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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Ironic Tone Of Voice Unfortunately, Comedic Relief In Action Movies Is Coming From The Extreme Violence

Henry Sheehan The Orange County Register

‘Con Air” is a movie permeated with extreme violence, most of it resulting in horrible death, but all of it meant to be taken lightly.

Just to give an example of its tone, consider one scene in which a convict, part of a gang that has skyjacked a U.S. Marshal Service transport, discovers the plane is taking off without him. He runs out onto the runway, vainly galloping beside the taxiing aircraft, as inside one of his confederates, a rapist who has a grudge against him, looks out at him impassively before giving him the finger. As we look at the desperately running con from inside the plane, he suddenly disappears from view, as if he’s fallen. Later, his mangled body is discovered mashed in the landing gear.

The sequence is shot strictly as comedy: setup, payoff and topper, followed up later with a delayed second payoff. Also, because the victim is a bad guy, it presumably doesn’t matter much what happens to him.

This is now common in big-budget action films: to present as much violence as possible in a way meant to suppress any feelings of sympathy or horror and to elevate whatever comedy is to be had. It has its most recent roots in the wise-guy one-liners that helped propel Arnold Schwarzenegger to fame, notably in the first “Terminator” movie. (You can see early signs of this in the James Bond movies, too, for that matter.) Of course, Arnold was playing an evil robot in that praiseworthy action movie, but no matter; apparently we’re all evil robots now.

Of course, not every depiction of violence has to follow a standard moral code. After all, if you go down that road too far, you end up censoring Bugs Bunny.

Unquestionably, there are legitimate ways of depicting violence, even the large-scale violence of a movie such as “Con Air,” in ways that elicit more laughs than gasps. Those films, which depict other people dying as a result of performing enviably enjoyable, if utterly taboo, acts, deliver vicarious thrills that are both liberating and cautionary.

But those movies tend to work best when they’re set against a larger, diversified cinematic landscape. The problem we have now is that movies such as the “Lethal Weapons,” “Die Hards,” “Batmans,” “The Rock,” and “Con Air” are dominating the action movie market to such an extent (and the action movie is dominating the whole of Hollywood), that this ironic tone of voice is becoming the only way movies can speak about violence. And this is a particularly cheap, a relentlessly adolescent, irony. Under its breath, it’s telling the more mature members of the audience - no matter their age - that their attendance is neither required nor really even desired.

Most people have their first encounter with irony in their adolescence, even if they can’t put a name to it. With the certainties of childhood dashed and the authority of adulthood frustratingly far off, teens and pre-teens are caught in a terrain of shifting realities, particularly the emotional kind. Pithy phrases (“As if,” “Yeah, right”) and sarcasm manage to put up a protective cocoon between what an adolescent might mean and what he or she actually says, so that there is no risk of getting caught up in some embarrassing, uncool conviction.

This is exactly the type of irony that permeates the likes of “Con Air.” For instance, the closest the movie comes to making an affirmative statement about anything is with a stuffed bunny its hero carries through explosions, crashes and gunfire to bring to his little girl. It’s so ridiculous, it can’t be taken seriously, but underneath the smirking, there’s a faint whiff of naked sentimentality.

In other words, “Con Air” can’t make a direct statement about emotional values, and the emotional values it does hint at are of the broadest variety. It can only sidle up to them, ready to slip away if it gets caught looking ridiculous (“You didn’t think we meant the bunny thing seriously, did you?”).

But when you grow up, you begin to prefer direct statements, a preference that may begin the first time you say “I love you” and mean it to someone who is not a blood relation. There’s risk involved, of course, in saying something flatly and plainly, but the daily assumption of that risk is what’s known as maturity. And as you begin to assume that risk, you begin to prefer the company of other people - or movies or books or paintings or songs or whatever - that do it also.

As the room for direct statement narrows in these movies, so does the opportunity for grown-ups to see them. The action filmmakers who can negotiate a compromise between the joking tone and a more serious purpose are few and far between - there’s James Cameron (“True Lies”), Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”) and precious few others.

And speaking of irony, it’s those more sophisticated directors who tend to catch flak for violence. Because Cameron directly addressed the question of why women are treated in such a dehumanized way in action films and Tarantino actually questioned action-movie moral relativism, their movies were heavily criticized for being, respectively, sexist and immoral. But those movies that retreat behind an ironic barrier to artificially downgrade the seriousness of what they’re actually saying seem to get a free pass.

Does any of this matter? Of course. Defenders of the shrug-it-off school of violence usually point out that these movies never motivate any of their audiences to mayhem. But that excuse - “I saw it and I didn’t kill anyone” - depends on as limp an irony as the movies themselves. The problem isn’t the existence of any one or another of these movies, but their proliferation and the way they suck all other forms of life out of Hollywood, the way algae blooms kill off all the other life in a lake. The opportunities to depict the starkest of all dramatic situations - sudden, violent death - are steadily being squeezed into the least satisfactory framework. And the result is an equally steady deterioration in the audience, both in who makes it up and what makes it up.