Human Roast Pork Buns and the Question of Violence

For a movie about cannibalism, the actual cannibalism and chopping up of people was the least gross part of this movie, at least for me. This isn’t necessarily tied to the readings for this week, but the treatment of women in this movie, while obviously not good, fascinated me as I was watching the film. We have the waitress who is raped and murdered, the masculine cop who is constantly demeaned by her squad and is hopelessly in love with her womanizing commander, and we have the prostitutes he brings by the station so the characters and camera can leer at them. I was wondering if this was some sort of over-the-top commentary on how women are viewed in film, particularly in horror films and comedies, but instead of empowering them through said commentary, the film seeks to objectify and dehumanize women as much as possible. I wonder if audiences were as disgusted with the casual and not-so casual misogyny of this film as they were with the actual scenes of brutal violence.

In relation to the readings for this week, I am still caught up in something I asked about in class, which is why we are watching a film from Macau when our readings were so focused on issues of violence in an American context. I get that sometimes watching a film outside the cultural context of our studies can help us to understand our specific context even better, but not knowing the history of the film in terms of its arrival in the US doesn’t help me very much. I know that American films rarely push the envelope to such an extreme way that this film does, but doesn’t something like Saw or Hostel come close? I’ve never seen those films so I’m not sure.

Another thing I’m thinking about after our class discussion is the issue of child murder, and how that scene where the whole family is methodically killed was so shocking for some. For me, it didn’t bother me as much as the scene with the waitress because I’ve seen scenes of child slaughter before, but now I’m realizing none of those films were American. One was in the Japanese film 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, 2010), where the slaughter of a family is made to look almost casual, and hence was a much more disturbing scene to me. Another instance is when a child is unceremoniously and surprisingly shot in The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent, 2019), coincidentally made by the same woman who made The Babadook. What was notable about that particular scene is that I saw The Nightingale in a crowded theater, and the murder of this boy comes pretty late in the film, after the audience had already been subjected to multiple scenes of rape and murder, but people only started walking out of the theater when the boy was shot. Anyway that was a tangent that I’m not even sure has a broader meaning, it is just interesting to observe the limits that we’ve set for ourselves when it comes to enduring screen violence.