writing in the dust

We watch as the Driver stamps, time and again, on the skull of a villain in an elevator; but what exactly are we watching, as the camera rests, for a second, on the mashed-up result? Prosthetics, pixellation, pastry dough? The people around me reacted with the eewrrgh sound that has become de rigueur in the viewing of violence, followed by the traditional hasty giggle to pop the tension; even those moviegoers who revel in such a sight, however, might usefully pause to inspect the kick of pleasure that it provokes. No doubt they will have seen much worse, and they will also know that a bursting brain is no more real than a game of Quidditch, yet what perturbs me about a film as careful and as intelligent as “Drive” is its manifest delusion that, in refusing to look away from the minutiae of nastiness, it is actually drawing us closer to the truth about pain.

Anthony Lane on Drive. I finally got around to watching Drive last night. It was riveting, the cinematography was darkly gorgeous, and Gosling and Mulligan played their roles with just the right notes of understatement. In spite of all that, though, I’m with Lane. The — repeated, relentless — portrayal of violence in this movie didn’t finally tell the truth about pain.

Lane’s been harping on this point for years now — the way certain films help us know “everything about violence and nothing about suffering” — and I just think he’s right about that. There’s a difference between depicting cruelty and illuminating the mystery of human anguish. Or as Lane puts it in his review of Watchmen, there’s a difference between “pompous grabs at horror” and a grasp of “what genuine, unhyped suffering might be like, [and] what pity should attend it.” The latter is ennobling; the former — although Lane probably wouldn’t put it this way — is depraved.