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PARTISAN REVIEW
torture without capitulating. In art, though we may still be able to
understand and participate in the values of the Iliad, a modem writer
like Ernest Hemingway we find somewhat embarrassing: there is no
doubt that he stirs us, but we cannot help recognizing also that he is
a little childish. And in the criticism of popular culture, where the edu–
cated observer is usually under the illusion that he has nothing at stake,
the presence of images of violence is often assumed to be in itself a
sufficient ground for condemnation.
These attitudes, however, have not reduc€d the eillment of violence
in our culture but,
if
anything, have helped to free it from moral control
by letting it take on the aura of "emancipation." The celebration of acts
of violence is left more and more to the irresponsible: on the higher
cultural levels to writers like Celine, and lower down to Mickey Spillane
or Horace McCoy, or to the comic books, television, and the movies.
The gangster movie, with its numerous variations, belongs to this cultural
"underground" which sets forth the attractions of violence in the face
of all our higher social attitudes. It is a more "modem" genre than
the Western, perhaps even more profound, because it confronts indus–
trial society on its own ground-the city-and because, like much of
our advanced art, it gains its effects by a gross insistence on its own
narrow logic. But it is anti-social, resting on fantasies of irresponsible
freedom.
If
we are brought finally to acquiesce in the denial of these
fantasills, it is only because they have been shown to be dangerous, not
because they have given way to a better vision of behavior.2
,In war movies, to be sure, it is possible to present the uses of violence
within a framework of responsibility. But
then~
is the disadvantage that
modem war is a co-operative enterprise; its violence is largely imper–
sonal, and heroism belongs to the group more than to the individual.
The hero of a war movie is most often simply a leader, and his super–
iority is likely to be expressed in a denial of the heroic: you are not
supposed to be brave, you are supposed to get the job done and stay
alive (this too, of course, is a kind of heroic posture, but a new-and
"practical"-one). At its best, the war movie may represent a more
civilized point of view than the Western, and if it were not continually
marred by ideological sentimentality we might hope to find it developing
2 I am not concerned here with the actual social consequences of gangster
movies, though I suspect they could not have been so pernicio"s as they were
thought to be. Somo of the compromises introduced to avoid the supposed bad
effects of the old gangster movies may
be,
if anything, more dangerous, for the
sadistic violence that once belonged only to the gangster is now commonly en–
listed on the side of the law and thus goes undefeated, allowing us (if we wish)
to find in the movies a sort of "confirmation" of our fantasies.
