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| If you haven't seen Seven Psychopaths, for the love of god stop reading and go watch it before continuing. I would feel like a monster if I ruined what I consider to be a cult classic of our generation for you. |
The 2012 film, Seven Psychopaths, is a very interesting film to watch for the first time. The film has one setup, the setup for a typical gangster shootout film with an ensemble of gun wielding maniacs, yet the film has another, more prevalent theme about a writer trying to change the way we watch action movies. To quote Christopher Walken's character, Hans, "it's got layers...like a cake." Seven Psychopaths is reflexive to a point of almost self-parody. It is a house of mirrors. The film features a lead character trying to write a movie called Seven Psychopaths. The director even goes as far as to name this lead character, Marty, after himself, Martin McDonaugh. Marty represents the writer trying to change the system, but not being able to figure out how. In the film, Marty is trying desperately to write an action gangster movie that goes against the tropes. He is sick of these films just perpetuating blood and violence over and over. As he says in the movie, "I don't want this to just be another film about gangsters with guns in their hands,". Yet when he abandons the ideas of blood and violence that these movies have trained him to expect, he is left with nothing. His screenplay stays blank, stuck in writer's block. This idea is much to the content of his friend, Billy, who represents the most common audience member of these kind of action gangster film's, someone who came for the blood and violence and won't be satisfied until he gets what he paid the ticket for, a bloody shootout.
Billy understands what Guy Debord would define as the "society of spectacle." By that I mean that the things that are usually delivered to us in a film are what we would expect, not only as frequent viewers of action gangster films, but as a reflection of our own society. As Debord says, "Understood in it's totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not something added to the real world, not a decorative element so to speak, but it is the very heart of society's real unreality." More than that, these representations of violent society are what sell the ticket. They are used as commodity. Not only is it what we expect in our films, it is what we expect excitement in life to truly be like. Like Billy, we see it as the epitome of living. In the film, (granted, the character is admittedly deranged) Billy expects life to play out just like his favorite action films. Because he's spent his whole life seeing the world mediated though screens, he accepts that the things that he watches are how the world really plays out. Like a puppet master, he goes out of his way to make these falsehoods a reality. And like Debord says, "In a world that society has turned on it's head, truth is a moment of falsehood."
The shootout....as Billy imagines it. The world of screen and the world of physical reality meld.
Martin McDonaugh spends a lot of the movie trying to shine a spotlight on the narrative flaws in action gangster movies perpetuated by the current state of culture. Another way he does this, beyond the aspects of guns and violence, is through the film's hilarious treatment of women.
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| "I didn't mean to be such a fucking bitch!" - Kaya |
A lot of action movies today fail the Bechdel Test horridly. Laura Mulvey talked about this sort of narrative misogyny in her piece, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", where she writes that women in cinema are presented at best, as a plot device, and at worst, and most commonly, as simply a subject of the male gaze. "In a world by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between the active male and the passive female,". Almost every female in the movie of note is presented in a sexually appealing way and then immediately removed from the story. In a lot of films, particularly, as Martin McDonaugh is interested in, in a lot of action gangster films, women are seen as objects, to either be admired or simply mowed down for the advancement of the plot. In Seven Psychopaths, McDonaugh plays this point hilariously. Perhaps poking fun at himself for not having any great female characters in his film, the lead character, Marty, has trouble finding a way to get women involved in his story, as the clip below demonstrates:
Ironically, and self-referentially, the film also features a similar treatment of women (as evidence by the picture a paragraph above of a white-tshirted Abbie Cornish), something McDonaugh purposely includes as an omission in the script. He expects, and depends on us to realize that he is purposely writing terrible female characters into the movie. Every female character in the film (a whopping count of four, one of which is simply named, "The Hooker") only serve to move the plot forward and say next to nothing throughout the film except for the few occasions the play as inconveniences to their male counterparts. And as Mulvey predicted, "The presence of women is an indispensable element of spectacle within a normal film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the narrative development of the storyline". So....she has to die. As most of the women in the film do.
In conclusion, I think that Seven Psychopaths is written in a way that brilliantly sheds light on the culture evident in the things that a lot of us look for when we go to see these action gangster films that Seven Psychopaths tries to emulate. He gives us a film that features characters talking about the common tropes of films, and the movie makes us think that what we are watching is about to walk into those same tropes, and in a lot of cases it does. Toward the end of the film, the lead characters narrowly escape being offed by the gangsters coming after them. As they drive away, Marty goes back to thinking about his movies. In an act of defiance against trope, he suggests that perhaps the movie doesn't need to end in a shootout, but perhaps the film could end with the three friends just going out to the desert, setting up camp, and talking....just talking, until the movie ends. When the characters actually make it out to camp and begin talking, and given the fact that we've been trained, by this point in the film, to recognize the film's own meta-cinematic nature, we think, "Oh, I'll betcha that's what's going to happen." As Heidegger writes, "What draws from us draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it immediately, or at all." Then we are pulled, against what we wanted previously, into wanting a shootout all over again. McDonaugh makes us, once again, victims to our own culture expectation of spectacle. Yet, being aware of it somehow makes it more enjoyable.
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| Spoiler Alert: The film still ends in a shootout. I did warn you to watch the movie first. |
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