by Victor Pryor
Cinapse Pick of the Week
Exactly what it sounds like, the Pick of the Week column is written up by the Cinapse team on rotation, focusing on films that are past the marketing cycle of either their theatrical release or their home video release. So maybe the pick of the week will be only a couple of years old. Or maybe it’ll be a silent film, cult classic, or forgotten gem. Cinapse is all about thoughtfully advocating film, new and old, and celebrating what we love no matter how marketable that may be. So join us as we share about what we’re discovering, and hopefully you’ll find some new films for your watch list, or some new validation that others out there love what you love too! Engage with us in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook! And now, our Cinapse Pick Of The Week…
The first vision of humanity that we see in Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of MacBeth is the aftermath of a bloody battle. Corpses are strewn everywhere, and there is no sense of victory, only resignation.
A half-dead man crawls through the mud and the muck, but… towards what? Escape? Hope?
And a servant of the Good King, with the everyday elan of a man filling out a bank deposit slip, bashes his brains in with a flail.
In roughly one minute of screen time, we have essentially learned everything there is to know about the world of MacBeth.
And, worse, maybe our world as well.
Polanski lets loose a primal scream of anger and doom at the universe, and the universe responds in the only way it can:
Well… yeah. But what did you expect?
Just as the story of MacBeth has gone from history to mythology thanks to the pen of William Shakespeare, the story of Polanski’s MacBeth has become a legend all its own. The first film he made after the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by Charles Manson and his crew, it is perhaps the most nihilistic version of the tragedy put to film. Which is rather saying something.
Presuming as I do that you’ve all taken high school English, let’s skip the plot summary and get down to the matter at hand:
This is the most violent movie I’ve ever seen.
Not the most graphic. Not the goriest.
The most violent.
Now, what does that even mean?
It’s a fool’s game to speak in universals, but perhaps we can extrapolate from personal remembrance.
When I was young, it was all gore, all the time. The bloodier, the better. Many, many critics and theoreticians have mused on the cathartic properties of violence. No less an authority that Quentin Tarantino himself often extols the inherent beauty of cinematic bloodshed.
The reptile brain does backflips when the hiss-worthy villain takes two to the temple. We fight the urge to stand up and cheer when that ass-hat frat guy gets the knockout punch he’s been angling for ever since he started bullying our hero. And by golly, I’m not sure I’m on board with the politics, but it sure was neat when that promiscuous teenage girl got her head cut off, wasn’t it? But in recent years, I’ve started to feel the weight of that violence.
Death is everywhere in our media. Movies, television, music. It becomes white noise, a way to move the story along. People are no longer victims, they’re dots on a flow chart. And because we’re soaking in it, we don’t realize how much this normalizes the idea of violence, of murder.
We think it’s clean, somehow. Rational. That there’s some kind of logic to it, that it can fit inside the narrative boxes we build for ourselves every day in order to make sense of the world.
Polanski rips the scales from our eyes and forces us to accept what we steadfastly refuse to accept. That there’s no such thing as justified violence, that death never makes sense, and is never fair, never balanced.
We are not safe because we are good.
We’re safe only because nothing has happened to us yet.
Which, in the end, is the true nature of body horror: it’s not the new flesh, it’s the old one. An uncaring universe, a force beyond all reason and comprehension put hope and dreams and ambitions into our frail little bodies and turned us loose to hurt one another.
In the end, we are all meat.
Every death here is meaningless, as is every victory. And the soldiers on the field know this all too well. But, perversely, there’s a certain tranquility in that.
Instead, pity the poor kings and lords of the royal court, who operate under the delusion that it might someday end. That all this fighting might actually lead to something other than more fighting. That their status means anything at all at the end of a blade.
So the madness of MacBeth is the madness of all kings: the belief that power will protect them.
That being king somehow means he’s not meat like the rest of us.
Flesh abounds in this version, from the coven of naked witches, to the deathless Lady MacBeth monologue, performed by a nude Francesca Annis.
This could be titillation, but it’s just more fragility.
Weak mind, weak flesh; the song doesn’t ever change.
I call MacBeth the most violent movie I’ve ever seen because violence is baked into it’s very DNA. Every line of dialogue, every camera angle, every piece of set dressing… all of it is infused with the specter of murder. Many movies have been violent, and many other movies have had death on the brain. But no other movie has been as resigned to the idea that it’s not death itself that’s inevitable; it’s slaughter.
Those you love. Those you hate. Total strangers. And eventually, you.
All of them will be washed away in a sea of blood.
Plan accordingly.
