WEEK 57
To kill or not to kill? That’s been the main theme on my mind this week.
Will the short story of one of Blank’s victims (The Soup Pot Killer) be best served if the conclusion to a tense scene climaxes in a kill or a simple brush with death?
It’s important to note that this kill — the one we are currently fretting about — is a found kill. What I mean to say is that this opportunity to kill was never part of the original story. We found it along the way.
And in fact, whichever way it ends up going, the truth of it won’t change the outcome of the story one bit. The only value we can see for using it is to add heightened drama to the tale and broaden the relationship with the affected characters. And that’s all of great value… but we think we still get a certain amount of that value, whichever way it goes.
Like John Blank, we can kill. We can deliver a visceral scene of murder replete with buckets of blood and reasonably consistent gore. Or we can take you to the last moment of the kill, the second before it happens and stop there. You know there was a kill, at least you’re really sure, but there is a small seed of doubt that can heighten the moment. Or we can create a moment where a kill seems most likely and then, again at the last moment, offer an entirely different “no kill” solution.
In No Country for Old Men two important characters were killed off-screen. Both Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn Moss and Kelly Macdonald’s Carla Jean Moss (husband and wife in the movie) meet an invisible demise. We know it happened because Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh is the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. But the Cohen brothers never show it.
Writer, Michael Joshua Rowin said, “…No Country could serve as a textbook in how to handle action off-screen—the film’s most effective intimations of evil occur from across the bridge of what the brothers allow the viewer to see.”
And, my friend and writer Julie Andrijeski reminded me that it’s all about context, which is so true.
What are your thoughts? Which do you prefer? Does the empty feeling of knowing but not knowing drive you crazy? Please leave us a comment… we would really love to hear from you!
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It depends on how I feel about the character(s) being killed. If it is an evil character who has been torturing and murdering innocents throughout the story, then I would prefer to observe his demise.. and see the surprise on his/her face (or read the thoughts going through his mind) when some seemingly powerless individual is the one who conquers the perpetrator.
So did you see “No Country For Old Men”? If you did, how did it make you feel to not see those deaths?
In art, as opposed to life, violence should only be random when that is the message of the event. On the whole so much entertainment is about violence and death, as well as the news, that we need art to make us feel the tragedy of losing even one life randomly and for nothing.