Regarding Wounded Bodies on the Killing Fields of the Cinema,

Abstract

In her book Trauma Cinema (2005), Janet Walker is primarily interested in films that adopt catastrophe as their subject matter and trauma as their aesthetic in documentary treatments of incest and the Holocaust; but she also examines the classic Hollywood melodrama King’s Row, adapted from a book “spiced with harlots, idiots, nymphomaniacs and homosexuals,” concerning “three fathers who become sexually enamored of their daughters,” as well as “a sadistic doctor who performs unnecessary operations for the gloating pleasure of seeing his patients suffer to the human breaking point, and a whole horde of half-witted, sensual creatures preoccupied with sex” (to quote a contemporary review of the perverse source novel). Walker was especially interested in alterations deemed necessary in order to get the project past the Production Code, which certainly would have prohibited incest. We are interested in later standards that became less stringent in permitting screen representations of sex and violence after such groundbreaking pictures as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, particularly the popular and critical success of Francis Coppola’s The Godfather during the 1970s and its sequel, The Godfather, Part II —both of them brutal films when judged against earlier gangster pictures which, before 1968, could not have been so explicit and graphic. We will also discuss 1970s violence in the context of the Vietnam War—notably Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Born on the 4th of July, in an attempt to explain America’s demonstrable fascination with violence.