{"id":10271,"date":"2018-09-25T12:30:05","date_gmt":"2018-09-25T16:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=10271"},"modified":"2019-01-12T14:42:25","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T19:42:25","slug":"jeremy-saulniers-history-of-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/jeremy-saulniers-history-of-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeremy Saulnier’s History of Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Saulnier knows violence. The director of Hold the Dark<\/i> (arriving on Netflix this week) makes movies filled with brutal, intense fights and attacks. And they aren\u2019t the sanitized action sequences of blockbuster superhero or sci-fi movies, nor are they the often cartoonish, over-the-top gory moments in horror movies, which can end up ridiculous and laughable. The violence in Saulnier\u2019s movies is sickening and real, with unpleasant, messy effects. It\u2019s often practiced by people who have no idea what they\u2019re doing, making the injuries they inflict even more dangerous and painful. Saulnier never looks away from those injuries, never letting his audience forget what the cost of violence actually is.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>That doesn\u2019t mean the violence can\u2019t still be queasily funny at times. Saulnier\u2019s debut feature, Murder Party<\/i><\/strong> (2007), could be categorized as a horror-comedy, and its protagonist, Chris (Chris Sharp), is a hapless loser who literally follows an invitation to get murdered. The lonely civil servant finds that invitation lying on the ground of his New York City neighborhood on Halloween night, and with nothing else to do, he fashions a sad-looking knight costume out of cardboard boxes and heads to a creepy abandoned warehouse for a \u201cmurder party.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, things do not work out well for Chris, although he\u2019s more resourceful than his initial presentation would suggest. He shares that in common with the unassuming protagonists of Saulnier\u2019s other films, from the homeless drifter of 2013\u2019s Blue Ruin<\/i> to the snide young punk rockers of 2015\u2019s Green Room<\/i>. It helps that Chris\u2019 antagonists are just as clueless as he is. The group of pretentious NYC artists has decided that they can make their names via an \u201cart project\u201d that involves murdering a random civilian and staging his dead body in some sort of creative way.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, none of them can agree on how exactly to, er, execute their artistic vision, and they spend more time bickering among themselves than they do preparing to kill Chris. Eventually, there\u2019s as much violence among the artists as there is against Chris, especially once their would-be benefactor (Sandy Barnett), who claims to control hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money, shows up to pit them against each other. Some of the deaths are quick, and some are drawn-out and painful, but they\u2019re all gruesome and unwelcome, no matter how much these pseudo-intellectuals think they understand what it takes to kill.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Murder Party<\/i> co-stars Macon Blair as one of the artists, and Blair has become Saulnier\u2019s most important collaborator over the course of his four feature films. After the freewheeling absurdity of Murder Party<\/i>, Saulnier and Blair teamed up again for a much more somber \u2014 but no less savage \u2014 revenge thriller, Blue Ruin<\/i><\/strong>, which became the breakout film for both of them. Blair plays Dwight, who\u2019s introduced as a heavily bearded vagrant living out of his car, sneaking a bath at a suburban home while the owners are away. Like Murder Party<\/i>\u2019s Chris, Dwight seems mild and even lost, but when he finds out that the man convicted of murdering his parents has been released from prison, he focuses all his energy on enacting vengeance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, he doesn\u2019t have the first clue how to do that, and his initial efforts to obtain a gun go comically wrong. He ends up stabbing his target in the side of the head, watching as blood gushes from the man\u2019s skull (a very similar stabbing occurs, with similar results, in Green Room<\/i>), and having gotten his ostensible revenge surprisingly quickly, is left not knowing what to do next. Saulnier, however, knows exactly what to do next, and he puts Dwight through the punishing aftermath of his revenge (which is completed within the first 20 minutes of the movie), as the ugly consequences of violence pile up.<\/span><\/p>\n

One new violent act doesn\u2019t make up for the violent act from years ago, of course, and every decision that Dwight makes only takes him further away from being at peace with his parents\u2019 deaths. He only brings other innocent parties (including his sister and his childhood friend) into the cycle of violence, entwining himself further with the family of his parents\u2019 murderer. \u201cSo you\u2019re, like, in it?\u201d his friend asks when Dwight comes to him for help, and that deadpan understatement encapsulates just how all-consuming the mutual quest for vengeance has become.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Blair returns for a supporting role in Green Room<\/i><\/strong>, playing pretty much the only character in that movie who doesn\u2019t commit some horrific act of violence. When the members of the punk rock band The Ain\u2019t Rights come across a murder victim at the remote lodge where they\u2019ve just played a show to a hostile audience full of neo-Nazis, the people who run the club (which is, of course, the front for various criminal enterprises) go into cover-up mode. \u201cWe\u2019re not keeping you. You\u2019re just staying,\u201d Blair\u2019s club manager Gabe tells the band members mildly, as he scrambles to figure out how to contain the situation.<\/span><\/p>\n

If it were up to Gabe, maybe The Ain\u2019t Rights would get to leave, but once quietly menacing owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart) shows up, it\u2019s clear that the situation won\u2019t end in anything but bloodshed. \u201cYou were held here for your own safety,\u201d Darcy tells the band members later, but unlike the explanation from Gabe, it sounds more threatening than reassuring. Trapped in the backstage dressing room where the murder took place, the band members have to improvise a way out, calling on reserves of courage and rage that they never knew they had (or, at least, had previously only channeled into their music).<\/span><\/p>\n

Possibly the nastiest, goriest moment in any of Saulnier\u2019s movies comes when Ain\u2019t Rights bassist and de facto leader Pat (Anton Yelchin) is slashed with blades as he holds his arm through a crack in the room\u2019s door. As he pulls his arm back, his hand hangs off at a nauseating angle, all the more disturbing because it hasn\u2019t been hacked clean off. Pat has no choice but to wrap the hand in duct tape and move on. Like all of Saulnier\u2019s unlikely protagonists, he faces unimaginable violence with a combination of stoicism and bemused disbelief. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s what bullets do,\u201d Ben tells Dwight in Blue Ruin<\/i> after obliterating the head of a man who was holding Dwight at gunpoint. In Saulnier\u2019s films, those outcomes are impossible to forget.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Saulnier knows violence. The director of Hold the Dark (arriving on Netflix this week) makes movies filled with brutal, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":539,"featured_media":10272,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/539"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}