On violence

Maybe because I am not a violent person, I like violence in movies and books. Fictitious violence is perhaps an outlet to release accumulated stress and oppression and fear. I can’t go around being rude to people, so I watch and read violence. I demand quality in violence, though. Van Damme or Seagal will just not do, but Tarantino, the obvious name, or Scorsese, or sometimes trashy Schwarzenegger are perfect. There’s a terrifying beauty in Mr. Orange lying almost dead in the most massive pool of blood you’ll ever see only to muster courage to get up slightly to shoot some guy dead, his face white and sickly. And there’s beauty in Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson pointing their guns in perfect synchrony at someone who we know will die.
Violence in language, which is what interest me the most, has the ability of being scarily beautiful as well. I will not mention Tarantino’s dialogues again, because it has become a platitude to point out how well written they are, and that’s probably because it’s true – they are brilliantly written. But a simple dialogue full of cursing and swear words such as the ones you can hear in Goodfellas is just so good you wonder how foul language can render such quality. Joe Pesci, an actor I still love despite the fact that I haven’t heard of him in ages, is the funniest, the most amazing actor delivering the “how am I funny?” lines, and he intersperses everything he says with the rudest swear words I’ve heard. And it’s brilliant and so much better, for example, than a decent, friendly language movie such as Jerry McGuire (first example that came to my mind, I really don’t know why).
Although it may be far-fetched and perhaps exaggerated, I do think that conveying violence in language is almost like poetry. One of the reasons poetry is so overwhelming is because of the work that it demands on language itself. A good poet must really know words – their meaning, their sound, their prosody. And then he must come up with a universal truth, the kind of truth that will make his readers think “That’s exactly it! This is exactly what I’ve been saying for ages!” And then this poet needs to combine his truth with the words he knows so well and only then will he stand a chance of writing mildly decent poetry (I guess that’s why there aren’t many truly good poets around). The same happens with violence, I believe. You cannot just write foul language and expect it to do the job. You can’t just come up with more or less scary threats like “I’m going to burn you alive and kill you” and expect it to be prime literary work. You must know language really well, so well that you can make the ugly words look pretty. And this is a very hard job, because ugly words are meant to be ugly, so anyone that can make them sound nice is really a true connoisseur of the language they speak. That’s why it is so thrilling to hear, for example, “your mother sucks cock in hell” coming from an innocent girl possessed by an evil entity. This is because, albeit the horror of it all, language is being used to its limit. And I guess this is why I like fictional violence.