Gore and the Media >> by michael hansen >> *spark-online issue twelve

Many movies and television shows employ fake blood to implement their stories. But in very few cases has the fake blood been utilized in such a way as to convey the surreal aspect of actually being exposed to large quantities of blood in a violent setting.

I remember coming up Hayward, my family living on A Street in a Mexican neighborhood--I must have been about four or five, I hadn't even started kindergarten yet. I was playing with another neighborhood boy, and these two guys came up and started rousting us, looking for this kid's older brother. I was very scared. Even as a little boy I could tell these were some serious guys. At the time I saw them as grownups, but they had to have been teenagers. Anyway, my friend's big brother came out of his house, walked up to these two guys without a word, and cut them both through their T-shirts and into their guts with his knife right there in front of our little boy eyes: SNIK-SNIK. The blood flow was immediate, profuse, and right at my eye level. It soaked their shirts and their pants (at the time, I thought it looked like they'd peed themselves, and perhaps they did as well) and dripped onto the sidewalk in spatters and puddles.

It was like a window between two worlds had shattered, and all that blood was pouring through the crack. The blood was redder than red, seeming to stand out from the background more real than anything else there. (When I was older and started dropping acid, I would have described it as psychedelic--and that it was.) The two bullies stood there, hunched over and dripping as they pressed both hands to their respective wounds holding their guts in, begging my friend's brother not to cut them anymore, tears and snot running down their faces. He let them go, and I never saw them again.

The only movie outfit I can think of that handled blood at all effectively was the Hammer Studios. They didn't even pretend that a 2D rendition of such a vital fluid could be at all realistic: their fake blood was garish red ketchupy stuff that wouldn't even fool a small child. It was a symbol for the crazy-clown, evil-funhouse mindset that grips you when large quantities of actually flow.

Another thing media fails in is their characters' lack of response to large quantities of blood. Unless you're really jaded, or have a lot of emotional control, large quantities of human blood WILL affect you.

I remember as a teenager discovering my friend Chopper's murdered body right after he'd been killed in a drug rip-off. The door to his hotel room was partly open. I pushed it in and stepped inside--and there Chopper lay on the hall floor with his head beaten in with a lead pipe, a pool of blood soaking the cheap hotel carpet in a wide expanse around his ruined head. The blood had even sloshed up on the baseboards a little, and I remember being surprised that there could be that much blood inside somebody. That's one constant: No matter how many times you see it, it's always a shock how much blood the human body actually contains. The pool of blood, my friend's empty eyes staring at nothing in particular, and the SMELL: that hackneyed odor of copper or hot metal. And you unconsciously pick up on other pain- or terror-induced pheromones laden in the congealing mess. It's paralyzing. The smell gets your INSTANT attention. You freeze and scan the environment with every sense on overdrive. When blood is spilled by perpetrators unknown like that, you'd better believe you're checking your surroundings in frantic paranoia, making sure you don't fall prey to the same threat.

I remember when the phone rang in the depths of poor, dead Chopper's hotel room, I literally jumped from the floor. When I landed, I whirled and ran as fast as I could from that room of death. No shame, no regrets, no guilt or blame.

In real life, you don't have casual conversations around lots of blood. You don't behave casually at all, unless you're a sociopath or a homicide dick.

Not being part of that particular lifestyle any more (and not missing it a bit) I don't know how I feel about media renditions of violence, and blood in particular. Does it hurt? Does it contribute to violence in our society? Off the top of my head, I'd say no. Violence in media and games is a shadow, a reflection of the forces in our society that express themselves through violence. Attacking media violence is like punching your reflection in the mirror: all you'll get is seven years bad luck and a sliced-up hand. I will say that I feel violence in the media is presented a little too casually, but perhaps that's more in the nature of an inoculation, an attempt to emotionally anesthetize people from the possible effects of extreme experience. But still:

I remember a few years back, watching TV in the wee hours alone (my wife and child safely asleep and me unable to). I was watching some cheesy '70s cop show, and a disposable character had just bitten the dust, some snitch tossed screaming from the roof of a multi-story parking garage. It was handled antiseptically, no blood, no emotional response displayed by any of the characters, but it punched me in nuts. I just sat there in my easy chair crying and crying, unable to stop. And I thought how ridiculous it was for a grown man to be crying alone in the night (alone except for my flickering conduit to the television consensus that is), crying for some throwaway character in a two-bit piece of period dreck. But I don't think I was crying for him at all.