“there’s nothing fun about the game. No light relief. Just one piece of nauseating unpleasantness after another.”
– Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw“Real ain’t pretty”
-the game’s primary marketing slogan
There is no dearth of violent media in the video game or movie industry. But there are very few pieces of media which are able to express violence in its actuality. And even fewer capture the feeling of being there, in all its horror.
Kane & Lynch: Dogs Days(2010)(K&L:DD) is a hyper-violent, 3rd person action adventure shooter game, known for its graphic display of violence, highly cynical themes, janky gameplay mechanics, and hand-held camcorder cinematic design. The game is perhaps most infamous for the controversy surrounding the review of its predecessor, which led to the firing of Jeff Gerstmann—an American video game journalist who had described Kane & Lynch as ‘an ugly, ugly game’.
The most common method bad filmmakers use to show the ‘true nature of violence’ is adding more violence. It’s as if above a certain threshold, the violence becomes real, and loses its artificiality. But dialing violence to 11 to show their viewers actual violence rarely captures the true nature of it . What it merely does is evoke visceral shock and disgust, eliciting a stronger reaction out of the audience.
What the aesthetics of K&L:DD does, is that it captures the grit and filth of violence in its entirety. When you are in a street gunfight in K&L, it actually feels like you are there. Violence involves much more than bullet shots spinning past each other into theatrical explosions of blood and gore. It’s the breaking of pre-conceived notions, of seeing how the body itself reacts to violence. When the line between a ‘person’ and a ‘self-automated flesh and bone being’ blurs.
And most of all, the helplessness of violence being inflicted upon you, how your body betrays any notion of dignity and honor when shit hits the fan and your life is on the line. A CCTV footage comes to mind: a bank robber shot through the carotid artery in the neck. Dark red, copiously flowing blood, almost ridiculous-looking at first sight. The marionette-esque movements of the body which has shed entirely the faculty of thought or reason, and is reduced to that one instinct: survival.
There is a foreboding doom in Dog Days, a claustrophobia suffocating every frame. You’d never find a clear sky, it’s always brown and dirty from dust and humidity and artificial pollution. Even the brief, sparingly beautiful evening orange sky is always obfuscated by a clustered network of poorly planned electrical wires. The people in this part of the world have literally nothing to look up to. Only a few towers in the backdrop look lit up and somewhat beautiful– but they are always distant, away from our reach, and always in sharp contrast with the filthy, water-logged, neon-lit streets of an overcrowded market. The only way K&L access one of these buildings is through the means of violence, in a final confrontation with the main ‘bad guy’ of the game. He’s executed almost immediately, in a very anti-climatic manner. No payoff, no catharsis.
I wouldn’t be the first to point out Dog Days’ janky camera movement, poor shooting mechanics, the abhorring unlikableness of the two protagonists, and say: yeah that is the point! It’s meant to be that way, as is violence in the thick of it, not when you are romanticizing and cheering it from behind the screen.
We are not desensitized to violence. We are desensitized to the sensational kind of violence– the violence that is orchestrated, theatrical and entertaining.
I was in my office the other day and the talk came about the new Final Destination movie (FD: Bloodlines). I expressed distaste for watching the movie, saying that I do not like watching mindless gore. I was met with a kind of collective patronization, as if the hallmark of adulthood is to be able to consume ‘violent’ media and that the deterrence against consuming violence is something we leave only to little kids. One of my colleagues asked me(probably innocently): ‘so Anshul you prefer watching movies where you don’t have to think about much’. And I thought: what is there to think about even, it’s just a series of setups and payoffs for violence and gore. But it made me wonder: how many of us have actually seen violence take place in front of them? Not movie violence, with its calculated set-placement, choreographed action sequences, makeup and editing (movie blood is made up of corn starch, syrup, glycerin, and cocoa, which would smell more like liquid chocolate and makeup, than the actual stomach-lurching, metal-tasting smell of blood), but real violence. The raw violence that we city folks are mostly safe from, but encounter distantly, either through news, media outlets or through partially masochistic endeavours of watching violent and gory movies.
I think it signals to our relationship to violence. I don’t think we are desensitized to violence. I refuse to believe anyone who has not seen a murder in front of them actually is. I think we are desensitized to the sensational kind of violence– the violence that is orchestrated, theatrical and entertaining. Acts of violence that take place in the arc of a story as a payoff to some Chekhovian gun that was placed in the first half of the script.
There will never be another game like Dog Days. It’s a product of a very specific era in gaming and art, with a very specific team, a very specific vision, and the single-minded guts to pull it off.
Today the risk of a game like this failing is too big. The political climate has become more and more hostile to artistic expression that dares to try something unconventional, and investors would be wary of putting their coin behind a game that differentiates itself so vastly from its predecessors.
And that’s why I believe it was worth making this game. There will never be a game like this again. Any form of art, no matter how bad or unpolished, if made with a certain maddening inclination and honesty, will always find its place in the repository of art that not only opens the space for cultural discourse, but also sheds light on what art is capable of achieving when tested to its limits. A poorly lit torch, courageous enough to illuminate the outer dark of human nature will ultimately still hold more value than burning matchsticks huddled together in some pre-lit center of the world.
Violence is violence. Bloody, shameful, sometimes hilarious, gut-wrenching and most of all, interesting. A thing that is alluring only because it is unencountered. Violent media will always be a part of our culture because deviance will always be a part of our culture. We all find it intriguing to some degree, even if we are aversive to it. There’s no high-mindedness in an aversion to violence. It’s simply a personal choice.
So if you are going to watch Final Destination Bloodlines by this weekend, by all means go ahead. Keep some popcorn handy. And if you have never encountered violence, are not a citizen of a war-torn country, do not have to sleep with one eye open, don’t forget to thank your stars.
anshul kandpal 