The Screen that Divides Violence

The Untold. Directed by Herman Yau. 1993

Honestly, it was really hard for me to see comedy in this film at all. The violence was so shocking and graphic, it was hard to watch how far the director would push to shock. The first thing that came to mind when watching this film was, why? Why show such vivid violence of a serial killer? Why do we need that perspective? Other questions that came out of this was, why do we, as spectators, have the desire to witness this violence? Where does this desire stem from? 

A lot of these questions I still have yet found the answers to, at least for my own spectatorship, but I have some thoughts about the potentials of why. The screen divides us (reality/ the spectator) from the fantasy that is presented on screen (The world constructed from the mind). Though, at the same time this can be contradicted because parts of media find its way into our reality, masking itself as "real". An example of this is the media construction of drowning v. drowning in real life. On the screen the drowning is one that is violent and loud, the person screams and splashes around. But in reality drowning is quiet and suffocation, the person can't scream or speak because of the water that is filling their lungs (Professor Ongiri brought this up in class once before and it always stuck with me). 

But, with something as visceral as a murder shown on screen, it is clear to us that what we are seeing isn't reality. But what if the violence shown on screen was real? How would we react differently? I ask this question with a memory in mind. There was this one time around late middle school, early high school time when videos called "shocker videos" were popular. These videos were circulated around the internet as dares to be watched or curious spectacle that tested how much a viewer could take. What made these videos so alluring was when coming across the video, one doesn't know if the events shown on screen are real or not (until they researched it). At the time, everyone was watching these videos (at least all the people at my schools), so my curiosity got the best of me and I caved and watched a huge collection of them. Though one video that stopped me from this morbid trend all together was this video called 1 man 1 ice pick. 

When watching the video I didn't completely see what was happening, the action of someone stabbing was clear but not what this person was stabbing. Though as the video continued, the slow reveal of a person was shown. I kept denying this violence on screen. I didn't believe that this violence was "real", or in other words, I couldn't believe this type of violence was filmed and disseminated all over the internet for anyone to access. I didn't watch the full video (thankfully) because I had to turn it off and look up if this was real. And it was. 

The video came from a murder case in 2012 (There's a documentary on Netflix about it called Don't F*ck with Cats). What I remember the most about that whole experience was my reaction because when a murder is shown on screen I always associated it with a "fantasy" or an "aesthetic". I always thought that the two people shown on screen would get up and go back to reality when the director said cut. But seeing the reality of murder, I kept circling around the feeling of disbelief rather than instant disgust. How then does this recording of real violence affect the viewer?

Another interesting point about that shocker video is the killer himself was so obsessed with films about killers (films like, American Psycho 2000) that he himself staged his murder like the one seen in Basic Instinct 1992. This then puts into question yet again, does the fantasy of violence physically manifested on screen not have a deadly affect on the viewer? I feel like it's rare, but can happen, depending on the viewer, because audiences are made up of individuals that think and experience things differently, they don't act as a collective mass that act under one brain as the idea of an audience perpetuates.