Embarrassing confession time: I’ve always been a bit of a mess around blood and guts. When I was a teenager, I’d regularly feel light-headed at the sight, or even the description of it. Biology class dissections, history lessons about gruesome forms of capital punishment in the middle ages, a pig-butchering scene in Michael Winterbottom’s otherwise dreary adaptation of Jude the Obscure that we had to watch for an English lit lecture: all would turn me white as a sheet of A4.
In recent years I’ve largely managed to get over my squeamishness around a bit of spilled claret. I’ve had to, frankly, because it’s hard to escape the stuff in popular culture these days. Where full-on, gnarly violence might have once been largely reserved for horror films and extreme cinema, now even our prestige TV can’t resist a bit of it. The biggest show of the last decade, Game of Thrones, was a real gorefest at times, and its follow-up House of the Dragon seems to be on a permanent mission to outdo it. Another series of the moment, the critically acclaimed superhero satire The Boys, has enough exploding heads and severed limbs to eclipse Peter Jackson at his Braindead peak. And the most-watched show of the past few months has been Netflix’s “unwatchably queasy” Jeffrey Dahmer drama.
Brutality has crept into the most unlikely places. I remember a little-seen Daniel Radcliffe/Jon Hamm comedy-drama on Sky Arts (of all places) from a few years back called A Young Doctor’s Notebook that, during its telling of the travails of a green-behind-the-gills medic at a turn of the century Russian hospital, managed to smuggle in the longest, most gruelling amputation scene you’re ever likely to see. And watching the largely cheerful Melissa McCarthy caper Spy on a recent plane journey, I was jolted by some sudden scenes of gleefully unnecessary bloodshed (sorry to any fellow passengers who inadvertently witnessed that).
I was reminded of all this at a preview screening of The Banshees of Inisherin, the new film from Martin McDonagh. Set in the early 1920s on a fictional Irish island unaffected by the civil war consuming the mainland, its stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson (rekindling their double act from another of McDonagh’s films, In Bruges) as former friends locked in an increasingly intense feud.
The Banshees of Inisherin is a fine film – a bit Beckettian, frequently funny but with a sad and sinister undercurrent. It also has some moments of serious gruesomeness. I won’t divulge quite how these moments are gruesome, as they’re pretty central to the very premise of the film, but let’s just say that the BBFC’s warning of injury detail feels like a bit of an understatement. Despite this, the film is garnering Oscar buzz, particularly for Farrell’s performance. The Oscars, once a home for safe middlebrow fare that definitely didn’t feature much violence, seems to be feeling a bit bolder these days – see its embrace of Parasite, a film that in its final act didn’t exactly skimp on gruesomeness.
Perhaps we’ve all lost our squeamishness. I’m not sure a show as brutal as Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story would have garnered such mass, planet-conquering appeal if it was released, say, 30 years ago. Rules around age ratings have softened – the recent Sam Raimi-directed Doctor Strange film managed to sneak some pretty intense stuff into a 12A-rated film – and broadcast TV isn’t as subject to quite as stringent rules.
Let’s not get Mary Whitehouse here: none of this is necessarily a bad thing – ultimately it speaks to a less censorious society. Still, it is striking that this relaxed attitude isn’t extended to sex or swearing; the dreaded NC-17 rating in the US is still handed out for films that show too much of the former (effectively banning them from most cinema chains), and excessive use of the latter (particularly the c-word) is still looked on unfavourably by most ratings boards. In short, it seems getting it on is more taboo than getting your head chopped off.
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