Making it
Explicit
A bit of delayed New Year’s cleaning-up, this: a post I began
before Christmas, prompting by seeing Sightseers. The most interesting feature of a
worth-catching-though-not-mind-blowing film was the violence, or to be more precise
the ways violence was used. A great deal of time is spent building tension as what
Tina and Chris are what they will do, interspersed with a few brief but
surprisingly graphic depictions of murderous carnage and its aftermath.
I understand that these shots are important to the aesthetic of
the film, both as nods to British horror and slasher films, and as providing
Tina and Chris with an unpleasant verisimilitude. But, for what it’s worth,
they jarred a little with me. In fact, I felt that they worked against the
building of tension which preceded them in each case – it might have been
better to hold back more, to string us out a little longer by implying rather
than showing what happened. They felt a little cheap – which is not to say they
cheapened the film as a whole.[i]
All of which poses a perhaps unanswerable question – would Sightseers work without these shots? Unanswerable
in that any answer will amount to a subjective judgement and indeed an
expression of personal taste regarding the need for violence in a film partly
about grisly killings. A slightly more interesting question is whether it would
work as a (very black) comedy without explicit violence. I’m inclined to think
it would. The explicit bits aren’t funny in themselves,[ii]
and I don’t think they were needed to bring out the humour. What’s needed is
the contrast between the mundane nature of Tina and Chris’s travels and their
wilfully excessive responses to the irritations they encounter en route; and
this contrast doesn’t require that we actually see what happens.
A possible if slightly random comparison might be with Lena
Dunham’s Girls, celebrated for its
gritty realism and audacity, a large part of which involves some non-Beautiful
People[iii]
having non-stylised sex. This might indicate something about my attitude
towards sex and violence respectively, but I think these scenes matter more to
the success of the show and to its humour. For a start, they tend to be funny in themselves.[iv]
They’re also a good way of getting straight to the key themes of intimacy and
gender identity.
Furthermore – though this is more speculative on my part – it
might just be that relatively explicit sex has a different effect to violence,
particularly when it’s presented in the fairly naturalistic manner of Girls. After all, many of us have had naturalistic
sex with non-Beautiful People, whereas very few of us have seen a murder take
place, let alone carried one out. In the context of a bittersweet contemporary
comedy, the sex still has the power to shock, but it doesn’t feel as though
it’s there for that purpose. Rather, it gives Girls a feeling of emotional honesty we can relate to, and without
which the show would lose much of its charm. Sightseers is honest in its own way about the frustrations of
everyday life, but the violence which results jars any fellow-feeling we might
have for Tina and Chris.
[i]
This isn’t true of all cinematic violence. Sometimes the film requires graphic
and even disturbing images (see A Prophet,
Hidden, and what seems like half the
cinematic output of Korea). None of these, it should be noted, are celebrated
as works of comic genius.
[ii]
With the exception of the episode involving knitting needles, about which I can
say no more.
[iii]
Which is not to say that any of the people involved are ugly. This is
television, after all.
