Savage Friday: A Primer on the Savage Cinema

Welcome to "Savage Friday," a new type of post I’ll be running from time-to-time here on the blog. 

The Savage Cinema, as I like to call it, grew out of a film movement that began, arguably with Bonnie and Clyde (1976).  You’ll recall, perhaps, that Arthur Penn movie’s frankness about sex (conveyed in ubiquitous phallic imagery…), as well as the film’s unbelievably bloody and downbeat ending. 

As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, the “New Freedom” arrived in full, and cutting-edge filmmakers began to vet stories -- horror stories, I maintain – about basic human nature. 

In tales of the Savage Cinema, resources are scarce, compromise is impossible, and two “sides” go to war.  The Haves and the Have Nots (The Hills Have Eyes [1977]), the lawful and the unlawful (The Last House on the Left [1972]), the male and female (I Spit on Your Grave [1978]), the liberated and traditional (Straw Dogs [1971]), even city folk and country folk (Deliverance [1972]) find that there’s no room for debate…only bloodshed and hatred.

And in each one of these films, for the most part, there’s an Every Man (or Every Woman) who is drawn or pulled into combat, and must consequently re-evaluate his or her sense of morality to contend with the sudden, often inexplicable outbreak of violence.  That Every Person rises to an unexpected challenge, but also – in some way – succumbs to the basest human instinct: to kill.

In the crucible of (unwanted) combat, the Every Person thoroughly tests him or herself.  Does he or she have what it takes to survive?  Does this character descend, finally, into bloody violence?  And what is the personal, mental, and physical toll of shedding civilization and established norms of morality, even for an instant?   Can you come back from that?  Do you want to come back from that?

Such questions intrigue and fascinate me, perhaps because I have always lived a sheltered and safe life.  I’m a largely risk averse person in terms of my choices and life-style.  I live in a world where there is ample police protection, no military draft, and remarkably little crime. But I admire the Savage Cinema films I’ve mentioned above because they force audiences to ponder, quite frankly: what would I do? 

Even better, these films echo their content to an extreme and remarkably pure degree.  If Savage Cinema film narratives involve shedding the shackles and protections of civilization and the norms of morality, their cinematic, visual approach involves a stylistic corollary: shredding established film decorum and conventions, and going over the edge into transgressive and taboo-breaking territory.

This territory is not for polite company, to be certain.

It’s a place of frequent female and male rape (Deliverance, Straw Dogs, I Spit on Your Grave, Last House), imperiled family members (The Hills Have Eyes, Last House), and brutal violence.  Often that on-screen violence is of an intensely personal and even animalistic nature: A woman bites off a man’s penis in Craven’s Last House.  Similarly, in Straw Dogs, we see a man’s foot blown off (by a stray shot-gun blast) in extreme close-up. 

So yes, these movies are explicit and disturbing, but also courageous in the sense that they follow through on their promise and premise.  Where some people and critics have stated that such films are gratuitously violent, I argue the opposite point.  These films are about violence, and the consequences of violence on families, and civilization as a whole. 

The violence highlighted in films of the Savage Cinema is of a type that makes you wonder about our human nature.  It isn’t depicted as heroic, but rather, in some instances, as necessary and human, but still awful.  If you gaze at the final freeze frame of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, you see a family destroyed by violence.  On the soundtrack, we hear the lyrics “the road leads to nowhere” and that “the castle stays the same.”  In other words, a civilized family has descended to the level of law-breaking criminals, and nothing has been earned or won through that violence.  Retribution or revenge may satisfy blood lust for a moment, but then what do you do – for a lifetime – knowing that you are the same thing, at heart, as the “monster” you slayed?

This is the morally-fascinating territory of the Savage Cinema, and the reason why it boasts artistic worth and social value.  And make no mistake: the genre boasts powerful enemies on both sides of the political spectrum.  Some religious right-wingers decry the violence of the Savage Cinema and want the films banned.  On the left, there some committed feminists who view the films as being overtly anti-woman. 

With respect to both demographics, they aren’t seeing the forest for the trees.  While it’s true that the films are brutal, and that women are among those who suffer in them, it is also true that the violence boasts a moral point, and that men and women are – largely – brutalized equally.  In the Savage Cinema, no one is immune from the human condition.  But it's easy to discern that these films are politically-incorrect and that if you just look at the images (and not the meaning underlying the images), these films appear...incendiary.

Even in terms of horror aficionados, there are those who decry these films.  Savage cinema films lack the "Gothic elegance," we might be told, of an earlier, more dignified generation of genre films.   Again, that's true from a certain perspective.  The horror in these films is more direct -- and blunt -- than we might be accustomed to if we grew up with Universal or Hammer.   Savage Cinema films arise from a different cinematic aesthetic and tradition than such efforts -- that "New Freedom" of the counter-culture, late 1960s -- and yet they still speak trenchantly and symbolically about the human condition.

We initiate our first Savage Cinema Friday with a look at one of the form’s most notorious and memorable films: John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972)...