Wisdom from Wes Craven

I’ve never watched a Wes Craven movie. From the descriptions I have heard of them, I probably never will. The only reason I listened to a Terry Gross interview of Craven, who died August 30, was because it was on the radio as I drove into Tulsa recently. I was certainly not expecting to learn anything from him.

If you watch any of his movies, I understand, you might think that he exults in torture and blood. But actually, one of his formative experiences as a child was when he killed a rat. He shot it with an arrow, pinning it to the ground. Its scream was much louder than one would ever expect such a small animal to make. He said it was a long and difficult process to finish the rat off.  He was astonished at the desperation of the rat to stay alive. Humans are like this too, he realized. This experience stayed with him for life.

Most movies before the 1960s showed stylized murders and death. Viewers were never really confronted with the horror of seeing another person killed. For example, in many movies, a single stab will kill someone, or a single blow to the head. (I saw this sort of murder at least a hundred times on Perry Mason reruns.) But in real life it usually takes multiple stabs or blows and gets gruesome very quickly. Wes Craven wanted his viewers to know how horrifying death really was.

That is, Craven wanted us to know how horrifying violent death was so that we would hate it. Watch enough stylized deaths and pretty soon death seems abstract. Craven wanted to blow us away from this delusion. In particular, he grew up watching graphic footage of death in the Vietnam War. To Craven, it made no sense that Americans would support such a war, and also support economic enslavement of the poor people of the world, while being afraid to watch a graphic scene of murder in a movie.

Craven talked about his fundamentalist upbringing, but he did not recognize much connection between it and his inability to resist showing us graphic violence. But I saw a connection. If you read enough Sunday school stories about the Israelites conquering the native peoples of Palestine, if you kept reading about how the Israelites “smote” the inhabitants and killed all of them, men, women, and children, then pretty soon genocide and slaughter seem normal. Generations of Sunday school kids have grown up thinking that the Israelite slaughter of whole cities of people was somehow antiseptic and that God did not give a crap about their screams. So much for the book of Joshua. As for the book of Judges, it is so gruesomely violent that there is no way to make it tame enough to teach in Sunday school; most churches skip the part about the Israelite man who cut his murdered concubine into twelve pieces and sent them to the tribes of Israel. Or the Israelite who sacrificed his own daughter on an altar.

Maybe if Wes Craven had made The Ten Commandments, following the Bible account faithfully, then complacent American Christians would have been shocked enough to quit supporting government and economic policies that, even today, lead to the degradation of millions of poor people around the world.

Maybe it’s time for a new movie called The Book of Judges: The Real Story. Damn, that would make one hell of a movie! Don’t believe me? Dig out your Bible and read the book of Judges. I’ll write the screenplay if anyone wants to put up the money for the movie. Not for a Hollywood movie, just an Indy movie for Sundance or Cannes or something. Or maybe it will play on the Sunday evening church circuit.