Violence and Gore

I mentioned that I am covering these topics at least partly because in my writing all of them come up, and while in a way violence is the easiest to treat, it is also the one that I have the least satisfactory resolution for in my own writing.

Set in the post-apocalyptic dystopian future, the heroes are constantly under fire, and while most of them do end up dead, they also end up killing quite a few themselves, and yet I have portrayed them as good people.

True, most of the killings are in self-defense, though several happen on a rescue mission where they technically are taking offensive action, but for the purpose of rescuing comrades, so there is that, but I guess what I was thinking is that even if every killing is justified, it seems that killing should take an emotional and spiritual toll, where you would eventually build up some hardness and callousness. At least, I think it would take a lot of conscious effort to fight that.

For this particular piece, I end up not doing too much with it because the good thing about this harsh lifestyle is that no one spends too long in it really, generally ending up dead before they have had a chance to get too hardened. (Obviously, it’s a really upbeat story.)

I am pretty much okay without dealing with the issue in depth, because I think you can raise questions in fiction that you don’t answer, but just leave them as food for thought. (This is much less satisfying in non-fiction.) The questions are raised. There is an early scene and a later scene that both kind of address it, and you are left with is a feeling of discomfort: this is not good, but there better choices are missing.

That is probably the right attitude to have about violence. Sometimes it is necessary, but you should never love it. One thing that makes the killing easier in this story, and a lot of others, is that the bad guys are mostly faceless and identical drones. When I saw Star Wars, I initially assumed that the storm troopers were robots. They looked mechanical, but that was because the of the body armor which dehumanized them and made them indistinguishable from each other.

In this case, my interpretation of the Draculoids was influenced largely by my reading of A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier (but not for Kony—lots of bad guys use kids). Anyway, something they did to keep the children as soldiers is that they were constantly on drugs and when they were not out fighting they would watch violent films. There is still a human there, but harder to get to.

I figured it would be the same way with the Draculoids. For one thing, it gives them a motivation, and also I figure that if they are constantly high they are going to be worse shots, and that makes it more plausible that the good guys keep surviving their engagements, because normally you would expect the casualty rates to be evened out a little more. As it is, the Draculoid deaths definitely outnumber the Killjoy deaths.

It is also different in that the Killjoy losses hurt and are mourned, and the Draculoids are really just cannon fodder for the people who are over them. So your bad situation comes because you have people against you who don’t value human life, and will greatly abuse human life to get what they want, but it also leaves people who do care as killers, or dead, or eventually both.

As you can see, there is not an easy solution to maintaining your humanity while living in a war zone, but what we have picked up along the way is that violent images do make it easier for people to be violent (also drugs, but no real groundbreaking news here), and also what I am hoping you will just agree on, is that human life is important and valuing it is important.
So, how to do you create a fun, action-packed, adrenaline-crazed tale without being part of the problem?

There were some extras on the Austin Powers Blue-Ray that would totally not have worked in the movie, as they would have slowed and dragged it down horribly, but that were still pretty funny. You saw the reactions to the deaths of two of the evil henchman. One scene was the wife and stepson of the guy who got steamrollered, and then the friends of the one who got his head eaten by ill-tempered mutant sea bass. The ridiculous nature of the deaths took away from the solemnity a little, but the point was that henchmen could have friends and families too.

So, I have to think about these people, and I shouldn’t be taking too much pleasure in their deaths. It’s disturbing that we have gone from where it was just heroes shooting lots of bad guys, which was bad enough, to where a new term was invented, “torture porn”, for a genre that delights in how creatively and gruesomely various people can be killed. It’s a normal progression though. Killing one guy is no longer a big deal, so you kill more, but you can’t keep upping that past a certain point without making the film too long, so just make the deaths worse, and then they need to keep getting worse. Make it squishier! More entrails! It’s not a good direction to go.

We often use the word “gratuitous” with violence and sex and language, and generally we use it meaning that it’s just there for the sake of being there. It comes from “gratis” though, meaning free. Here you go: violence at no cost! There is a price, though, and so ignoring what the actual price would be is something that is paid for in desensitization.

I’m saying this as someone who loves a good action scene, which perhaps is why I am having such a difficult time arriving at a point. The difference is that in the movies you can have the enemy be orcs or destructive aliens, where you just want to kill them all as quickly as possible, and it is no crime. That doesn’t happen in real life.

In films without the fantasy or science fiction element you can have the villains be Nazis or drug dealers or something else awful and clear the conscience that way, but then they are still people. They look like people, they bleed like people, and they probably still love their mothers, even if they are really bad people.

Actually, it’s not that in these films that you don’t care about death—you just don’t care about the bad guys dying. You want the hero to live, and maybe his love interest. Hopefully you care when his minority sidekick dies. Possibly the whole thing was set off by the death of family members. In that scenario, it’s only bad if it happens to us. Actually, there is a lot of that going around financially, and some of it does become life and death.

I guess ultimately I am just against mass killings. It’s not really that controversial a position stated that way. I’m also against recreational killing, even if it’s fake. And I’m against narcissism and selfishness. I can’t really tell you any rules I have for writing violence. It is more than I have this ethos behind it, and so that affects how things are treated. And I find that I don’t write throwaway characters. Even if they only have a small part in the story, they have an existence beyond what is seen, and they are a real fictional person, so that has to be taken into account.

Now I need to get back to the story. I killed off six last night, but there are a lot more to go. (And two of them really hurt, but now I am feeling bad about the other four.)