It's hard to say which I think is less bad: stylized violence or realistic violence. I'm going to refer to the Kill Bill films as examples of stylized violence and The Departed as one that has violence that is over the top but still too realistic for me to call it stylized. (Spoiler alert for the movies). Stylized violence exists for the audience to enjoy, where the Bad Guys and Good Guys are clearly delineated. I shied away from watching any Tarantino film for a while because I heard about how violent they were, yet when I finally got around to watching one I found out that I liked them. The story-telling and dialogue are whip-smart, but also the violence is stylized and unrealistic so I could sort of distance myself and remind myself that it was just a movie I was watching. On the other hand you have “The Departed”, which is very much set in the real world, where people get beaten up and shown to be in pain, real pain. The violence is over the top because the situations are over the top, and the violence serves to emphasize just how badass and cold-blooded the characters can get. What’s better: hand to hand violence or gun violence? I could argue that the former is better because it is more real, but then the latter evens the field a little more; you don’t have to be physically fit to shoot someone. But “The Departed” has a lot of non-gun violence in it as well. At the bottom of it, these are action movies—but with great dialogue! In horror movies the whole point is to shock or gross out the audience with stylized violence.
I can’t tolerate horror movies. I know that the kind of violence portrayed in these movies is also very stylized and unrealistic, but I don’t get anything out of watching people get tortured and scream in pain. That kind of violence isn’t warranted, to me; oftentimes it’s senseless killing and there’s nothing that smart or thought-provoking about it...
....now I feel like a heathen and guilty for some reason.
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