A harder job is to figure out why it is done. Perhaps the creator's actual purpose is not so important as the effect it has on the audience. But second-guessing of the creator's motives is always going to go on, and cues in the work may push the audience one way or another. If we just discuss effects, we avoid the tricky problem of the author's intention - is it wish fulfillment? moralization? sheer desire to disturb? - and also confront the possibility that the work might have unintended effects on any given audience.
Effects of isolated shock include:
* Contrast. At the most basic artistic level, the shocking element provides the goal of an investigation or adventure. It gives a dramatic, attention-catching payoff of surprise. In an interactive medium, it can also give clarity to a muddled situation - this thing is clearly an abomination, it needs to go!
* Demonization. A point is taken about things linked to the abomination - sex is bad, drugs are bad, religion is bad. Sometimes, in slippery-slope logic, the greater evil is a stand-in for some lesser form of deviance like homosexuality, race (or racism), unbelief. Sympathies are with the normal community trying to root it out, and if they're oblivious, this just makes a more effective call to arms for the crusade.
* Hypocrisy-bashing. The take-home message here: apparently normal society shares essential traits with the abomination it's so horrified with, maybe to the point of being more monstrous than the monster. This can be done savagely, by making the monster-haters ugly and brutal, or gently, by emphasizing the humanity of the apparent monstrosity. A related theme is to satirize conformist efforts to keep up normal appearances and ignore the monstrous, as in Jaws and many other films.
When shock becomes pervasive, this can convey:
* Existential stress. A "world gone mad" has an artistic effect of unhinging the audience, creating an atmosphere of constant and pervasive threat to one's values and assumptions. Note the difference with contrast. There, the viewer and protagonists have a solid ground and safe space to retreat to, whereas here, both of them are marooned in an existentially hostile world where rules of sex, rules for bodies, rules for eating are profoundly and disturbingly different.
* Dystopia. Endemic wrongness is often taken as the bottom splashdown of the slippery slope, calling out an evil in the world not by isolating it, but by imagining it taken to the farthest extreme. "If you let men marry men, pretty soon, incest and bestiality will not only be acceptable but fashionable!" "The logical consequence of sexism is the owning of women as property!" A fairly standard character in dystopia (as in Brave New World or 1984) is the one character who for some reason is "old-fashioned" and stands in for the audience's sensibilities.
* Relativism. Just as isolated shock has culturally conformist and nonconformist interpretations, so does pervasive shock. The nonconformist version of dystopia leads to a questioning of the very basis of taboos we take for granted, through one of two means. Either the taboo-breakers are portrayed sympathetically ( for example, Donald Kingsbury's SF novel Courtship Rite depicts a harsh, protein-poor planet where cannibalism is normal and institutionalized), or the reader's society is contrasted against the transgressive one in an unflattering light ( for example, Piers Anthony's short story "In The Barn," where an explorer of alternate universes finds one in which humans, lobotomized from birth, are used for meat and milk, and reflects on what an explorer from another universe might think of our own treatment of animals.)
Finally, there are two reactions which have been presumed in both of these genres of shock.
* Wish-fulfillment. Based on the assumption that each taboo covers a deep dark desire, one presumed intention or effect of portraying shocking things is the vicarious service of such desires, both in the author and the audience. Undoubtedly this is the case for some, but how much we really want to break taboos may be overstated. The possibility of wish-fulfillment, though, does make for some good hypocrisy-bashing and relativism aimed at the audience itself. Nobody who's seen Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds can escape its point that the Nazis cheering the imaginary violence at their film premiere are uncomfortably mirrored by the audience cheering the imaginary violence against the self-same Nazis.
* Desensitization. This is less of a goal for authors, than an unintended side-effect. The Technicolor gore of 1978's Dawn of the Dead now looks laughable and primitive; pornography has ritualized a certain kind of sex so much that the only way to shock people now is to present sexual bodies that are hairy, lumpy and ugly. Desensitization has been a concern of regulators and moralists for a long time, exemplified most tellingly in the strictures of the Comics Code of the mid-20th century, which required not just that evil be punished but that it not be depicted overly graphically. This assumes only thing keeping us away from committing vile sins ourselves is innate revulsion, which can be desensitized by repeated exposure, much as medical students get used to the feel of cadavers.
Well, that's quite a scheme there. I'll let that sit, and pick up again with the ways these categories can be applied to confrontations with the past.
"This assumes only thing keeping us away from committing vile sins ourselves is innate revulsion"
ReplyDeleteRevulsion is certainly a factor in deterrence - the Nazis created the gas chambers because they were worried about their soldiers being traumatised carrying out mass executions. There are many reports of Nazis, even Himmler, who had no moral objections to the killing but would vomit when confronted with it.
Likewise, after WW2 the US military discovered that many soldiers refused to kill; their training was not psychologically preparing them to kill, especially fellow whites like the Germans who looked a lot like them. Training was adapted to eg use lifelike targets and otherwise help normalise killing.
Funnily enough I'm currently reading Anthony Beevor's new history of the Second World War, and this comes up a lot in that book; I hadn't realised that the gas chambers were in large part a reaction to the fact that mass-murder by shooting took such a psychological toll on the murderers. It should be obvious, of course, but I think it jars with the cultural myth that has developed about ordinary German of that era.
DeleteHowever, I've also heard that the research which indicated that "many solders refused to kill" has been thoroughly debunked - apparently most soldiers quite readily killed their opposition when they got the chance, even when untrained. I think anecdotal evidence actually suggests that the greener the troops are, the more likely they are to kill prisoners, civilians, etc.
In any case, from what I've read (and I'm a bit of a WWII history buff), it's very difficult to generalise about human responses to war. That always has to be the caveat with this kind of thing.
One way is to contrast the taboo-breaking to a recognizable version of our normal reality. The other is to have it as a norm in the setting - a whole world gone horribly or gloriously mad.
ReplyDeleteUseful, perhaps, in the context of RPGs, to compare with the "points of darkness" (horror, Cthulhu, etc) and the "points of light" (D&D, post-apocalyptic, etc) setting styles.
"However, I've also heard that the research which indicated that "many solders refused to kill" has been thoroughly debunked - apparently most soldiers quite readily killed their opposition when they got the chance, even when untrained. I think anecdotal evidence actually suggests that the greener the troops are, the more likely they are to kill prisoners, civilians, etc. "
ReplyDeleteIt can both be true that green troops are more likely to kill prisoners & civilians, and also true that most soldiers did not 'fire for effect' in the European theatre - evidence from the Pacific theatre and Vietnam was AIR that around 80% would fire for effect, compared to 20% in Europe.
But I think the biggest factor in combat effectiveness is willingness to shoot at guys who are shooting at you; fire suppression is the dominant element in modern small-unit tactics.
Those Pacific theater stats are interesting, any source for that? Would seem to advertise the effectiveness of campaigns of racial dehumanization.
DeleteI knew I'd read somewhere that there was a lot of skepticism about Marshall (the researcher who gave that 20% figure). I remember now it was in John Keegan's book The Face of Battle - he talks about how those figures are impossible to verify, but it seems the vast majority of American troops certainly fired their weapons at the enemy in WWII. Most of the time this was in the general direction of the enemy, because of the nature of warfare at the time, but it certainly doesn't suggest an unwillingness to kill. It's worth remembering that in WWII (even more so now) artillery and air attack were vastly more deadly in terms of combatants killed than rifle fire was. As the old war gamers at my local club put it, "Artillery kills things, infantry takes their stuff".
DeleteThere is also a suggestion the "only 20% fired for effect" figure has been conflated with the notion that only around 20% of an infantry division would see combat if no reserves were committed. (I wonder if you could bring Pareto into that: 20% of men do 80% of the fighting?)
The Pacific Theatre was certainly more of a war of extermination than Western Europe, akin to the Eastern Front. American troops would routinely kill Japanese prisoners. I think there is a lot of research waiting to be done into the myth that ordinary Japanese soldiers would rather die than surrender - I suspect that was a partial concoction to cloak the regular massacre of Japanese troops who surrendered. That's partially a hunch. I do know that Niall Ferguson has done a lot of research in the area, though.
I've read The Face of Battle, great book but that inspired me to read a whole bunch of Keegan's books. But there's no evidence in there debunking Marshall.
DeleteOn the Pacific Theatre - again, it can both be true that the Japanese told their soldiers not to surrender, believing it dishonourable, AND that the Americans routinely killed captured Japanese. One reason they routinely killed captured Japanese was hearing about what the Japanese did to Allied prisoners!
I may be misremembering. In any case it's not so much that there is evidence debunking Marshall, it's really an argument against his methods - there is absolutely no way that the 20% figure could possibly be knowable, because nobody has access to the information: how could anybody know with any accuracy how many troops "fired for effect" versus just blazing away at random? It's a guess, and most likely a biased guess like guesses always are.
DeleteIt is possible for both those things to be true, sure, but the popular myth is that the Japanese always fought to the death. My suspicion is that considerable numbers did surrender but were massacred routinely, and the myth about Japanese soldiers never surrendering was a convenient cloak for that. As I say, I have no real evidence for that and it's just a hunch.
I don't doubt that a lot of prisoner killings were motivated by revenge. But I think we've lost sight of how much this was a war of extermination on both sides in the East. On the 9th of March the USAF deliberately killed, at a conservative estimate, 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo. This is rarely even remembered nowadays, much less taught in schools. And it was just one night.
"USAAF", not "USAF", obviously.
Delete