Since the 1960s, the society has been submerged in a swirl of violence such as the president assassination, the escalating Vietnam War and a flurry of social disorders accompanied by bloody riots. On the other hand, violence-intensive films began to be unleashed after the dismantling of movies’ traditional self-policing apparatus and the introduction of rating systems. The coincidence of these two trends reflected the audiences’ desire to master their experienced historical traumas through the overexposure of different portrayal of violence. Directors were at the same time driven to untangle the inner core of film violence and explore its social implications, sensuousness, character emotions and romance.

Bonnie and Clyde was one of the first wave films which projected criminal violence wantonly on the screen and in the pursuit of stylish violence, strung sensuousness, romance, and political commentary together. According to J. Hoberman, it “redefined the nature of acceptable on-screen violence” by “encouraging laughing at sadism and murder eventually repels you” and manipulating the audience’s emotion on the once-repugnant violence. Bonnie and Clyde described a pair of young couples determined to embark on a journey of seeking fame by their criminal feats. The sensuousness of criminal violence and their admiration for publicity of romantic violence was their intrinsic motivations. The film began with a scene when Bonnie was frustrated with a permanent restlessness like she was caged in her ordinariness. She looked down from the window without any clothes on and found the Clyde was stealing a car. After a dialogue pervaded with sexual implications, she was charmed by the crimes Clyde had ever done like stealing and armed robbery. Therefore the sexual sensuousness and criminal violence were internally related especially when Bonnie threw her body at Clyde after he successfully burgled a store.

 

There is another scene which related the criminal violence to a compelling desire to rebel and by this revolt to gain fame and celebrity. When Bonnie and Clyde found the house they were sojourning were really peasants’ estate confiscated by the banks in the middle of the Great Depression. Clyde shot his guns to the panel and told the peasants that he robbed banks. Arthur Penn remarked that “It was only a small step for the dislodged farmers and their children to pick up some of the plentiful weapons and turn them against the repositories where they believed the money was” Here the thrill of crimes was added an element of romance and chivalry by representing the common people against the authority.

When Bonnie and Clyde presented violence as a photograph romantic, intricate and sensuous, Deep Red experimented with the visceral experience of violence by forcing the spectators into the picture staring its grotesque face in the eye. Deep Red stood out in the sweep of Italian giallo movies into the Hollywood horror film market and incorporated adeptly the influence of Italian neorealism movement into its finest details. Here violence was morphed into colors, music, psychological traumas in the childhood and tracking motion camera shot identified with the murderer’s perspective. At the time when Hollywood horror movies are mainly bound with themes of vampires, supernatural fantasies and psychopathic murderers, Deep Red represented a brush of fresh air with its styled violence. Kristen compared Deep Red with another film Texas Chainsaw Massacre which as he mentioned was “more of a chore” to watch and monotonous in its violence description. Roger Ebert cited in his essay claimed that this movie got no purpose and was purely designed to terrify the audience. 

Tyson Wils argued that the abundance of suspiciously meaningful pictures and the desire to follow the thread of their interpretation did not offer a neat solution to the crimes encountered by Marcus. This film’s cruelty seems to be in its fierce displacement of characters’ entrenched presumptions. For example, Marcus’ speculation about the lost picture was later found to be a mirror reflecting the murderer’s face. Louis Paul remarked that it “continually teases and bewilders viewers. One never gets to see the face of the true killer until the finale”. Chaos and accidents set the basic tone for this film.

Colors, music and psychic toys were associated with psychological traumas, criminal violence, and blood through a deliberate juxtaposition of these elements. Aaron Smuts claimed that the lullaby plays the role as “transition device serving to cue the entrance for often gruesome acts of bodily violence.” Tyson Wils also argued that the relationship set-up in the opening scene established the red color connotation of violence and murder when Helga Ulman in the middle of explaining her telepathic power, felt the presence of a murderer. The panicked exclamation with a close-up camera shot of her red lip and the red curtains nearly filling the whole screen occupied aggressively the whole screen.

In the end, this aggression of violence was demonstrated by the fusion of the murderer’s perspective and the camera shot and the visceral experience of murder (sticking head out of broken glass, pushing the head into scalding water and bumping teeth against the mantelpiece). Argento said in Dario Argento’s World of Horror “I want the spectator sucked into the scene. I want him to approach objects or people. In the end, it is you, the spectator, who kills or who is murdered.”

 

Deep Red might attain its effect of violence aggression without falling into boredom and monotony like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It, nonetheless, had not reached into the depth of characters like Bonnie and Clyde. It could be called as a stylish overload of sensory violence without its characters’ fully developed.

John Woo’s action movie at the same time tried to contribute its own understanding of violence by aligning the choreographed gun fighting scene with characters’ intimate understanding. Hard Boiled was a low budget movie like Deep Red and Bonnie and Clyde with a budget of 4.5 million dollars which received great appreciation in the US and the United Kingdom.  It incorporated Hong Kong’s prevalent core values like camaraderie of martial art films into a cop-thriller theme and made Hollywood styled violence imbued with character charisma and masculinity intimacy. Scott Tobias argued that “Hard Boiled hits the action beats hard when it gets to them, but invests more thought and energy into character work and genre deconstruction than it tends to get credit for.” The male bonding motif was sufficiently demonstrated in their hospital shoot-out sequence when Tony and Tequila positioned oppositely and exchanged their places to gun down any enemies in their way. Arun Kumar claimed that “As Tony and Tequila run down the hospital corridor, Woo positions them on opposite sides, making them continually cross places to underscore the doubling motif.” The masculinity intimacy was channeled into their collaborating violence against villains. Thus Hard Boiled differed in its distinctive way of portraying righteous violence than Bonnie and Clyde’s aesthetic manner. As John Woo mentioned in his interview, Hard Boiled was rather a tribute to great heroes to cops’ efforts in stamping down villains.

Kory Saxe remarked in his blog that Hard Boiled was John Woo’s last movie before going to Hollywood, and he definitely wanted to leave a deep impression on the audience through this film. Therefore Hard Boiled was also more sophisticated in this expression of violence.

Pulp Fiction is another film about crime stories like Bonnie and Clyde. However, it is pulped and doubling on itself with rough violence. In the atmosphere of sequels and remakes where violence was usually combined with spectacular visual effects, Pulp Fiction, a low budget movie was trying to show the mobility of this film by its imposed meta-violence to its story structure. Roger Ebert claimed that it was constructed in such a non-linear way that the story doubled back on itself and characters popped into each other by a funny coincidence of violence. Vincent and Jules met Wolfe after their accidental killing of their comrades. Vincent and Mia’s story was packed with nerves after he heard the story of a man being dumped from windows for doing foot massages to Mia. Quentin Tarantino in his interview admitted that he wanted to hang out with these characters and saw how their crimes bound them together.

If Hard Boiled, Deep Red, Pulp Fiction and Bonnie and Clyde were all undisguised about their violence expression, then Forrest Gump was more subtle in its burial of violence and meta-violence to the historical reality in a time prevalent with conservative’s desire to exploit the nations’ past. Forrest Gump benefited a lot from technological innovation in its insertion of the historic sequence into film stories as Robert Zemeckis mentioned in his interview.

On the contrary, this technique was not exploited to visual effects but more to the satirical commentary on the trend of historical revisionism. Karen Boyle claimed that “The world will never be the same once you’ve seen it through the eyes of Forrest Gump”. He focused on how Forrest Gump toned down brutality in the “reconstruction of history by picking a simple-minded man as its main character.” The way he told the stories intertwined in the historical fabric impart history a sense of innocence. Vivian Sobchack confirmed that “The film presents the shambles and the horror of our recent American past made harmless and sweet because the protagonist doesn’t understand a moment of any of it.” Joei Conwell mentioned that after Gump was enlisted in the Vietnam War, he took Jenny’s words seriously and ran through the bullets without thinking of his safety. This reflected Gump’s distinctive way of dealing with violent conflicts: running away from bullying, running through college years, Vietnam War and depression of Jenny’s loss.

Bonnie and Clyde aestheticized the violence as sensuous, rebelling and romantic which in the end distanced the audience from the violence itself. Deep Red instead forced the audience to see, to feel and to touch the violence by morphing it into colors, music, psychological associative toys and perspectives. Therefore the personality charm of Bonnie and Clyde would not be seen in Deep Red’s excessive overload of sensory violence. Hard Boiled channeled characters’ emotions into violence while Pulp Fiction experimented with what violence or crimes would do to the stories structures and characters. Forrest Gump was more innovative in its violence to the historical reality.They are all unconventional movies since violence in their eyes ceased to be mere stimulating devices  but a territory to be explored. It seemed as though both directors and the audience began to enter the violence to view its interior possibilities since the 1960s. 

Since the 1960s, violence sloughed off its purpose of pure excitement and began to take the form of art. Only art could minister the cure to people’s past traumas since it permits varied interpretation of violence. There is violence to be admired and in Bonnie and Clyde, violence to be stunned and appreciated in Deep Red and Pulp Fiction, violence to be justified and supported by comraderies in Hard Boiled, and violence to be pondered over in the social context in Forrest Gump.