thumpa thumpa

My wife and I like to watch TV in a large black leather chair. It's not quite a double, but big enough for a cozy squeeze. We were into the second season of AMC's Breaking Bad -- brilliant, nasty fun -- when the episode called "Grilled" came up. I won't tell you what goes on, because getting there is considerably more than half the fun, but suffice to say a very, very unpleasant character finally gets his in a suitably unpleasant and deeply satisfying way. ("Let him bleed," is what's said afterward.) It doesn't happen quickly, but then again nothing in Breaking Bad does. It may be one of the most glacially paced all-stops-out TV crime thrillers ever, but make no mistake: when it comes to thrills, Breaking Bad kicks like the methamphetamines the show's lead character cooks.

"Wow, you must have really enjoyed that," my wife, who had been leaning against me, said when it was over. "Your heart was racing."

It was. And this is nothing new. My reaction to movies, at least of a certain kind, has always been as much physical as emotional or intellectual: my heart pumps, my body shifts, my limbs twitch. Sometimes, during an especially satisfying fistfight -- as in, say, the climactic bare-knuckle brawl of Walter Hill's Hard Times (1975, seen at age 17), my own clenched fists move in a kind of dopey mirror pantomime.

(Only boxing has ever a similarly limb-twitching effect, and then only boxing practiced by Muhammad Ali during the '70s. Never before and not since. I'm still working on that one.)

I can't help this. Pure motor response. But I do know one thing. Nothing will get the body going in unconscious response to what's on screen quite like a particular kind of violence. Note I did not say violence, for it isn't all violence that sets the kettle a-boil. In fact, most violence passes by me with all the impact of scenery flashing by through a car window, with no more discernible impact than the vague subliminal thump of Lady Gaga on a shopping mall muzak playlist.

What does the trick is payback. The kind of violence which is perpetrated on somebody who themselves have perpetrated unspeakable acts of cruelty, torture and gratuitous bodily harm, and who finally get what's coming to them in a suitably gruesome, elaborate, meticulous and ritualistically drawn-out fashion. This is what pulls my body into the act.

I wish I could remember more specific scenes than I currently do, but hopefully a generic description will suffice at least to let you click to what I'm talking about. It's a scene where the protagonist finally, after a number of failed near-attempts and near fatal encounters, turns the tables on the psycho-killing, puppy-torturing, sexually-sadistic, shit-eating grinning and usually under-shaved antagonist and makes him suffer a little dose of his own medicine before drawing last breath. And sometimes it is just a tiny dose, just enough so that the bastard knows he's fully aware of the fact he's being cooked before the job is done.

It's a scene you'll see in quite a few crime movies, especially if they feature Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood, a fair number of horror movies -- although, for some reason, these never jazz me the way other payback scenes do -- and it's pretty much a hot-branded staple of the western.

Revenge is the western's primary source of narrative horsepower (more, much more, on that in future posts), and it's never sweeter than when perpetrated under a big sky on someone who kicks up a cloud of dust as they go down. But sweet and satisfying it must be, because that's a sign that a western has done it's job: it has not only justified the act of violence but made it necessary to satisfying narrative closure. It's made you root for it, and it has successfully convinced you that the only reasonable way of settling things is by righteously kicking some  high holy ass.

Could part of this be sexual? Jesus, it probably is, but I wouldn't want to go to far with that. Because I do believe that it truly is cathartic, and therefore probably usefully so. What I get is a sense of release during these sequences, and this is what, if they're working properly, they're engineered to do: to open the valve that has been slowly tightened for the preceding ninety or one-hundred some minutes, and release with a long sigh of escaping tension -- or bursting hiss of psychic steam -- the deliberately compressed emotional material built up so methodically in the process of getting there. Come to think of it, a cigarette would sometimes be nice under the circumstances.

(A thought. You know what would have made Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ an immensely more fun, satisfying and, dare I say it, honest movie?: if Jesus had rolled away that stone after three days and gone to beat holy crap out of a Roman legion or two: "I'll be right up, Dad. But first I've got some business to take care of..." I mean, you just know Mel's got that movie in him.)

But then it's done for me. I don't walk out into the streets spoiling for a fight or ready to pile heaping servings of whup-ass on anyone, and I never have. If anything, I'm as conflict-averse as a monk (although motivated less by religious principle than sheer cowardice), and a truly do believe that ultimately revenge is not only pointless but poisonous. The desire for it pollutes the soul and saps it of spirit, and usually produces nothing more effectively than its own blowback. In life, and eye for an eye just ends in blindness.

But on screen? It's the best. Thrilling, satisfying, stirring and almost transcendentally transporting. And physical. It gets my body going. So call it what you will: sick, sad, dubious, disturbing, or just plain weird, but there it is. There may be nothing I enjoy more, on the sheer level of vicarious joy, than seeing somebody deserving get theirs. This is probably why I have an unusually overdeveloped appreciation of Charles Bronson movies, and why the western has held me in thrall for so long: it takes me to the frontier of my civility, where the wild things are only the desires dare to go. However, it is probably a good thing that I never got into video games. My heart probably would've given out years ago.