On Violence in Cinema

With a dearth of scripted television, the only respite from the onslaught of reality programming are the obituaries of actors who passed away years ago. In its obituary of Gregory Peck, who passed away in 2003, The New York Times recounted a 1989 speech in which Peck warned of the perils of centralized media ownership. Accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute 19 years ago, Peck observed:

If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more.

Apparently, Peck was no fan of the Die Hard trilogy. Now, separate and apart from his fears of media concentration, does Peck make a more general point? Are the mind-numbingly formulaic action flicks with their half-baked quips transforming the movie-going public into vile vulgarians? Is Hollywood devilishly lowering our standards year by year so that we come to expect less and less from their products? [An aside: Have you noticed how vulgar teen comedies have become in the last decade? Compare 1980s flicks like The Breakfast Club to more recent releases, like the Scary Movie flicks and Not Another Teen Movie, both of which feature almost astonishing levels of profanity and innuendo. This is evolution?]

Now compare Peck's rhetoric to the acerbic statements of filmmaker Tim McCann, whose scathing diagnosis of Hollywood (originally published in Film Threat) made the rounds on these, our Internets, several years ago and near the time of Peck's death:

There will never be absolute integrity in the [film] business. But never before has there been such a rash of s--t films, and a void of meaningful American work, that has seen the theatre screen, as there has been over the last ten years. At least when your kid is sent to school and fed McDonald's or whatever sugar water and fried lard they serve him at lunch, you know the government has issued limits on the amount of feces that is allowable in his food. Using that as a parallel, there are no equivalent limits for the cultural s--t we are being poisoned with these days. Considering how many brilliant and talented people there are in this country, it's a scandal.

There have, of course, always been bad movies, but they have become the rule, rather than the exception to the rule. For every stellar film, like 2006's Once, 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2000's Requiem for a Dream, and High Fidelity, we must suffer through a dozen or so variations of The Runaway Bride or You've Got Mail, both of which were recooked versions of Pretty Woman and Sleepless in Seattle, respectively. Who is to blame? Are the actors and directors simply unable to tell that a project is awful at the script stage, or do they not care in the least so long as the paycheck arrives? The Hollywood purveyors of such nonsense, or the movie-going public which shells out the cash for movie tickets and DVDs?

Batman, the Joker, and Francis Bacon's Figure with Meat

"I kinda like this one, Bob. Leave it," The Joker (Jack Nicholson), to Bob the Goon (Tracey Walter), choosing to spare one particularly gruesome painting after a mad spree of defacing works of art at the Gotham City museum, as Prince's "Partyman" plays on a thug's boombox, during a famous sequence in Batman, the 1989 film directed by Tim Burton.

That painting was by Francis Bacon and titled Figure with Meat, which is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. On this work, the website of the Institute notes:

Permeated by tormented visions of humanity, Francis Bacon’s paintings embody the ethos of the postwar era. Beginning in the late 1940s, Bacon created a series of works modeled on Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1649/50), in which he transformed the celebrated masterpiece into grotesque, almost nightmarish compositions. In this version, he replaced the noble drapery framing the central figure with two sides of beef, directly quoting Rembrandt van Rijn and Chaim Soutine’s haunting images of raw meat. By linking the pope with these carcasses, Bacon allowed the viewer to interpret the pope alternately as a depraved butcher, or as a victim like the slaughtered animal hanging behind him.

(Internal links added). No wonder the Joker saved the painting from destruction.

Inspired to paint by Picasso, Bacon was a painter of grisly images. How to describe his ouevre? Writes Steven Litt of the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "His paintings of screaming popes and caged businessmen - icons of the modern age - seem to flay the skin off their subjects and mold flesh like raw clay. His portraits lacerate foreheads, crush cheekbones, warp eyes and lips out of alignment and transform torsos and limbs into pretzels of twisted meat."

Figure with Meat, painted in 1954, has been called a "notorious riff" on Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X.¹ Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel offers a bit more detailed analysis of the work, its homage to Velasquez, and its depiction of the pope:

Bacon appropriated the famous portrait, with its subject, enthroned and draped in satins and lace, his stare stern and full of authority.

In Bacon's version, animal carcasses hang at the pope's back, creating a raw and disturbing Crucifixion-like composition.

The pope's hands, elegant and poised in Velázquez's version, are rough hewn and gripping the church's seat of authority in apparent terror.

His mouth is held in a scream and black striations drip down from the pope's nose to his neck. It's as if Bacon picked up a wide house painting brush and brutishly dragged it over the face.

The fresh meat recalls the lavish arrangements of fruits, meats and confections in 17th-century vanitas paintings, which usually carried subtle moralizing messages about the impermanence of life and the spiritual dangers of sensual pleasures. Sometimes, the food itself showed signs of being overripe or spoiled, to make the point.

Bacon weds the imagery of salvation, worldly decadence, power and carnal sensuality, and he contrasts those things with his own far more palpable and existential view of damnation.²

In sum, the painting "exhibit[s] Bacon's fascination with the screaming mouth set against a gray face that seems to be in the later stages of necrosis, with wrinkly eyes peering out helplessly from behind a mask of decaying, translucent flesh."³ Litt, in the piece linked above, observes that Figure with Meat is "less an assault on Catholicism per se than an image of an authority figure reduced to utter anguish and helplessness."⁴

See for yourself (and click upon the image to enlarge it):

The painting with which Bacon became so enthralled, Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, is below (and can be clicked upon for a larger image):

Figure with Meat recently toured a number of museums as a part of the "Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s" exhibit (more about which can be found here and here). In fact, a television advertisement for the exhibit survives on the YouTubes and can be seen here:


The Joker defaced a number of paintings in that sequence (though I've been unable to locate an online listing thereof), but he did append his signature to one work for good measure:

Figure with Meat has drawn a number of blog and Usenet comments over the years (mostly prompted by its appearance in Batman, including some such posts here, here, here, here, and here. It seems that Tim Burton can be thanked for generating some level of interest in Bacon among those previously unaware of his work or existence. So, last but not least, behold the sequence from Batman featuring Nicholson, Kim Basinger, and various members of the supporting cast that inspired all of those inquiries about the Bacon painting:


1. Dorothy Shinn, "85 Drawings at Oberlin Mark Ohio Son's Return; Jim Dine's Portraits, Figure Studies and Pastels in 40 year span on Display," Akron Beacon Journal, June 26, 2005.
2. Mary Louise Schumacher, "Screaming in Paint," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, January 27, 2007.
3. Colin Dabkowski, "The dark side: An Albright-Knox exhibit of Francis Bacon's paintings provide a chilling study of the violence that seemed unending in the 20th century," Buffalo News, May 8, 2007.