High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [103]
Sometimes the same formula is passed off as something more noble, because of higher production values and more imaginative criminals. The film Silence of the Lambs was one of the great critical successes of our time, and for that reason I felt obliged to see it, even though I hate feeling sick with fear and suspense, and have never understood why I should pay for that sensation when it’s easy enough to come by it for free. But I watched, on a friend’s VCR; got up and left the room every time somebody’s flesh was in danger, which was most of the movie; and afterward felt ripped off. It turns out, I’d rented the convincing illusion of helpless, attractive women being jeopardized, tortured, or dead, for no good reason I could think of after it was over. You may disagree. Obviously most people in the world do. But I’m uncomfortable with the huge popularity of that film. I know, now, I should have stuck with my instincts and skipped it. I felt the way many African Americans probably felt watching the old Star Trek plots in which, any time you saw an anonymous lieutenant in an Afro beaming down to Planet X with the landing party of white guys, you knew somebody was going to bite the dust on Planet X, and you knew who it was going to be. Anyone who complained about that kind of story line, at the time, probably would have seemed overly sensitive. When nobody else can see what’s driving you crazy, it’s easy to feel you’re making it up. Even when you’re not.
When I watch a film whose plot capitalizes on the vulnerability of women to torturers, maimers, rapists, and maniacs, I take it personally. I feel preyed upon. I don’t enjoy sitting through another woman’s misery, even if I keep telling myself that her big problems there are really all just ketchup. It still hurts to watch. For me, a recreation of simple violence has no recreational value. So why would I ever create an act of violence in a novel?
My answer has to do with the fact that I don’t consider a novel to be a purely recreational vehicle. I think of it as an outlet for my despair, my delight, my considered opinions, and all the things that strike me as absolute and essential, worked out in words. When I wrote in my secret yellow notebook, it was not for other people, and I still write for mostly the same private reasons. It’s my principal way of becoming reassured I’m still alive: I have come through this many of my allotted days, watched the passing of life on earth, made something of it and nailed it to the page. Having written, I find I’m often willing to send it on, in case someone else also needs this kind of reassurance. Art is entertainment but it’s also celebration, condolence, exploration, duty, and communion. The artistic consummation of a novel is created by the author and reader together, in an act of joint imagination, and that’s not to be taken lightly.
One of the extremely valuable things to be done with the power of fiction is the connection of events with their consequences. And violence, above all else, is a thing with consequences. The difference between the violence in great novels like War and Peace or Beloved, and the contents of a Slice & Dice movie (or a Slice & Dice book; there are plenty of those) is the matter of context. Occasionally I make the error of seeing an adventure movie that I’ve been assured isn’t violent, and inevitably, throughout the movie people are dying like flies. But like flies they don’t have personalities, they are just there.