Tuesday, 11. September 2007
pornography of violence
As two cars crash into each other on the highway, in the darkness of the night dismembered body parts of young, tall, beautiful ladies, like broken Barbie dolls, fall out through the broken windows or melt into a unitary lump of blood, flesh and metal. In his latest movie “Death Proof” Quentin Tarantino transgresses the furthest boundaries of his otherwise already sophisticated aesthetics of killing, where usually the rivals at least used to bow to each other. Whereas in “Planet Terror” Robert Rodriguez depicts how a small number of ideal superheroes, as if descended out of a comics book, fights with the expanding masses of humans turned into monsters as they are infected by a biochemical weapon.
The name of the project that Rodriguez and Tarantino co-authored – “Grindhouse” – comes from movie theatres, widespread in the United States, that show low budget category B films, attracting prurient viewers by the excessive depiction of redundant violence, forbidden sex, chaos, rebellions, monsters and drugs. It is a parody, which many leave with a feeling of strength as in the end evil is defeated. But that is only a movie. There are places in the world, where violence and paranoia are daily experiences. And these are not necessarily war zones. The worst is that once you step into such a land, the same weird feeling of voyeurism overcomes you as if you had just entered a movie theater showing a film of pornographic violence.
Tarantino could have vacation in Guatemala, where, even though the civil war ended eleven years ago, experiments with people equal to or even exceed the very fragile boundaries of death aesthetics in the movie industry. A couple of years ago Amnesty International made a press release when the authorities found what was left of the body once known as Maria Isabel: her hands and legs were tied with barbed wire, she had been raped, stabbed and strangled, her face disfigured from beating, the whole body covered with small holes, a rope around her neck, nails bent back. They never found her killers. Some years later Cristina Hernandez, forced into a car near her house, and hopelessly chased by her father, was found shot four times and all bitten.
In similar uncanny ways thousands of women have been tortured, raped and killed in Guatemala over the last few years. Why? During dinner in Zone 7 Rafael, who quit working for the municipality after his files have been stolen, told me about the gangs, tracing their origins in L.A. and other U.S. cities, their brutal inner-wars, the fate of their girlfriends in case of betrayal or jealousy, family vendettas, when they keep killing the women in the family of the indebted man until he returns the money. Finally, some victims are accidental, as one private interpreter recalls, because when a new member is initiated into a gang, he has to kill whoever they encounter first and in late evenings it is usually single women coming home from work through the dark streets of the slums that they meet. Unable to find definite data, sociologists explain the phenomenon by reducing it to the discontent of the macho society as daughters, sisters, wives and mothers independently climb up the social ladder...
Rodriguez would also have something to admire in Guatemala. The fear of violence, turned into paranoia, is ever-present in the capital, divided into twenty-five zones. The rich and the visitors live in private compounds outside of the city or in Zona Viva (“live zone”), where the streets between the hotels, restaurants and bars are patrolled by gunmen with carbines, where most buildings, even their inner yards, cultural and health institutions, are surrounded by a concrete wall with barbed wire fence on the top and armed guards at the gates. It is a ghetto city, divided no longer by ethnic, but by social boundaries: the walls and the fence are expensive. If today someone was to paint Guatemala City, most likely it would resemble the triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, entitled “Hay Wain” (1485-1490): there and then the avarice of mundane wealth lead people to madness, discord, deception, violence, murder; here and now burglars and rapists climb over the walls into the houses of those that have more, destroying everything on their way.
According to the results of a survey, that were announced in August 2007 and printed on the front page of “Siglo XXI”, 93.1 percent of Guatemalans are very concerned with the safety of themselves and their families. Those living in the capital often talk of the “banalizzacione di violencia”, or trivialization of violence, as it appears to be an inseparable part of everyday life. While we were tasting “Gallo” in the street just outside the fortified Universidad Landivar, a girl ran past us, grabbed her umbrella and pointed it as a gun towards her mother. A perfect pose, no reflection. But is reflection possible at all where violence is so endemic? 64.1 percent of the inhabitants claim that they or someone close to them have been victims of a crime; 23.6 percent choose not to leave home at night.
Scars are not the only form in which violence is imprinted on the bodies of the torturing and the tortured. Tattoos of black tears on the face count the dead loved ones; black crosses mark the killed ones. Following the ancient principle of lex talionis, or “an eye for an eye”, immortalized in the Code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, no longer exposing their tears and crosses in the public, but hiding them on their hands or legs members of gangs don’t ask for the intervention by the corrupt and incompetent police. Away from the city, in rural areas, not receiving attention from the authorities local crowds lynch whomever they perceive as a criminal.
However, such society with a face, distorted by injustice, inequality, violence, appeals to the outsider, as if he entered the same cheap film, insanely stuffed with the scenes of killing and sex. Then in every passerby in the streets of Guatemala City you start recognizing the fear, which filled the eyes of the running hero in Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” as the Maya civilization was collapsing. Paranoia, sleepless fear that lingers in the air, danger, endemic, vulgarized violence. And poverty. Brazilians can’t stop laughing at tourists coming to Rio de Janeiro and willing to visit the infamous favelas, controlled by drug gangs; that is, leave the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema and see the purportedly authentic, because hidden, local life, advertised by CNN and BBC news reports on the problems of “developing” “Third World” countries.
So the lens of the camera is looking for, finds and catches homeless mothers surrounded by hungry children begging for cash on the sidewalks, toothless tramp preparing dinner in a metal bin by the highway, a dozen or two men crowded in the truck on their way to work in the mines. And then – run. Reality, authentic being is recorded and eternalized in the photograph. It is dangerous to stay because angry “models” can rebel and channel their fury towards the fancy digital toy and its owner. Hungry and dirty, like the monsters in Rodriguez’s movie, the “authentic” locals attack. The tourist, who provoked them by looking for real, unmediated experiences, even if robbed or beaten up, is happy to come home and tell stories of a wild and dangerous land he got out of.
Such perverse indulging in social inequality, poverty, violence and other troubles of men is usually denied and disguised by the Marxist slogans of solidarity with the suffering people, often written on the T-shirt just below the portrait of the Argentinean revolutionary. The voyeur is caught onto his own hook as the victims of his lens are suffering twice from the same hand, which first brought racist government, uncontrollable neoliberalism and illnesses, and now broadens his mind and enriches his experiences by the apocalyptic sight of their consequences.
If Tarantino and Rodriguez are mocking cheap movies, intended to satisfy the lusts of violence and sex, therefore, are adding a new layer of meaning to the superficial fiction on the screen and so are creating a point of reference for reflection, the pornography of violence as a searched-for authentic experience in Bronx, Kosovo, Belfast, Mexico, Beirut, Detroit and anywhere else, where there are beaten, starving, naked, armed, scarred, angry, lame, begging for a pittance, confirms the insurmountable wall between the viewer and the object of his malaise-seeking sight. The glass wall of the lens is not a mirror, therefore, in the postcards from exotic places we only see dark smiling kids waiving their hands at us. I am not there, because to be close to them is too demanding. I am not there, because I am not reflecting it. I am not there, because for me it is enough to quote what has already been said by the enemies of America and the capitalist world. And nothing more? On the wall of an expensive colonial restaurant in the former capital of the Spanish colonies one can read: Unos nacieron para moler y otros para ser molidos (“Some were born to crush and some to be crushed”).
More photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/ieva.jusionyte/DiezDiasEnGuatemala
The name of the project that Rodriguez and Tarantino co-authored – “Grindhouse” – comes from movie theatres, widespread in the United States, that show low budget category B films, attracting prurient viewers by the excessive depiction of redundant violence, forbidden sex, chaos, rebellions, monsters and drugs. It is a parody, which many leave with a feeling of strength as in the end evil is defeated. But that is only a movie. There are places in the world, where violence and paranoia are daily experiences. And these are not necessarily war zones. The worst is that once you step into such a land, the same weird feeling of voyeurism overcomes you as if you had just entered a movie theater showing a film of pornographic violence.
Tarantino could have vacation in Guatemala, where, even though the civil war ended eleven years ago, experiments with people equal to or even exceed the very fragile boundaries of death aesthetics in the movie industry. A couple of years ago Amnesty International made a press release when the authorities found what was left of the body once known as Maria Isabel: her hands and legs were tied with barbed wire, she had been raped, stabbed and strangled, her face disfigured from beating, the whole body covered with small holes, a rope around her neck, nails bent back. They never found her killers. Some years later Cristina Hernandez, forced into a car near her house, and hopelessly chased by her father, was found shot four times and all bitten.
In similar uncanny ways thousands of women have been tortured, raped and killed in Guatemala over the last few years. Why? During dinner in Zone 7 Rafael, who quit working for the municipality after his files have been stolen, told me about the gangs, tracing their origins in L.A. and other U.S. cities, their brutal inner-wars, the fate of their girlfriends in case of betrayal or jealousy, family vendettas, when they keep killing the women in the family of the indebted man until he returns the money. Finally, some victims are accidental, as one private interpreter recalls, because when a new member is initiated into a gang, he has to kill whoever they encounter first and in late evenings it is usually single women coming home from work through the dark streets of the slums that they meet. Unable to find definite data, sociologists explain the phenomenon by reducing it to the discontent of the macho society as daughters, sisters, wives and mothers independently climb up the social ladder...
Rodriguez would also have something to admire in Guatemala. The fear of violence, turned into paranoia, is ever-present in the capital, divided into twenty-five zones. The rich and the visitors live in private compounds outside of the city or in Zona Viva (“live zone”), where the streets between the hotels, restaurants and bars are patrolled by gunmen with carbines, where most buildings, even their inner yards, cultural and health institutions, are surrounded by a concrete wall with barbed wire fence on the top and armed guards at the gates. It is a ghetto city, divided no longer by ethnic, but by social boundaries: the walls and the fence are expensive. If today someone was to paint Guatemala City, most likely it would resemble the triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, entitled “Hay Wain” (1485-1490): there and then the avarice of mundane wealth lead people to madness, discord, deception, violence, murder; here and now burglars and rapists climb over the walls into the houses of those that have more, destroying everything on their way.
According to the results of a survey, that were announced in August 2007 and printed on the front page of “Siglo XXI”, 93.1 percent of Guatemalans are very concerned with the safety of themselves and their families. Those living in the capital often talk of the “banalizzacione di violencia”, or trivialization of violence, as it appears to be an inseparable part of everyday life. While we were tasting “Gallo” in the street just outside the fortified Universidad Landivar, a girl ran past us, grabbed her umbrella and pointed it as a gun towards her mother. A perfect pose, no reflection. But is reflection possible at all where violence is so endemic? 64.1 percent of the inhabitants claim that they or someone close to them have been victims of a crime; 23.6 percent choose not to leave home at night.
Scars are not the only form in which violence is imprinted on the bodies of the torturing and the tortured. Tattoos of black tears on the face count the dead loved ones; black crosses mark the killed ones. Following the ancient principle of lex talionis, or “an eye for an eye”, immortalized in the Code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, no longer exposing their tears and crosses in the public, but hiding them on their hands or legs members of gangs don’t ask for the intervention by the corrupt and incompetent police. Away from the city, in rural areas, not receiving attention from the authorities local crowds lynch whomever they perceive as a criminal.
However, such society with a face, distorted by injustice, inequality, violence, appeals to the outsider, as if he entered the same cheap film, insanely stuffed with the scenes of killing and sex. Then in every passerby in the streets of Guatemala City you start recognizing the fear, which filled the eyes of the running hero in Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” as the Maya civilization was collapsing. Paranoia, sleepless fear that lingers in the air, danger, endemic, vulgarized violence. And poverty. Brazilians can’t stop laughing at tourists coming to Rio de Janeiro and willing to visit the infamous favelas, controlled by drug gangs; that is, leave the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema and see the purportedly authentic, because hidden, local life, advertised by CNN and BBC news reports on the problems of “developing” “Third World” countries.
So the lens of the camera is looking for, finds and catches homeless mothers surrounded by hungry children begging for cash on the sidewalks, toothless tramp preparing dinner in a metal bin by the highway, a dozen or two men crowded in the truck on their way to work in the mines. And then – run. Reality, authentic being is recorded and eternalized in the photograph. It is dangerous to stay because angry “models” can rebel and channel their fury towards the fancy digital toy and its owner. Hungry and dirty, like the monsters in Rodriguez’s movie, the “authentic” locals attack. The tourist, who provoked them by looking for real, unmediated experiences, even if robbed or beaten up, is happy to come home and tell stories of a wild and dangerous land he got out of.
Such perverse indulging in social inequality, poverty, violence and other troubles of men is usually denied and disguised by the Marxist slogans of solidarity with the suffering people, often written on the T-shirt just below the portrait of the Argentinean revolutionary. The voyeur is caught onto his own hook as the victims of his lens are suffering twice from the same hand, which first brought racist government, uncontrollable neoliberalism and illnesses, and now broadens his mind and enriches his experiences by the apocalyptic sight of their consequences.
If Tarantino and Rodriguez are mocking cheap movies, intended to satisfy the lusts of violence and sex, therefore, are adding a new layer of meaning to the superficial fiction on the screen and so are creating a point of reference for reflection, the pornography of violence as a searched-for authentic experience in Bronx, Kosovo, Belfast, Mexico, Beirut, Detroit and anywhere else, where there are beaten, starving, naked, armed, scarred, angry, lame, begging for a pittance, confirms the insurmountable wall between the viewer and the object of his malaise-seeking sight. The glass wall of the lens is not a mirror, therefore, in the postcards from exotic places we only see dark smiling kids waiving their hands at us. I am not there, because to be close to them is too demanding. I am not there, because I am not reflecting it. I am not there, because for me it is enough to quote what has already been said by the enemies of America and the capitalist world. And nothing more? On the wall of an expensive colonial restaurant in the former capital of the Spanish colonies one can read: Unos nacieron para moler y otros para ser molidos (“Some were born to crush and some to be crushed”).
More photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/ieva.jusionyte/DiezDiasEnGuatemala
ieva jusionyte, 22:52h
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