My History of Violence: A rumination on art, death, truth, hubris and the unsexy call for media accountability
By John H. Richardson
Paste Magazine
When I was a cub reporter starting out at the Albuquerque Tribune, I found a report in the police blotter about a pair of 16-year-old lovers who gassed themselves in a car. I about choked on how great a story it was, did a little reporting, found out they did it in a closed garage and that their bodies were discovered by the very same parents who were trying to split them up. Then I pitched it to my editor. no way, he said. I said, “What? Are you crazy? It's Romeo and fucking Juliet!” He gave me a sad look. “If I run this story, and give it big play and a nice layout, I guarantee you there will be a copycat suicide. Maybe a bunch of them. Do you want that on your conscience?”
I said, it’s not my responsibility what crazy people do. It’s the truth and that’s what I want to write, the truth. Would you tell Shakespeare to stick to comedies? Would you tell Tolstoy to write Peace and Peace? I may have even cited my old college professor Sylvère Lotringer, who taught a class on death and who once told me that the cheap horror movies I loved in those days (from Halloween to The Evil Dead) were “an inoculation” against the violence in society. And I may have quoted Theodor W. Adorno, who said that “Writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” so the only moral thing was to celebrate guys like the Marquis de Sade because he reflected the ugliness of the world without sentimentality or prettification. I also may have mentioned the Sex Pistols (“I’m gonna go over the Berlin Wall”) or quoted Joy Division (“Don’t speak of safe messiahs”) because those were the days when I had tons of theories and came to every conversation armed with quotes.
Somehow, my editor managed to resist my blinding rhetorical onslaught. He didn’t run the piece. And I thought, this little burg is just too small-town for me, baby. These people don’t understand art. They don’t understand transgression. So I went to Hollywood. And just after I got there, some guy made a movie called The Program that had a scene where some kids lay down on a highway divider as a dare—and sure enough, there were copycats out in Pennsylvania who laid their dumb asses down on highway dividers and got squashed. And the studio said, hey, it’s not our responsibility what crazy people do. These people just don’t understand art.
Not long after, I introduced a David Cronenberg movie at some Hollywood event, and I vividly remember saying that people who rejected the work of people like Cronenberg and William S. Burroughs refused to understand that “in order to heal a wound, you have to probe it.” I said those exact words. And added a few choice details about what you were likely to find in a wound when you probed it. And I remember that afterward, a very nice person came up to me looking puzzled and asked if I really meant all that—obviously too kind to wonder outright how someone so smart could be so stupid. And I remember feeling a tiny bit of shame accompanied by the first hint of a clue that maybe I had let myself get caught up in something that made me feel cool and justified my teenage rejectionist impulses while also gratifying my intellectual pretensions. Back then I was so fucking dumb that I actually took a date to see Dead Ringers.
But then I got married, had a couple of kids, adjusted the drug mixture a bit, and one day I found myself at lunch with David Fincher at one of those L.A. restaurants so impossibly cool it looks like a warehouse from the outside. Although he was rich and cordial and the dictionary definition of a successful young man, Fincher had just ruined the Alien franchise by shaving Sigourney Weaver’s head and setting Alien 3 on a prison planet populated by ugly guys with bar codes on the backs of their skulls. He told me about this movie he wanted to make about serial killers. I said, “David, you’re a handsome young movie director who hangs with Madonna. What the fuck do you want to make a movie about serial killers for?” He said he was fascinated with the “hum” that came into their minds just before a kill. I tried to talk him out of it. “Make something human instead,” I begged him. “Something about real people and real problems, not fantasy bullshit about psycho killers you never met and have nothing in common with.” But no, that polite and likeable young man went out and made Se7en, a movie only a sociopath could love. Then Fight Club, another nauseating piece of “cool” bullshit about how everybody else is crazy except us artists who are just using all this violence as... social criticism. And now there are fight clubs and Saw sequels all over this American Gladiator Land we call home—and Fight Club/Grand Theft Auto/God of War kids are in Iraq killing to the soundtrack of Slayer and Megadeth amidst other soldiers (some of them so good and decent it breaks your heart) who try to be kind and stay alive and pass on Decent American Values that all those smug hipsters would laugh at if, say, Netflix sent them a Barry Levinson movie by accident. And it’s not just the kids. Judging by the canonization of Cormac McCarthy, who writes about scalpings and coin-flipping symbols of death and babies roasted on spits and the Apocalypse Blooming From Every Man’s Evil Heart, nihilism is now so universally confused with profundity that even the serious literary establishment can’t see that he’s really just Stephen King without the entertainment value.
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