386
JOHN FRASeR
are the truly disquieting figures, and it is noteworthy that most of
the films that I have listed are high points in the genre of horror
movies as a whole. The conduct of such figures is iniquitous, ,f
course. But the atrocities that they perpetrate or are responsible for
issue from coherent, unified personalities functioning with complete
certainty and, in a sense,
non-monstrously.
That is to say, the figures
are not crippled, deformed, contemptible or pitiable like the figures
in the first group, and up to a point they are obviously capable of
functioning perfectly successfully in normal society.
What I have been leading up to is that the more ordered and
channeled the energies making for violences are, the more significant
the violences themselves are likely to be, and the more illuminating
the entailed empathy. I am not talking necessarily of an "intellectual"
channeling. At the same time, though, the more the violent man
functions publicly in terms of some reasonably coherent public sys–
tem of ideas, the better; and the better it is, too, if one sees him as
prepared to meet the full challenge of other no less purposive ag–
gressors in a more or less admirable way. Sade's garrulous males,
all
hidden away inside the black-fairy-tale security of walls and money
from the threats of other males (and even from such social conven–
tions and difficulties as confronted Valmont in
L es Liaisons Dange–
reuses)
are merely contemptible. They are repulsive and dangerous,
insofar as they can be said to exist as realized characters at all, but
their repulsiveness is that of the two voluptuary and physically repul–
sive tormentors of Christ in Bosch's
The Crowning with Thorns
(the
version in the London National Gallery, that is).
It
is the other two
figures in that picture - the clean-shaven, grave-looking, neatly ac–
coutered professional soldiers - who are the really frightening ones
and who really matter. They are not only respectable, they in a sense
deserve
respect for some of their qualities; and I have no doubt at
all
that one could have found their equivalents among Massu's para–
troopers, or
in
the SS or in almost any other organized body of
violent men whose activities one particularly abominates or dreads.
Violence, in such hands,
is
the cutting-edge of ideology - often, of
course, of ideology that has become a whole life style - rather than
the expression of inchoate and merely "personal" aberrations. And
when in distinguished art one moves from more or less public figures
like Twain's Colonel Sherburn, via someone like Goulay in George
