ELLIS, W.- Blood in Your Eye- Why We Need Violent Stories

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8/14/13 at 11:15 AM

Blood in Your Eye: Why We NeedViolent Stories

By Warren Ellis

In this Vulture original essay, the outspoken author of Dead Pig Collector and

the graphic novels Transmetropolitanand Redexplains that, now more than

ever, violent fiction is essential for helping us understand real-world horrors

and de-fang society's monsters.

"I dont understand." How many times have you read that in conjunction with a

violent act?

I dont understand why he did it. Or I dont understand why this happened.

Sammy Yatim, shot dead and then tasered by police on a Toronto streetcar, and

even the chair of the Police Services Board asks, "How could this happen?"

We hear it every time: I dont understand. Youll hear it the next time a tasty

piece of necro-porn lands on Big Medias desk. You know what I mean by that

dead-body news.

Here in Britain, our weakling government is attempting to launch a web filter

that would somehow erase violent material from Internet provision placing

it, by association, in the same category as child pornography. Every week seems

to bring a new attempt to ban something or other because its uncomfortably or

scary or perhaps even indefensibly disgusting. Meanwhile, Jim Carrey is

refusing to promote his latest film,Kick-Ass 2, following a change of heart in

which he cannot support that level of violence.

That, right there, is the problem, as I see it.

Imagine if Mr. Carrey had instead decided to do the press tour forKick-Ass 2.

Blood in Your Eye: Why We Need Violent Stories -- Vu... http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/warren-ellis-essay

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Imagine if, on every stop on the junket, hed used this promotional soapbox to

talk about real-world violence versus violent fiction. His reticence to appear in

support of the film comes from the Newtown shooting event an event, like all

the others, characterized by those left behind saying, I dont understand.

The fact that he didnt use the opportunity is less a failure of intelligence and

imagination than it is a symptom of the way we generally demonize violent acts

and violent work. We make them Other, and we just distance ourselves. They

are Other, and they didnt come from us, and were just going to stand over

there and shake our heads sadly. And, moreover, anyone who gets closer to it in

order to experience or understand it must be a freak.

Which, I guess, is where I come in.

Ive just written a novelette calledDead Pig Collector, which is largely about a

person who kills other people and efficiently gets rid of their corpses. Just a day

ago, as part of an interview session, I was asked how I would feel if the story

were used by someone in the real world as a manual for murder and body

removal. Which hadn't really occurred to me. The person asking the question

really didnt seem happy that the story was out there at all.

The function of fiction is being lost in the conversation on violence. My book

editor, Sean McDonald, thinks of it as radical empathy. Fiction, like any other

form of art, is there to consider aspects of the real world in the ways that simpleobjective views cant from the inside. We cannot Other characters when we

are seeing the world from the inside of their skulls. This is the great success of

Thomas Harriss Hannibal Lecter, both in print and as so richly embodied by

Mads Mikkelsen in theHannibaltelevision series: For every three scary,

strange things we discover about him, there is one thing that we can relate to.

The Other is revealed as a damaged or alienated human, and we learn

something about the roots of violence and the traps of horror.

I can watch footage of Sammy Yatim being shot, but my government doesnt

think I should watch violent films, and Jim Carrey needs to pretend he was

never in a violent film. In every case, violent fictional content is separated,

sometimes with the consent and intent of the creators and performers, from

discussion. And yet its fine for our television news providers (which in the U.S.

and the U.K. has probably never been worse) to hammer us with this crap andthen insist that it must be witnessed but that no one can or should ever hope

to understandit.

Possibly this is just the biased viewpoint of an author whose novelette takes

place inside the perspective of a man who kills people and disposes of their

bodies for a living, but it seems to me that we dont begin to understand

something until we talk honestly and directly about it. Difficult topics must be

engaged with, and in the way that fiction invites us to engage but numbing

news-porn deliberately does not, because news wants us only to witness and

have our buttons pushed, and denies greater emotional and intellectual

immersion. The news doesnt want us to think, only to react, like plants.

We dont even understand indefensibly disgusting work until we give it the

protections and investigations of speech. The most horrible things in the world,

the real cancers of our society, have to be interrogated. You cant ignore a

tumor. If you do, then it quickly becomes too late to do anything at all about it

and youre nothing but a skinful of the stuff. At which point, saying, I dont

understand why this happened is not only disingenuous but utterly offensive.

We learn about things by looking at them and then talking about them,

together. You may have heard of this process. Its sometimes involved in things

like science. Its also the system of fiction: writing things in order to get a better


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look at them. Fiction is how we both study and de-fang our monsters. To lock

violent fiction away, or to close our eyes to it, is to give our monsters and our

fears undeserved power and richer hunting grounds.

Its entirely possible that we need a little blood in our eyes to see some things

more clearly.

Warren Ellis is the author of Dead Pig Collectorand many graphic novels,

including Red, which has been adapted into two films starring Bruce Willis

and Helen Mirren. His first nonfiction book, on the future of the city and the

science-fiction condition we live in, arrives in 2014. He lives mostly in Britain.


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ELLIS, W.- Blood in Your Eye- Why We Need Violent Stories