Savage Pastimes: Entertaining Violence
Toward the end of his 1995 epic Braveheart, Mel Gibson, playing the great Scottish hero William Wallace, finds himself in most unpleasant circumstances: having been beaten and tormented by Edward I’s sneering toadies, he’s stretched out on a rack until his joints begin to pop, then slit like a chicken and beheaded.
He had it easy.
In 1305, the real William Wallace was hanged to the point of unconsciousness, revived, tortured, hanged some more, castrated, gutted, and beheaded, with his body dismembered, dipped in tar, and sent off on tour as a warning to anyone who shared his views. As in Gibson’s movie, noisy crowds gathered to watch the bloodletting. In real life, far from being abashed by what they saw, the onlookers enjoyed the spectacle.
“The bad news,” writes literary scholar Harold Schechter in his book Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment, “is that audiences apparently still enjoy watching other people die in horrible ways. The good news is that we are willing to settle for simulations—and relatively tame ones at that.”
Relatively tame, yes. Braveheart only hinted at most of its truly gruesome possibilities. It earned an R rating nonetheless, the better to shield it from youthful eyes, while Gibson wandered off to contemplate how to be an even more sanguinary filmmaker, returning with his answer in The Passion of the Christ....
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He had it easy.
In 1305, the real William Wallace was hanged to the point of unconsciousness, revived, tortured, hanged some more, castrated, gutted, and beheaded, with his body dismembered, dipped in tar, and sent off on tour as a warning to anyone who shared his views. As in Gibson’s movie, noisy crowds gathered to watch the bloodletting. In real life, far from being abashed by what they saw, the onlookers enjoyed the spectacle.
“The bad news,” writes literary scholar Harold Schechter in his book Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment, “is that audiences apparently still enjoy watching other people die in horrible ways. The good news is that we are willing to settle for simulations—and relatively tame ones at that.”
Relatively tame, yes. Braveheart only hinted at most of its truly gruesome possibilities. It earned an R rating nonetheless, the better to shield it from youthful eyes, while Gibson wandered off to contemplate how to be an even more sanguinary filmmaker, returning with his answer in The Passion of the Christ....