Cheap Shock, Part 1: On Gore, by Adam Lehrer
In the first of a two-part series, Adam looks at the mainstream's insistence on buckets of gore
I wish we could make buildings that could constantly explode and come back in different ways. The idea of a changing environment suggests that if your environment changes all the time, then maybe your ideas will change all the time. – Vito Acconci
During the premiere episode of the Game of Thrones prequel series, The House of the Dragon, almost nothing happened. Chitter chatter amongst flat characters in sets almost identical to those familiar with the original series. Glacially boring, I’d have turned it off completely if the writer’s strike hadn’t made the content landscape so bereft and bleak. Just as I was about to give up and turn the television off, I watched in horror with my jaw to the floor as a full-grown man, quite literally, sawed the head off of a fucking BABY! A BABY!
Quite frankly, I was disgusted. Not disgusted in the sense of actually being shocked, but disgusted by the cheapness and meaninglessness of it. This is a hit show, backed by a major network, and watched by children. Given how awful the last three seasons of the original series were, it’s not surprising that the prequel series milking the mass appeal of the household brand is just as bad. Alas, the thought of the show’s writers scratching their beards, banging heads on the wall, and debating plotlines while downing expensive coffee, managing to come up with NOTHING that could move the show forward when some overpriced hack who could easily be replaced by AI screams:
“I GOT IT! THE BABY PRINCE WILL GET HIS HEAD SAWED OFF!”
Cheap shocks are always vulgar, but sadistic violent gore has become the cheapest of all shocks. And gore is everywhere, all the time, consumed by all. The kind of violence that was once limited to the Grand Guignol theater of Paris and enjoyed by those daring and sophisticated enough to take a seat in its audience is now blasted into the brains of those so illiterate they can hardly parse through a single paragraph without getting distracted by the alerts on their phones. And where something like the Grand Guignol sought to create radical and new art, the gore mongers of today make shallow content that scandalizes no one,inspires no one.
I’m old enough to remember the early 2000s film movement defined by ArtForum film critic James Quandt as the “New French Extremity” or “Cinema of the Body”, which, at the time, felt like a thrilling lens into a completely unrestrained form of cinema. When Irreversible was screened for the first time, it’s reported that viewers vomited during the scene in which Vincent Cassel’s buddy bludgeons his lover’s rapist’s head in and we are treated to all the gory details of the skull and brains and guts caving in blow by blow. And that was forty minutes before the infamous prolonged, brutal rape scene, still unmatched in its squeamish intensity. Martyrs, directed by Pascal Laugier, reached a pinnacle in cinematic violence, and functions as the capstone of the New French Extremity as a project. It ends with a woman being flayed alive, in completely graphic fashion, the camera turning away from nothing.
There was indeed something truly daring about the New French Extremity, a hybrid of rigid French avant-garde formalism with the nasty blood and guts of splatter films made for the grindhouses of the ‘70s and the video nasties. Now, the gore of those films made by Gaspar Noé, Laugier, Philippe Grandrieux, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Francois Ozon and countless others is regularly surpassed in every episode of every piece of shit, formally flat, intellectually bereft streaming series across every streaming channel. It’s fucking grotesque, desensitizing, and completely depressing.
True shock value is not merely how much gore and violence you can pepper a piece of media with. Shock comes from what is truly new. Newness, innovation, something we’ve never seen before; THAT is what shocks us. Shows like Game of Thrones made violence and gore that sometimes surpassed that of the NFE films, but did so for cheap entertainment with fractions of the conceptual depth of those films. The Sopranos wasn’t just shocking for being the first show to depict brutal rape and the bludgeoning to death of a young woman on television, but because it was one of if not the first shows to demonstrate real literary ambitions and scope. Streaming accessibility has essentially eroded all meaningful distinguishments between the forms of these shows. Prestige TV is as trashy as nighttime soaps were, but lacking the sophisticated self-awareness, not to mention the real eroticism and beauty that something like Melrose Place once had.
It’s all content. Garbage. Endlessly recycled and consumed by opiated and SSRId masses who simply have little else to do at night. A beheaded baby will at least catch headlines, for a day. That is how these alleged “showrunners” now think. We are far past the era of the “showrunner” as auteur. David Chase, Vince Gilligan, Matthew Weiner and David Milch are all relics of the past. There are decades separating us from their artistic achievements in the TV form. And yet, we keep acting like this era persists, justifying our blind compliance to trash product with cheap gore and grotesque shock. I digress.
So, what is “shock”, really?
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick posits that the response to shock should be a “primary autonomic response”:
“The so-called ‘shame’ or ‘blushing’ reaction to a morally shocking stimulus” writes Dick. “It can’t be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, and cardiac rate.”
Essentially, according to Dick, a shocking work of art should be experienced on the most guttural, visceral, and physical level of the human being. This definition of course completely excludes all of the gore we see in the aforementioned shows mentioned, and not to mention in the endless onslaught of pastiche, anti-Christian themed horror shlock fest films of 2024 like The First Omen and Maxxine.
The images in these films, violent as they were, made me feel nothing. They bored me. Because they were meaningless, and released against a landscape where the Gen-X vision of transgressive art has been fully immersed into and absorbed by the globalist entertainment consensus. Buckets of blood delivered to impressionable and desensitized normies has been the primary cultural milieu for so long that none of these cultural products even make a dent on my soul, my way of thinking, my way of looking at art. They only contribute to my ever escalating alienation and malcontent.
The morally shocking stimulus, as we’ve seen throughout art history, certainly doesn’t need gore and violence, and sometimes doesn’t even need to challenge prevailing norms on sexuality. It just needs to violate an agreed upon or even unspoken set of values and principles that, ultimately, ring false.
The ultimate example is always Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain (Readymade)”, when the artist decided to put a toilet in a gallery in 1917. Reactions to the radical artistic statement were, as you can imagine, extremely negative.
“The artist is a not great creator—Duchamp went shopping at a plumbing store,” wrote the philosopher Stephen Hicks. “The artwork is not a special object—it was mass-produced in a factory. The experience of art is not exciting and ennobling—at best it is puzzling and mostly leaves one with a sense of distaste. But over and above that, Duchamp did not select just any ready-made object to display. In selecting the urinal, his message was clear: Art is something you piss on.”
Indeed, art is something to be pissed on. Or, at least according to the great pioneer of Dadaist art, the rigidly bourgeois understanding of what art was in the early 1920s should be pissed on. Discarded. The reaction to Duchamp’s piece, of course, only proves its importance. Its shock. The gesture signaled to the world that there would now not just be “retinal art” to be enjoyed visually, but “conceptual art”, to be considered intellectually. Now we must discuss the other side of cheap shock, but more on that later.
READ PART 2 HERE