Violence incorporated: John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the uses of gratuitous violence in popular narrative

The current public discussion of media violence is shaped by two fundamental assumptions. One supposes that representations of violence reflect the steadily rising level of violence in society, while the other assumes that representations either cause or at least significantly contribute to the increase of violence. According to the latter position, which is gaining popularity to the extent that it can distance itself from simplistic models of cause and effect, violence proliferates in the media because it follows the logic of incremental competitive growth. In other words, there is a steady increase in the relative degree of explicitness of violent representations because authors and distributors, in competing for audience attention in an increasingly saturated and differentiated mediascape, keep upping the ante. Desensitized by constant exposure to images that leave little to the imagination, audiences will only return if they are given more of the thrills they crave. And it is violence, which provides these thrills. Hence, more violence means more thrills and higher returns at the box office or ratings at the Nielsen's. Producers blame consumers and vice versa, as the boundary of what can and cannot be shown continues to advance, to the detriment of society. Or so the story goes.2

Whether we allow representations of violence to proliferate or whether we devise strategies for containing or controlling them is of course a matter of economic and political consideration. Since the participants in the discussion often pursue goals that go further than simply setting the boundaries of what can be shown or seen, much of the discussion rests on assumptions which, by and large, remain unexamined. How, for example, do we know exactly what a thrill is and what provides it? The answer to this question is often treated as a foregone conclusion.Violence, some will say, is the surest way to thrills. It constitutes the lowest common denominator for a mass market audience, as much as this audience may otherwise be divided by social class, race, gender, or subcultural affiliation. Once we all agree on the problematic assumption that violence holds a universal appeal, public discussion can focus at best on whether the reasons for our fascination with violence are culturally specific or not, whether we learn to enjoy representations of violence or whether we follow innate appetites. Often, the discussion ends there.

Meanwhile, developments in the media marketplace appear to call into question the argument about universal predilections for violence. Aided and encouraged to develop a distinct sense of identity, different segments of a mass audience are capable of asserting their own unique cultural agenda in an increasingly more complex and differentiated media landscape. Providers who want to survive in this landscape must become more receptive and responsive to smaller demographic entities as these entities proliferate and their buying power increases. For example, television cable channels have abandoned blanket assumptions about universal imagery and receptivity. Their appeal to more highly differentiated viewer preferences, endorsed by precisely circumscribed target audiences, undermines a simple model of mainstream versus margin.While network television, once upon a time, may have provided the grounds for such a model, the current media landscape appears more as a field with multiple centers. Andrew Ross has suggested, however, that the increasingly fine distinctions among demographic microcommunities in the marketplace "actually lend themselves to further extensions of social control" (1989, 188). As "consumer capitalism draws [a profit] from ever finer discriminations between social and [for example] sexual identities," these distinctions create categories which, in turn, influence and potentially limit the range and nature of individual experience. The argument of"giving the consumers what they want, and what they demand," and the concomitant argument regarding the inevitable incremental increase of violence, is one of the ways in which, according to Ross, the diversified marketplace reveals itself as not that diversified after all.

Obviously, what an essay of this length cannot accomplish is to critique the "supply and demand" model of violence on all fronts of popular culture. What I aim to do, therefore, is to intervene on the microscopic level, tracing the rules of discourse regarding the representation of physical violence in a specific text and then drawing conclusions from this example regarding the larger cultural discourses surrounding it.These rules will become most clearly visible, not so much when they are functioning with inconspicuous smoothness, unchallenged and self-effacingly, but rather at the moment of scandal when they are called into question, subverted, violated, or broken. What I will attempt then is a reading of a text, associated with excessive and gratuitous violence, derived from a genre associated with excessive and gratuitous violence-John McNaughton's controversial serial killer film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990).