Thinking About Violence and Affect in Television and Films: Warning- gory images

The past few weeks I have gotten sucked into bingeing Vikings.
I remember trying to watch it a year or so ago and I just couldn't get into it.

But maybe it's because a friend is working on a chapter about the tattoos in Vikings, or maybe it's because I know actual medievalists work on the Old English and Old Norse, but I started the first episode on Amazon, and have raced my way through to season 4, DVRing season 5 as it's premiered.

I have not always been super attentive when watching. I found myself spacing out in some of the battle scenes. In part, because this type of uber-violence is not something that appeals to me. But I kept noticing that I could not ignore the violence in the show. I could not space out during the fights, the battles.

THE BATTLES ARE THE POINT.

This is not mindless violence. This is not the violence of Watchmen, or Sin City, or Kill Bill, or so many others, where it rarely is part of the narrative and too often seems like just violence for violence's sake. As though all these directors are trying to one up each other to see HOW gory, HOW violent, HOW far they can push it all.

That is what a lighting designer I used to work for calls "artistic masturbation" and it does not appeal to me.
But that is not how the violence in Vikings functions. It is not devoid and separate from the context and the narrative, IT IS the context for the narrative.
Much like the tattoos on the characters show growth and change, advancement, so too do their scars. The violence they live through, or not, defines them, marks their journey. These are not violent events just to showcase special effects, these are glorified versions of their lives.

At the same time that I have been watching Vikings, I had a chapter for an edited collection to write. The chapter analyzes the folkloric devil in The Last Temptation of the Christ and The Passion of the Christ as representative of who was demonized in the culture wars that each represents. My analysis required me to sit down and watch both films, taking detailed notes. Because I started work on this before finishing and submitting the dissertation, then set it aside, I found it a bit hard to come back to this, figure out how to write, how to THINK again.
I think one of the issues I had was that I knew I was going to have to sit down and watch The Passion of the Christ again. And I find it hard.

I love horror films. LOVE them. The gore does not bother me, never has, not even films that fall into the "torture porn" genre.
But I have a really hard time watching Passion. Like want to watch some parts through my fingers, flinch, hard.
It got me thinking about affect theory, and how the film sets up the violence as an experience, that the audience is called to witness the violence.

In the film, it is not the violence that is the point, but the effect it has on the audience as witness

Along with all of these thoughts, about violence as affect, audience as witness, and context, enters my watching Punisher. 

I used to love the character of Frank Castle. The righteous vigilante who sought justice for his family.
I disliked his appearance in Daredevil because that was not Frank Castle. Frank Castle was shown indiscriminately killing and injuring people in the hospital, and that was not the character I knew and loved.
The stand alone series has mostly ignored that, and has stepped away from that, showing more of the Punisher I know.

But as with many things, it's hard to like the Punisher these days.
The comic character is problematic for the way that an ultra-militant, not-legal, segment of the population has embraced him. The character's arc throughout the comic has become more and more problematic, but the fans who have embraced him are downright terrifying.

More and more, we can't separate symbols from the reception, their affect.
We can't claim ignorance of the impact characters, storylines, have on the culture at large.

So I want to like Frank Castle. I want to empathize with his hurt, his loss.
But the show doesn't let you. He is, by his own confession, complicit in the system, even if he didn't want to be.
He is a creation of the military industrial complex, but he doesn't stop, or get out, and he is given numerous chances to do so.

He does at least seem to recognize that the world does not have a place for him, backing off from those identified as "innocents" in the show.

The violence in the show is presented both as inevitable and avoidable. It is over the top, unnecessary, and symbolic of Castle.

It's easy to look away from the violence in Punisher, to look away, to space out. And I would argue that this is the danger of it. It is totally normalizes. We ACCEPT this level of violence from a white, militant man who sees himself as judge, jury, and executioner. 

I have no big insights into any of these.
Rather, these three things, experienced altogether as they were, seemed worth framing together.