Grief & Gore
Or how violence can be used for far more than spectacle and nastiness.
The frowned face of the maleficent sorcerer denotes surprise. And fear.
His mortal enemy, a young warrior whose insignificant existence was nothing but an amusement mere minutes before, has become more powerful than he would’ve ever imagined. The sorcerer had murdered his brother years ago, and now the young warrior is driven by an unstoppable desire for revenge. The warrior roars like a lion, concentrating all his strength in a mighty blow. His arms are imbued with supernatural power, orange bolts of lightning that emerge due to the rage in his heart. Fists and lightning impact into the sorcerer’s chest, knocking him off his feet. The sorcerer falls from a balcony, unable to elude his deadly fate: a trap made with a bed of spikes. Impaled by the razor-sharp blades, the evil sorcerer exhales his last breath. From above, the young warrior sees his enemy defeated, with a spike protruding out of his chest.
Then, the sorcerer’s corpse deteriorates incredibly fast, turning into a mummy just before he becomes an explosion of light that engulfs the arena.
There’s no open-wide ripped thorax nor are there guts twisted in a spiral around the spikes. Not even blood coming out of the mortal wound nor forming a pool underneath his dead body.
That’s the climactic fight of Mortal Kombat.
Back in the 90s, the game became an instant classic thanks to its shameless (and at the same time revered) regurgitation of various B-Series movies and action figures’ sources of inspiration. But what nobody could have suspected is how its movie adaptation, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, has now achieved cult status. Even the newest film adaptation takes cues from it and homages its banging main theme. Even the latest entry in the video game saga has paid homage to it. For many, the 1995 film is the best game-to-movie adaptation to this day.
And curious enough it doesn’t have what was precisely the original selling point of the franchise: gore.
I’m sure that this was somewhat a complaint back in the day for those fans who expected a good bloodbath like in the game. And that brought me to the next question:
Why do some audiences crave violence so much in fiction?
We could say violence and media have a long story together. We’ve been drawn to visceral and aggressive scenes from the dawn of times. Bloody battles have been captured in art forms as old as cave paintings or funerary vases. In fact, in Ancient Greece, they even had a specific word — sparagmos — for how an animal or human sacrifice was torn apart in a Dionysian rite.
Centuries later, it’s not that we have changed much with our Call of Duties and our Saws.
In many games, comics, and movies, gore is treated as a playful spectacle and grotesque parody. The more splatter, the better. In games like the aforementioned Mortal Kombat, violence is used to distance itself from other fighting games and arcades, but also as a way to humiliate the rival and as a celebration of our victory. The problem, though, is the law of diminishing returns: every new entry in the saga becomes less and less impactful in its use of gore because the players are increasingly insensitive to it.
How to make the blood and guts matter again?
What Mortal Kombat teaches us is that is all a matter of contrast. You need to stage the violence differently from what you had before if you want it to stand out. However, it also can be of good use when it’s used in limited ways. Many stories are restrained and peaceful… Until they’re not. Blood and gore serve as a signal that punctuates the escalade. That shit has just hit the fan.
You probably know of that little film called Psycho. It still is one hell of a movie, and it’s amazing how it made its most violent scene — one of the most iconic of all time — without gore. Really. If you didn’t know that, go watch it. The knife NEVER touches the woman. And it happens in one of the most simple settings ever: a shower. I talked about how horror is more powerful when it brings the mundane in another of my articles, so maybe you should check that out…
However, you can be affected by blood even when there are buckets of it throughout the story anyway. There’s another video game that repeats the shameless brutality of Mortal Kombat (this time with a subjective POV!) but also integrates it into the narrative with great results.
In Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus — a game that sets you in a post-WWII dystopia in which the Third Reich has conquered the USA — you have a feeling of jubilee every time you exterminate a nazi with a hand ax. Its gunplay is fast and energetic, and every single shot makes your whole body rumble. I don’t think its viscerality is matched by any First Person Shooter out there, honestly. And the game doesn’t stop at that, as it generates a side effect to all that violence: it also makes you wonder if you’re becoming a monster. But even that effect somewhat fades away after several hours of non-stop nazi hunting.
Then, a fascinating change occurs right in the heart of the story.
A moment, not spectacular, not glorified, that made me connect with the main character in a way all the previous shootings and cinematics couldn’t before (somewhat of a SPOILER ahead!): the moment they kill you.
Of course that scene is a plot device. Of course it’s presented in a non-interactive video. And of course you, as a player, are killed (a lot) through the game as it happens with almost every action game in existence. But what set all this apart for me was how, when you become ONE with the main character, when you understand his motivations as well as when you control his god-like fury to annihilate your enemies and you think you are invincible, then the narrative tells you both the hero AND the player that you are not untouchable. It’s not a scene more violent than what you have already seen, but it gets you right in the guts because the game reminds you that violence, even if it’s justifiable, always leaves a mark. And it’s not always the physical mark that leaves a bigger scar on you.
It reminded me a lot of Robocop and its exaggerated use of gore to make it almost a caricature. Its director, Paul Verhoeven, sustained that the more extreme and splashy the violence is depicted, the less you can take it seriously. But in the one scene where the main character is viciously assassinated… it’s too much to handle. Verhoeven wanted a pivotal scene in which the violence was used differently than in the explosive action that is so characteristic of the film. He even compared what occurs to his protagonist to the crucifixion of Christ. He needed it to feel different. So in that scene, there’s more tension, no usage of music, and the cartoon-like splatter is replaced by a more realistic approach. And it’s brutal and terrifying.
And this leads me to talk about one of my favorite shows from in recent years…
On its surface, it’s one of those edgy animated TV series made for “adults” -ahem- which mixes even edgier elements like barbarians, zombies, and dinosaurs. And lots of blood and gore. But the dozens of us (dozens!) who followed Genndy Tartakovsky, one of the most genuine wizards of animation of our time, and were awaiting Primal eagerly, we knew it was not just a show about the glorification of violence or a darker new interpretation of our Saturday morning cartoon of yore.
Although in a way, it’s a lot like that.
Primal delights itself, like Mortal Kombat did, playing with multiple inspirations to achieve an exciting package. The pacing is as kinetic as you could expect from an animated series of around 22 minute long episodes but there’s another element that makes its visual part even more prominent: it’s a show with no dialogue. So — music aside — the animation and the editing carry all the weight of the storytelling. This makes Primal go straight to what we want from this show: adventure, action, cool monsters, great fights, and gallons and gallons of blood.
Or is it?
Don’t get me wrong, Primal has all of those in spades, and then some. But even when its duration or lack of talking characters seem like a limitation or an excuse to indulge in the more awesome elements, the show manages to focus on what really matters: its Themes.
Just from the beginning, Tartakovsky and his team make a declaration of intent when we are witnesses of the first action in the first few seconds of its running time: the killing of a living creature with a spear. This tells us two things right on; first, this violent act is only just an iota of what we’re going to see in the subsequent minutes, and two, the blood-soaked weapon is as much the tool of destruction for the character as it’s an extension of him. Spear — because of course that is how the character is named in the credits — has to face a world dominated by a constant cycle of violence. It’s all about survival. Or so it seems…
Not too long after that first scene, Spear loses almost everything he had in the world except the weapon that gives him his name. It happens in a very cruel and savage way, and all he can do is watch helplessly. And even when his suffering pushes him to a brief attempt at revenge (and suicide — this show is BLEAK), he remembers that is more important to live one more day. And to live, he must kill again; but his survival depends on how he chooses his prey. What appeared to be an exciting, fast-paced, gory entertainment turns into a more reflexive show. The way Primal addresses violence goes from spectacle to trauma to an empty repetitiveness. Spear is left with nothing but loss as the only meaning of his existence. As if life itself was a predator that constantly bites the main character until he’s only a hopeless skeleton. The amazing thing with this show is that what I’m describing here is not the entire season, but the first ten minutes…
After that, is when the story reveals the most important piece of the puzzle.
Spear has an encounter with a big dinosaur not too different from those which tore his life apart. Hungry and desperate, he sees how this thunder lizard snatches his lunch right in front of him. Spear can’t take it anymore and follows the dinosaur to its den just to discover that the giant reptile is a mother trying to feed her two chicks. Before he gets to decide whether to attack or run, Spear and the mother are ambushed by the same vicious pack of dinosaurs that he confronted before, and thus, he’s involved in a scene almost identical to the one that caused his trauma. He’s condemned to relive his pain over and over again. But something has changed: Spear witnesses how ANOTHER character suffers an equal fate. In a kill-or-be-killed world, for the first time, he puts himself in the shoes (paws) of the Other. And this is the start of a powerful bond between two characters, different and the same, that choose to be together to face the constant hardships of life. They both grieve, but they have each other.
It’s only fitting that this show is called Primal. It is aggressive and blunt, but also incredibly honest.
For years there has been much ado about how violent media can be damaging or how it can desensitize us; however, the question should never be about violence itself, but how it’s used. The context is everything. In stories like Primal, Robocop, or Wolfenstein II, violence gains thematic relevance. They demonstrate that gore and bloodshed can be used in funny and de-stressing ways, but then they go further and make violent portrayals meaningful. And if it’s articulated in the right way, violence becomes cathartic. Characters that have to go through a painful experience make us feel connected to them — we empathize with them — but it’s also a powerful tool for learning.
These kinds of stories show us how we can, if not overcome pain, at least make it more bearable when we can’t avoid it. That and how to understand others as much as ourselves when they are hurt.
After all, “if you prick us, do we not bleed?”.
