After the Bridge, The Blood

On market-validated violence.

Recently I sat with my housemate and watched The Narrow Road to the Deep North as a vowed commitment to staying up to date with the pulse of cinema. Featuring a dazzling suite of Australian talent the show sears with a tale of festering morality. Aside from needing to exit the living room several times due to the ferocity of graphic imagery, I noticed the ad-spots carving the episodes into more digestible chunks were exclusively for the Australian Defence Force, and Ancestry.Com’s War Hero Registry.

The surge in Australia’s commissioned mainstream spectacles of violence is an interesting one, where the intent can for some products be hopefully as it reads: to become more intimate with the horrible thing, so we do not repeat it. In the time between my watching and the writing of this, I have seen as many interviews with the show’s talent confirming as much. But when something derived with the implied intent of paying homage to lives lost senselessly is nested into a greater environment that not only celebrates war but continues it’s legacy, we must question whether its existence and creation is truly naive, or expressly complicit in warmongering. That is to say that we are quick to name media as radicalisation when it arrives as non-state terrorism (e.g. ISIS recruitment videos, incel forums, fringe propaganda), but slow to see it in high-budget depictions of horror and masculine pain we gather around reverently.

In this particular text adapted for screen we experience a certain double derivation, once by Flanagan the author of the book to bring a foreign but familial war’s form into existence on behalf of his father, and then once again by Director Justin Kurzel for the contemporary streaming platform. The secret third derivation is the commissioning of the piece by the profiting bodies (i.e. Amazon, Screen Australia and friends) under the sole interest of commercial value, one of the less considered energetic properties of modern art. As artists it is the leg we often try to hide, relegating the mechanism of funding to inconsequential outside of original function: to get the art made. As if it is possible to have a nameless sperm donor, homogenised of its genetic coding. Plucked from a catalogue, and devoid of resemblance to its maker.

To notice it, asks an uncomfortable question of us all: Who is paying, and for what?

Depicting violence no-one else wills to, is brave. There is undoubtedly a time and place for truth-telling, as long as we can remember that “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. The unspeakable things will at best resemble our cosplayed versions of them, but they will always fall short of the horror real.

What can be true at the same time is that for any artist, to be unaware of their affectivity; the connective tissue they are feeding fresh blood to; is to sever art’s relationship with its own muse, in favour of hedonistic realisation. Of being the boldest, the most disturbing. The God-on-Earth who moved the mountain. Gaspar Noe, responsible for one of my favourite movies Love, is loathed and loved for this sort of face-grazing work.

As an audience, the colosseum is playing out in high definition from private viewing suites, with the illusion of non-consequence as we fight our nervous systems to accept intimacy with the grotesque. It is just a show, the condolence we offer ourselves. And then to self-regulate, we scroll through feeds speckled with beheadings and people both psychologically and physically beaten, as the normalisation of violence supposes its continuation after a show like this one has ended. How far have we actually been moved if glimpsing the terrible thing brings us no closer to preventing these forms of violence?

Many artists do not wish to be arrested by their artistic choices in this way, yet seek nothing less than influence and remembrance in their work. It is an interesting paradox, to affix your name to a project loudly and then hope simultaneously that the death of the author has already taken place upon its release. Know me for my greatness, not for my weakness. That is very human. But it is also desperately disconnected from societal reality, especially in the hall of mirrors we have built.

It seems as if some of us are looking, quite desperately, for an exit to the loop of violence, yet the collective distance between dissociation and extreme palpability, means that one man’s motivation to exit is another man’s re-entrance to the comfort of the known. It means, we are not ready for the death of violence, we are still coming to terms with its face, and how it feels in our bodies. We become impatient with the cycle, and in our calls to end violence, pick up its tools in hopes it’ll carry us forward. And for some, the violence itself is the realest thing they feel. It is the muse.

I have known this best when I have infiltrated male spaces, sometimes accidentally. 6am, unslept on white plastic chairs in an Australian backyard, the final beers being downed. I am there mostly listening, and we are awake and unable to find rest for similar but different reasons pertaining to our inability to cope with feeling bad. One conversation I recall was a few surfers and their videographers discussing the glory of the brawl, and how they miss it, how good it felt to exert their force against someone else. I remember it particularly because when I finally spoke I said how unrelatable I found that, and how ultimately terrifying and sobering it was to hear the quiet thing be said out loud.

A couple of them proceeded to tell me how I didn’t understand it, that it was sacred to a male experience that I wasn’t privy to or capable of knowing. As if I hadn’t been conditioned and employed to conduct the exact emotional reproduction that soothed the wounds of men for free for most of my life. Notice how we are relieved to make someone else a home for our shame. Ignoring the actuality of the times I had been on the receiving end of blows, manipulated into power struggles, and forced to flee the assertion of male bodies onto mine against my will. As if it wasn’t that exact violence that led me to that now 6:45am scene, wishing I didn’t need to feel numb to feel validated.

It reminds me now of something Uncle Richard, a dear friend of mine, said to me in the context of understanding red cedars and his people’s history in the Daintree where he’s from. That if you’re not willing to harm someone weaker than you, you usually harm yourself.

If you have ever interviewed a war veteran, unanimously, once you are let past the veneer that shame builds, you will hear little else as clearly as the pleading echo of the sentiment: never again. Around age 14 at the peak of my leadership potential, I was given the prestigious role of Middle School Captain. Aside from being resented, one of my job perks was hosting veterans on ANZAC day, where I was given hours to drink tea and engage in conversation instead of going to class. I was smaller and blonde and disarming, able to discuss my modern history projects delicately with them, gleaning careful insight into the way you are rearranged by combat, even when it is considered noble and proper. When I think of this particular show, and of the people and damages it depicts, I wonder if this show was made with the thought of those service men and women as audience? Of how they would feel watching episodic interpretations of realities they actually lived? Would it bring them comfort to see the attempts to speak what they had vowed not to repeat? From my own reckonings with C-PTSD, it is certainly not something I would feel comfortable asking someone to watch in order to garner me an answer.

Here, there is tension between whether now, in an age where there are fewer veterans, where war seems both imminent and yet removed, are we actually echoing the idea that lives have been lost senselessly with life-sized media, or if in the capitalist wheel, we are committing to make sense of it. That suffering has a utility, as long as someone is getting paid.

I always wonder what we owe the dead when we speak of their pain. And the living, whose brutalisation continues, as colonial violence remains mantled.