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Unforgiven: The Elusive Essence of Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Philip Hanson
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Extract

Our films preserve a record of popular beliefs about the sources of human violence, yet sometimes explain their characters' actions with theories of violence that have been challenged or discarded as untenable. The 1992 film, Basic Instinct, in its title and in its characters' actions embraces Freud's concept of an instinctual link between sexual desire and aggressive violence. In the film the two merge, as in the bedroom scenes between Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, where boundaries between sex and violence blur, or, in the opening scene in which a retired rock star's sexual climax converges with Stone's character murdering him with an ice pick (placing a phallic image side by side with a phallus). Violence, this film tells us, has as its source the same instinctual well as sexual desire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 27 , October 2002 , pp. 595 - 610
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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References

NOTES

1. Potegal, Michael and Knutson, John F., The Dynamics of Aggression (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1994), ix–xiiGoogle Scholar.

2. Goldstein, Jeffrey H., Aggression and Crimes of Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3–4Google Scholar. The recent Colorado high-school massacre has sparked a great deal of dialogue over the genetics of violence. Goldstein attacks genetic theory (as an ultimate explanation) (7–10). See also Powledge, Tabitha M., “Genetics and the Control of Crime,” in Violence in American Society, ed., McGuckin, Frank (New York: H. H. Wilson, 1998), 42–58Google Scholar. More recently, scientists from Celera Genomics and the National Human Genome Research Institute announced they had cracked the genetic code. The continuing difficulty with understanding human violence is reflected in the remarks of Dr. Stephen Moldin, chief of the genetics research branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, who commented on the breakthrough in the genetic code, remarking that explanations of violence, alcoholism, and depression still would result in “the same 100 researchers [being] split into camps, some arguing for hereditary influence, others that evidence for genetic susceptibility is lacking” (quoted on the day of the genetic code announcement in “Most Ills Are a Matter of More Than One Gene,” New York Times, Science Section, vol. 149, no. 51, 432, 06 27, 2000, pp. D1 and D6Google Scholar).

3. Goldstein, , Aggression and Crimes, 74–105Google Scholar.

4. Baumeister, Roy F., Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997), vii, 376–77Google Scholar.

5. Ibid, viii.

6. David Webb Peoples, Unforgiven [screenplay] (North Hollywood: Hollywood Scripts, 1984), 1Google Scholar.

7. Unforgiven, dir. Clint Eastwood, with Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, and Gene Hackman (Warner, 1992).

8. Baumeister, , Evil, 140–141Google Scholar.

9. Peoples, screenplay, 5.

10. Richman, Josh, “Experts Point to Connection Between Alcohol Use, Homicide,” Oakland Tribune, 01 31, 1999, News Section, p. 8Google Scholar.

11. Goldstein, , Aggression and Crimes, 94–95Google Scholar

12. Ibid, 96.

13. Brier, Stephen, ed., Who Built America? (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 2: 114–16, 152–53Google Scholar.

14. The phrase that I have placed in bracketsoccurs in the screenplay, but is omitted from the film.

15. For Sigmund Freud, see Why War? [written with Albert Einstein], (London: Cat, 1934)Google Scholar. See also Farber, M. L., “Psychoanalytic Hypotheses in the Study of War,” Journal of Social Issues 2: 29–35Google Scholar.

16. Peoples, screenplay, 41.

17. Spiegel, John D., “Toward a Collective Theory of Violence,” in Dynamics of Violence, ed. Fawcett, Jan M.D., (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1972), 19Google Scholar.

18. Schickel, Richard, Clint Eastwood: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1996), 458Google Scholar.

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20. Peoples, screenplay, 34.

21. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 3–67Google Scholar.

22. Peoples, screenplay, 66.

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26. Ibid, 286.

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28. For an example of recent work on identity constructions, see the essays in Calhoun, Craig, Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)Google Scholar.

29. Peoples, screenplay, 108.