Strong Bloody Violence: Why I Didn’t See Coriolanus…
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of strong bloody violence. If you’ve seen the news or read a history book at any point you’ll know that the world exists and has existed in a state of strong bloody violence for as long as there have been creatures on it capable of strong bloody violence. There’s a fucking pandemic of strong bloody violence, cutting swathes of strong bloody violence throughout the world which, incidentally, will likely end due a particularly virulent outburst of strong bloody violence which will be both horrifically strongly bloody and horrifically strongly violent, the almost inevitable capstone to a history of imaginative varieties of strong bloody violence.
And I’m sick of it, sick of being expected to watch and enjoy strong bloody violence in crap exploitative films and sick of having to endure strong bloody violence as part of films which I actually want to see, excepting their aforementioned strong bloody violence. I’m sick of strong bloody violence even though I have mercifully little experience of it, or especially since I have so little experience because I’m sick of it being marketed to people like me, who seldom have much direct experience of it as something to revel in in video games, or with the propensity to inflict strong bloody violence on others as an admirable or desirable trait, as though we actually understand strong bloody violence.
It’s not so much that I’m ideologically a pacifist, or that I’m particularly uncomfortable with blood, gore or viscera in an abstract way, but the foregrounding of strong bloody violence is seldom less than celebratory, particularly in film, if only to showcase the special effects that so much of the budget has been spent on. Even when the brutality of said strong bloody violence is dramatically or thematically appropriate, I’m tired of it seeing it given such lavish, loving and rapt attention by actors and filmmakers for whom, for the most part, strong bloody violence is also mostly an abstract, brought out for its entertainment value alone.
So I didn’t see and won’t be reviewing Ralph Fiennes new film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus because I couldn’t stomach the promise of strong bloody violence, because as unforgivingly violent as some of Shakespeare’s work is (“Out vile, jelly!” anyone?), I’d rather take the poetry of his words and the performances of actors like Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler and Brian Cox without the gratuity of strong bloody violence, apropos as it might be. Frankly, there’s more than enough strong bloody violence to go around, and I need a break from it, or at least from all the fictitious or celebratory iterations of it.
