Thursday, February 4, 2010
Scarface
The thing that I found really interesting and ironic about Scarface and other movies made at this time is that despite all the violence restrictions, they were disturbingly violent. Because of these resrictions, they are violent in a different way movies are now. Movies now show gore and violence, but when it is shown it seems so much more real and terrible. In old movies like Scarface, killing is such a casual thing and that's what's so disturbing about it. I noticed that in the movie, Tony whistled a happy tune right before he was going to kill someone. I found this really disturbing because it just showed that to him, murder was just any other everyday task like laundry. A lot of times when he killed people I wasn't even sure what he was killing them for, especially the ten minute long scene of him doing a million drive by shootings and killing tons of guys. To me this casual view of murdering anyone for any reason is rediculously violent, no matter if the killer and the victim are in the same shot or one of the other silly violence guidelines they had.
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Lauren, I'd agree with what you're saying here. The violence shown in the drive-by shootings seems almost random, with anonymous victims.
ReplyDeleteI was struck by this also, but given my many years of studying older film (massive sarcasm here), I believe I have a plausible reason. By having the violence seem like an everyday task, a chore, "taking out the laundry," -- it makes it less brutal and gory, it desensitizes the audience cleverly; the same way that Tony and his ilk are indifferent to the task, and I think that could be seen as a message.
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