Why We‘re The Bad Guys
by Jim Cummings
A family is held hostage in their home by two killers who torture them with a shotgun and golf club. Millions of Americans are watching and no one intervenes.
If this happened today in Ohio, many would express sadness for the victims and their families, never considering that they regularly enjoy movies with similar plots. It’s difficult to understand the desires of an audience that hates explosions in metropolitan areas but pays to see them at the cineplex. For a country that spends so much time condemning human suffering you would not believe what we spend our money to watch.
James Bond is tied to a chair, he is nude and the chair bottom has been cut out so the bad guy can beat our hero’s testicles with a knotted rope. The filmmakers have constructed this gruesome scene to prove to the audience that Bond is strong-willed, that the bad guy is in fact a bad guy, and so the revenge is sweeter when the bad guy is killed in the end. People argue that cruelty like this is needed to test a protagonist (that Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, James Bond, Peter Parker, Edward Cullen, and Bruce Wayne had to be orphaned to make their story arcs more fulfilling), but since the Bad Guys are fictional, the cruelty that they inflict is not for their benefit, it’s for ours. We need this violent setup for a fulfilling payoff. The bad guy doesn't care about our heroes’ pain, we do. We are the ones that require them to endure it, we are the one’s that pay to see it. We are the bad guys.
The Formula
There’s a good guy and a bad guy, the filmmakers show the bad guy doing bad things to make the audience side with the good guy, the good guy takes down the bad guy in the end and the audience feels rewarded by their allegiance with the victor. In 2014, movie theater marquees are full of titles that might as well be called, “the good guy beats the bad guy.” Funny Games(1997) taught me this and I have since used it as a ladder toward media literacy.
If you haven’t seen it (don’t), Funny Games is a film about a family who drive to their country house where they are visited by two young men who torture them to death. The film’s American trailer presents it as a thriller to deceive moviegoers into thinking that it’s a fun romp with dangerous thrills. Funny Games is all but that: Long takes and realistic performances of torture and human degradation make it very difficult to watch, but unlike similar movies of the genre (Cape Fear, The Strangers, The Purge) the sadist characters in Funny Games often turn to the camera, acknowledging the audience for their complicity in the acts of violence, the film’s production, and the fate of the characters.
It is a punishment to audiences for wanting to watch it, disguised as a horror film, to raise our consciousness about what we watch and why we watch it. So why do we enjoy human suffering when we’re safe behind these one-way mirrors?
A madman has taken over a city, he holds innocent people hostage and kills some with firearms and his bare hands.
It’s a fictional city called Gotham which means that real people will dress up like the villain and line up around the block to see this depiction of violence and psychopathy but when a real psychopath stands up in the theater and opens fire they, along with the rest of the country, instantly change their minds about what they wanted to see. The joke goes: a man approaches the ticket counter in Aurora Colorado, “I’d like a refund” he says. “I came here to see a psychopath strike fear into the innocent, but I can’t stand these new 3D movies.”
This is cognitive dissonance, but our audience is not to blame, our movies are. We are attracting viewers with simplified premises that trigger their easiest emotions and because of this we have ushered them into expecting and accepting only poor storytelling. Filmmakers aren't making better characters, they are making crueler villains and bigger monsters because they imagine that it will make the story more compelling for audiences. It doesn’t, and although we are still paying for it, we are not buying it.
Recent studies of the brain’s response to stress with camaraderie may indicate why people seek out fear-creators like Halloween Haunted Houses. Although fear may not be a primary pleasurable emotion, people visit these sites because of their side-effects, the befriending sensation of squeezing the person next to them (Oxytocin), communal endurance relaxation (Morphine), frequent bursts of adrenaline (Epinephrine), etc. Films are the same, both attractions provide intense emotions while the audience has no real fear of danger. What blockbusters offer as a bonus is the unspoken promise from the filmmaker to the viewer that justice (and therefore, catharsis) will be delivered before the credits roll.
“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” -Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
One of the storytelling conflicts that the filmmakers address in Adaptation (2002) is that you can’t make a movie that is just about flowers, it must have drug smuggling, car chases, split personalities, and shootouts otherwise Americans won’t pay to see it. And maybe they’re right, but if they are right, they are right about us being wrong. It doesn’t take a thorough understanding of film to realize that we are being sold the same product again and again and, looking back, it can be hard not to feel swindled.
There is an endless variety of stories that are worthy of sharing. We have the ability to express different thoughts and cultures that enrich the world’s understanding of itself and provide adventures for people who love them. It is peculiar then, that our choices for engaging in popular stories are between which cool, white guy we’d like to see overcome impossible odds. We are not being sold sequels, we are being sold remakes, identical thrills with updated special effects. The manufacturers are promising us adventure while selling us movies that are so formulaic that they are no longer adventurous.
Watching the survival of heroes through hardship is fulfilling to watch, but this illusion becomes harder to fall for when you realize how inundated we are by it. It is becoming easy to mock and impossible to ignore.
Jim’s Keynote on this subject at South by Southwest 2015.
Jim Cummings is a Future 15 Speaker at South By Southwest 2014.
twitter: @jimmycthatsme
email: jimmycthatsme@mac.com
