by someone who saw the movie, was the child in "the Killing fields" who was riding on a man's shoulders when he stepped on a mine, and there was an agonized moment when the protagonist tries to get the man holding the child to throw him before the mine is triggered, but for whatever reason it doesn't work. The protagonist carries the wounded boy until he dies. I'm not sure why that one still gets me.
posted
I think the amount of gore/violence used depends on the circumstances and intended audience. For mainstream I would keep a story pretty sanitary. But if a story need required something more graphic I would certainly go into more detail.
For example, in most cases you could just say:
"The farmer hit the goat with his axe to put the poor creature out of its misery."
...and let the reader fill in the blanks according to their own desires. In this case the deed is rather mundane and emotionless. Now let's say you want to add a little emotion into it:
"The farmer hit the goat with his axe to put the poor creature out of its misery. The goat twitched with every blow of the bloodied axe. When the deed was done the farmer dropped the axe and turned away and tried not to wretch."
...now we've added a little emotion into the act. It's still not overly violent and gory, but just enough to get an emotional point across. The second sentence could be left out, but adds a detail of the horror without being gory and shocking. And, of course, there are times where a little more detail is needed to put a point across:
"The farmer hit the goat with his axe to put the poor creature out of its misery. His eyes widened with delight each time his bloodied axe struck and made the animal twitch. The blood spray excited him as he laughed at the bits and pieces of the head and brains that flew through the air. He hit harder and harder until the twitching ended. He held the axe up and plucked..."
...you get the point. This last example shows a far greater depth that the other two, and to the development of this type of character it works best. There's only so much you can do with sanitized combat and violence when you need to get a strong point across. Sure I could have sanitized the last example more, but it probably wouldn't have gotten the point across as well.
Anyway, there's my opinion. Strong messages require strong action (or words in our case).
posted
Sorry you had to experience that, with a four-legged friend.
I'd say, yes, it's *very* possible to show the cost of violence without much blood. I just saw the film United 93. Maybe the "this really happened" aspect helped. But seeing the terrorist murder someone for no reason (we didn't see the knife go in, but we knew it was there) was brutal. Even more brutal was imagining myself in an airplane seat, knowing that if I *didn't* go up unarmed against someone who'd just murdered 3 people with a knife, so I had to...very very tense.
posted
I tend to side with those who say that the finality of death and the irreversability of violence are more important than the blood and gore in creating an emotional impact. Of course, that's partly because I'm not particularly bothered by blood and gore.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
If you don't want to be explicit about the violence, than be implicit. Implied and understated actions can often be more powerful than blatant actions. It works for sex as well as violence.
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posted
What's so odd is how in children's movies they never show what happened, but they suggest it in such a way that you're sure you saw it. Like when that chicken gets slaughtered in Chicken Run. You see the sillouette shadow of Mrs. Tweedy raising the cleaver, and you see Ginger react to the chopping sound. But in retrospect it seems like you really see it.
What's really odd is that the next scene shows the skeleton of said chicken, picked bare of the flesh. It seems like if you can't show a particular animal being killed, it would be somehow wrong to show that. I mean, I know the whole point of the movie is that chickens get eaten. It was just one of those odd things.
posted
One really effective scene I saw was where the bad guy is bragging he slipped a drug into the council's drinks. The drug took effect inside, and the only think you saw and heard was the locked door shaking, pounding on the door, and screems, then silence. The scene showed nothing, but implied something horrendous.
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posted
I think there's two ways of sanitizing violence: one is the obvious, cut the blood and gore. I agree with that, we don't need more graphic depictions of dismemberment. The other one always gets me mad; it's when violence doesn't ellicit a strong emotional response from characters. You've all seen such movies: action films (not parody, I'm fine with emotional ambiguity in parody) where the death a loved one serves only to send the MC into a killing-spree. The only way we know that the guy cares is because he's willing to kill a lot of people to get revenge, but for all I know, he might have been a psychopath who'd use any excuse to kill. This kind of sanitation is truely insulting to victims and it banalizes the act of violence.
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posted
Of course, sometimes a hero isn't particularly affected by death. Okay, maybe I'm just saying that because I'm not particularly affected by death. It seems logically untenable, no matter what you believe about death, unless you honestly believe that someone was likely to have lived forever. Of course most emotions don't have very strong logical foundations, so you can have the hero be devastated by the death of a loved one. I just don't see it as absolutely necessary.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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quote:...you can have the hero be devastated by the death of a loved one. I just don't see it as absolutely necessary.
Survivor, come on. This is a tailor-made situation in which to get very deep into the character's head and make the reader experience the anguish. Yeah, it isn't absolutely necessary, but a situation like that presents a great opportunity, and it's low-hanging fruit.
posted
I'm not saying that the protagonist shouldn't ever be unhappy about such things. But it's only a chance to get deep into the character's head if there are alternatives to the most typical response. In other words, if the protagonist doesn't feel helpless grief in the face of death...you develop an opportunity to explore why this is the case.
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posted
I agree. With some character sets, a "sanitized" approach can be appropriate not because the violence isn't horrifying, but because the POV characters are so densensitized to it.
Posts: 683 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
I just listened to a James Patterson audiobook, The Jester, read by Cary Elwes and it made me think of this thread quite a bit. The protagonist is very horrified by the violence at first, but it got pretty A-team toward the end. That, and I found that I am not offended by the F-bomb if it is used in characterizing Medieval French villagers.
I don't think I would have gotten into this book if it weren't read by Elwes, because otherwise it would have made me think of the red-headed serial killer in Copycat. I think Copycat was quite a bold move, in that it seems logical that it was supposed to be a variant on the Silence of the Lambs formula. You know. So the movie itself was a copycat. This escaped me for over 10 years.
posted
I think there is always a way to show the cost of violence without showing the blood and gore involved, if you don't want to show it. Put it in terms the reader can understand.
For instance, if you are talking about a battlefield and how many people have died that day, then instead of saying numbers or units, reference something they would understand like a towns population. If it was a big battle and the reader had been introduced to some towns and cities, you could reference one of those cities and say something like "There were enough dead on field to populate (city or town name), what a waste".
That way the reader could understand the significance of what you are saying, they can picture the numbers as they will think in terms of cities and towns that they know along with how many people live in those cities and towns. Then they will imagine those towns empty of all life.
For me that is a good indication of the cost of the violence that you have left unsaid.
Picture a battle field, then picture a city like New York. Now take every living thing out of New York and put it dead on the battle field. Now picture the violence required to come to that end.
quote:I have stood in the field after a battle, my armor smoking with other men's blood, and felt nothing. But this...it should have ended differently.
To make the reader understand the cost of violence, it isn't necessary to show the bodycount, but to make the reader care about something that was lost, even if nobody died. Even if all that was lost was a foolish illusion. I've lost many illusions in my life, not a few of them to violence. Life or death...doesn't affect me so much. It never has...and that was a painful truth to learn about myself. I know I always make fun of Kirika for crying about how she doesn't feel sad, but the truth is I remember exactly what it felt like to discover that.
posted
On the cost of violence...I'm reminded of the old planet-destroying space operas, where, if anybody bothered to stop and think about it, millions or billions or trillions must have died in the process.
I like to look at it in two ways (neither original with me...I think I picked them up from a commentary on Harry Harrison). How would you like to be the guy who fired the weapon that killed trillions? How would you like to be the guy on the receiving end of that weapon?
posted
I think it would rock to be the guy pulling the trigger...not so much to be the guy on the other end.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
There's a difference between sanitized violence and suggested violence. Sanitized violence is like when all the bad guys fall with one shot. Suggested violence is more what people are talking about. You can choose to show effects of violence rather than the violence itself. If you choose to show the violence it should be realistic.
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