Of the Ten Commandments found in the Holy Bible, ”Thou shalt not murder“ is readily accepted by agnostics, humanists, atheists and adherents of religions other than the Judaeo-Christian. Some of the other commandments are also supported but extenuating circumstances in the strictures against, for example, stealing or lying may be found. But murder has no excuse: by definition it is pre-meditated, intended to destroy what can never be restored. Such a crime is understood as the worst thing a person can do in and to life, so bad that, for many, the perpetrator must be put to death. When the victim of a murder is known to one, hushed tones are used when speaking of the deed: it is something you would rather young children did not know of.
But we want to see it happen. Why else would the screens we view be sown with its victims? Murder features in most genres of film, television and game; it is the trigger which fires the plot, the hook that catches the imagination. It shows us something we hope we shall never see, it shows us the death we fear the most.
More than thirty years ago I watched the film Witness . I saw a young Amish boy, Samuel, cross the concourse of a busy Philadelphia railway station; it is his first time in a big city; he has asked his mother if he can go to the bathroom. She watches her little son as he makes his way wide-eyed through the milling commuters. He disappears into the restroom. It is his first time in such a space; he is apprehensive about the urinals and carefully chooses a cubicle.
As he is about to leave it, he hears others outside. Cautiously cracking open the door, he sees two men grappling with a third. One of the pair pulls back the man’s head and the other brutally severs his jugular with a switchblade. The boy gasps, turns his face away and inches back from the door.
In the years since then I have seen many other murders on screen. But none stay with me like that one. Not so much the horror of seeing the knife cross the jugular and the blood break from the throat, but how, as this happens, the murderer arches his body away from the collapsing man, then steps back, checks his suit for blood and casually moves to a basin where he wipes the blood from the blade and begins washing his hands. “Whatchya doing man!” urges his accomplice from the door. “Washing my hands, man.” He looks in the mirror, straightens his tie and inspects his face.
It is not voyeurism which has rooted this scene in my mind’s eye. Its violence, blood and suspense are well packaged, for sure, but what the director brought home was the realisation that there are people who can do those things and will do. Though the scene was harrowing, it made me more aware of the reality of evil than fearful of a bloody death. It was different from my early experience of screen killings where the hero in Westerns always had at least nine shots in his six-shooter – after a while it became more fun counting them than watching the villains go down. Later experiences brought more gratuitous violence to the eyes, slow-motion gore with a dosage of carnage and “whatever” attitudes. What this plethora of blood and killings does is not so much desensitise a viewer as much as remove murder from the imagination.
Before murder became such a screen presence, the word carried a more deathly weight. Because it was never seen, each person had his nor her own imagination of it, with the uneasy awareness that anyone could become a victim. As a boy I remember the words ”They were murdered in their beds.” horrifying me. But when film brought murder to the screen, it was the director who did the imagining – it happened to others…and you got to be a spectator. Added to this, the ease with which a human life could be snuffed out on screen diminished it. The cruel fact that a person has the power to end something so complex and inherently valuable as a life, something he cannot himself create, negates the value of human life, especially if the murderer continues to live.
How did Witness bring to me an awareness of the reality of murder when I contend that most films do not? It did because, through the eyes of the young Samuel, what he sees is not the identity of the killers nor the murder: he sees the evil of man. His eyes witness a crime both unspeakable and unspoken. He does not need a commandment to tell him it is wrong. He knows it is and it that it should not happen. Though the scene has never kept my eyes open at night, it has to the evil of murder.
