Images of blood in American cinema: the tingler to The wild bunch

173 Pages·2016·0.95 MB·English

by  Rødje, Kjetil

IMAGES OF BLOOD IN AMERICAN CINEMA
Images of Blood in American Cinema
The Tingler to The Wild Bunch
KJETIL RØDJE
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright © Kjetil Rødje 2015
Kjetil Rødje has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
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Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Rødje, Kjetil.
Images of blood in American cinema : The tingler to The wild bunch / by Kjetil Rødje.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-3672-6 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-3155-8785-1 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-
3171-1877-0 (epub) 1. Blood in motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1995.9.B6R63 2015
791.43'6561–dc23
2014048306
ISBN 9781472436726 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315587851 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN 9781317118770 (ebk-ePUB)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Feast is On
Introduction
1 Blood Enters the Frame: Exploitations and Attractions in the 1950s
2 Blood and Guts in the Early Gore Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis
3 Blood Assemblages
4 Blood in the 1960s: Bonnie and Clyde
5 Blood and Chaos in The Wild Bunch
An End
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Not a drop of blood was spilt in the making of this book; this is not least thanks to the support I
have encountered along the path towards its final completion. My biggest thanks go to Kirsten
McAllister, Jan Marontate and Adam Frank who, besides being wonderful people, have
offered comments and guidance while setting standards that have motivated my work in the
best possible sense. Much welcome advice and feedback at various stages has been offered by
Steven Shaviro, Sean McAlister, Patricia MacCormack, and Arild Fetveit. Laura Marks
deserves extra credit for her enthusiasm about the manuscript and for her invaluable comments.
I am most grateful to you all.
Heartfelt thanks to all my colleagues, students and friends at Simon Fraser University and
the University of Copenhagen. I would also like to express my gratitude to the very
professional and accommodating administrative staff members at both universities. At the
Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles I was met with the utmost assistance from a very
friendly staff. Especially, I’d like to thank Research Archivist Barbara Hall for welcoming me
to study the library’s collections and for providing me with guidance in my searches.
Ashgate Senior Commissioning Editor Claire Jarvis has provided invaluable belief in this
book project. I could not have wished for better support throughout the publishing process.
Without the patience, love, spirit, and understanding of Nina Boulus-Rødje this book would
have been far more difficult to complete. Julian Boulus-Rødje has been less patient but
nonetheless a great source of inspiration.
Prologue
The Feast is On
John Wayne is the sheriff; Dean Martin is ‘Dude,’ his deputy. They chase a bad guy who has
just shot and killed a man—a friend of the sheriff. It’s after dark, so they don’t have a clear
view of the killer as he flees. Dude fires a shot after him but is unsure whether he has hit his
target. The killer escapes into a nearby saloon that is frequented by his gang. Inside, Dude lines
up the gang members patronizing the saloon but the killer is nowhere to be seen. Dude stands
by the bar, being mocked by the bandits, when suddenly he notices something red dripping into
a glass of beer on the counter. It’s blood; someone hiding above the bar is bleeding. Dude
quickly turns and fires his gun at a figure above the bar. The killer falls dead to the floor
below. His blood gave him away.
The movie is Rio Bravo (1959). In total, somewhere between 15 and 20 characters are
killed during the film;1 with the exception of the incident described above, they all drop dead
with a single gunshot. These killings are clean; no blood is seen; no pain is expressed. The
blood dripping into the beer in the saloon is not repulsive. Neither the characters in the film
nor audience members watching the film are made to respond viscerally to the red fluid. The
blood serves a specific function within the film’s plot-line: it provides clues that connect cause
and effect. It serves as a sign that ties previous incidents—an escaped killer hiding above the
bar—to the next set of actions. Dude instantly realizes that the blood is coming from the
wounded bandit hiding above him and then shoots him dead.
Another movie: a woman enters a nondescript room, turns on the radio and starts
undressing. The radio broadcasts an alert about a killer on the loose. The woman steps into the
bathtub and relaxes in the water. A threatening shadow looms above her. She panics, and then
is stabbed repeatedly. We see the glaring eyes of the mad killer as he chops away at her body,
tearing it apart and ripping out shreds of flesh. He stabs one of her eyes out, and proceeds to
sever her leg, before leaving her dead in the bathtub—naked and dismembered. Next follows a
cut to a shot of the figure of a sphinx against a bright blue backdrop. Letters in red emerge over
the sphinx, spelling out the film’s title, Blood Feast. The red letters start dripping, as if the title
is oozing blood. We are witnessing the opening sequence of the 1963’s Blood Feast—a movie
that presented blood and gore on screen in an unprecedented manner. Blood Feast is structured
around a series of graphic scenes displaying women being chopped into pieces, ripped apart
and flogged. Blood flows freely in all the scenes of slaughter.
The two scenes described above can be seen as indicative of a shift happening during the
1960s with regard to the portrayal of blood in American cinema. The examples from Rio
Bravo and Blood Feast illustrate how one visual element, a red fluid, can serve fundamentally
different functions within a motion picture. In Rio Bravo the blood answers questions like,
“Was the killer hit?” and “Where is he?” The blood provides clues and drives the plot
forward. Not so in Blood Feast. Here the blood does not provide any answers regarding what
will happen next. In this film, the blood is mainly operating on a visceral level, addressing the
viewer directly and evoking embodied responses.
Rio Bravo invites the viewer into a diegetic universe, where we interpret signs and connect
the different elements in an unfolding plot of cause and effect. What we take from these signs is
reinvested into the images. The blood may invoke a response from us, which encourages us to
further engage in the film’s characters and plot. In Blood Feast, on the other hand, no such
engagement is encouraged. In this film blood and gore are put on display, but not necessarily
integrated into the narrative of the film. As we take in the gory sights we are not invited to
empathize or become more involved in the film’s characters. Likewise, the excessive gore is
not something that connects elements of the film’s plot. It is displayed as if for our eyes only, as
a spectacle.
In terms of the film’s plot, blood and gore do not have a clearly defined role in Blood
Feast. The story unfolds regardless of how the slaughters are portrayed. The blood in Blood
Feast is a surplus, exceeding its narrative function. It does not appear to have any signifying or
symbolic value. The blood here operates in a performative role. It reaches out towards the
audience in an exhibitionistic manner. The viewers are affected, and reactions unfold. The
blood is primarily something to be experienced and sensed, rather than interpreted. These
aspects of sensation and affect are what Blood Feast brings to the forefront, in an excessive
manner.
In the pages that follow I will argue that both blood itself, when used as a visual element in
a film, and the effects of blood images in their encounters with viewers, can be understood as a
process and a multiplicity. Blood makes a difference when it appears in a film. These
differences cannot be traced back to any single or uniform characteristic but are rather
distributed across transient sets of relations that in various combinations perform the effects of
blood.
This book will explore how these processes are enacted across a series of American films
from the late 1950s to the end of the 1960s—an era marking a fundamental shift in the portrayal
of violence and bloodshed in cinema. I will map out a trajectory that delineates how these new
blood images came into being and will seek to analyze how these processes and transient sets
of relations carry differing potentials with regard to how blood images connect with, and
affect, their audiences.
1 Since most of the killings take place during a chaotic gun battle towards the end of the movie, an exact number cannot be
given.
Introduction
Blood, seemingly all of a sudden, became much more visible in American cinema in the 1960s
(Horsley 1999; Prince 2000a; 2003; Slocum 2001; 2004; Sobchack 2000). During the era of
the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, riots and student demonstrations, changes also
occurred in American motion pictures. Among these changes was the sudden prominence of
blood.
Landmark movies of the 1960s include Psycho (1960), which constituted “new ways of
seeing, and new ways of feeling, films” (Williams 2000, 351), putting thrills and visceral
sensations to the forefront, best exemplified by the well-known shower scene where Marion
Crane (Janet Leigh) is killed with a knife and blood is shown running down the drain. A few
years later, more explicit bloodshed was presented in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a film that
“choreographed a dance out of blood and death” (Sobchack 2000, 114) and that arguably
introduced violence as a “thing-in-itself” in Hollywood cinema (Prince 2003, 30). Towards
the end of the decade the ultraviolent western The Wild Bunch (1969) was released, a film
whose unprecedented bloodletting proved immensely influential and arguably set the standard
for depictions of violence in later American cinema (Cook 1999; Prince 1998; 1999a).
This turn towards more explicit bloodshed was even more prominent in productions outside
of the Hollywood circuit. In the late 1950s more sensational images of blood and gore could
be found in low-budget movies, influenced by the success of the British Hammer horror films
(McCarty 1984; McKay 2007). This trend escalated in the 1960s and in 1963 the independent
micro-budget production Blood Feast was released. This film is recognized as the first ever
“splatter movie” (Crane 2004; Dixon 2010, 124; McCarty 1984), the horror sub-genre whose
audience appeal is characterized by the explicit presentation of gore images (McCarty 1984).
This eruption of graphic bloodshed in the 1960s was the culmination of a long development
in the depiction of violence in American cinema (Cook 1999; Prince 2003). As Vivian
Sobchack (2000) recalls, even though violence and death have always been part of the movie-
going experience, blood was previously absent. Earlier movies could be brutal and violent
deeds did occur but these acts were portrayed without emphasizing the explicit impact of
violence on the human body (Prince 2003). When blood did appear, its main role was to
provide information, not to evoke visceral reactions in audiences. In films like Rio Bravo,
blood was not presented as horrific or repulsive, nor was it highly stylized and aesthetically
affective. But then in the 1960s, seemingly all of a sudden, blood came to take on these
qualities. This shift wasn’t simply a matter of blood being made more visible; the blood
impacted audiences differently. It did something to you, in ways that differed from the earlier
displays of blood.
This shift in the appearance and portrayal of blood in American motion pictures is the topic
of this book. I will explore what happened, how it happened, and how these new blood images
operate within the films, and towards their viewers. Starting from the early emergence of
sensational blood images in films such as The Return of Dracula (1958) and The Tingler