The American action film and the Arendt–Pitkin ‘tyranny of “the Social”’

Abstract

Hanna Pitkin explains that Arendt’s defense of collective political action tends to reify and mystify an opposing concept Arendt calls ‘the Social’. Was Arendt actually right about the rise of ‘the Social’? Does the deep-set global mass entertainment culture tend to sap action even when it purportedly celebrates it? And what can viewing publics and counter-publics tell us about the meaning and reception of ‘the Social’, especially in this massively online era? This article surveys different ways of thinking about the basic problem presented by American popular action cinema, and especially big-budget Hollywood action films, through an Arendtian lens. In presenting this overview, the article looks to reorient traditional philosophical concerns about screen violence and its censorship, and to offer a holistic reappraisal of ‘the Social’ and ‘action’ by placing democratic theory in closer dialogue with film studies.

Keywords

Arendt authenticity film theory Pitkin Sobchack violence

This article reassesses Hanna Pitkin’s Arendtian criticism of ‘the Social’ in an age of global mass consumption of Hollywood blockbusters best described as ‘action’ movies. In doing so, I hope to put film studies’ recent concern with embodiment (Barker, 2009; Malkowski, 2017; Rust, 2017; Sobchack, 2004) in contact with democratic theory’s concern with spectacle and disciplinary control of publics (e.g. Green, 2010; Wedeen, 1999). These fields have much to teach each other about the meaning and practice of representation in an age of global media, and much in common, especially with respect to the pluralism and ‘dialogic’ interpellation of subject and object.

In Hanna Pitkin’s The Attack of the Blob, she uses the 1958 Cold-War-era film The Blob as an interpretive metaphor to reframe Hannah Arendt’s concern with ‘the Social’ (Arendt, 1998: 38–49; Pitkin, 1998, 16, 252). ‘The Social’ is a deserved worry, insofar as economics migrates from the private realm into a social realm, which it colonizes, threatening to re-assert the primacy of human biological processes over political ones; to make humans into a single family; and to normalize and level down behavior, snuffing out individuality (Agamben, 2009: 104–5; Pitkin, 1998: 10–16; Tsao, 2002: 103–7). However, Arendt’s social is also a mystification. In Arendt’s theorizing, ‘the Social’ becomes reified, rendered into a thing-ish mass, a collectivizing ‘blob’ (Pitkin, 1998: 4–5).¹

There is no Blob, for Pitkin, but Arendt’s anxiety nevertheless points out a genuine problem, ‘our collective ineffectuality’, our ‘inertia’, a loss of ‘horizon’ also addressed in recent film studies (e.g. Sobchack, 1992: 27–31). From the point of view of democratic theory, the worry is that blockbuster action films participate in self-forgetting by concealing the bloodiness and suddenness and contingency of the moment of death, and/or speeding up slow death to make it more lively and interesting (Nixon, 2011: 13), distorting the understanding of real vs. ‘reel’ action, and offering ‘good deaths’ to some privileged participants and protagonists while giving dismissible deaths to a globalized ‘other’.²

In an age of streaming video, where digital media’s gaze is ubiquitous, and online media consumers have the power to repeat, reverse, slow, and freeze digital media action with a super-remote-control (Malkowski, 2017: 203), it makes sense to re-ask Arendt’s question of the Hollywood culture industry. What if the public has caught up with Arendt, changing itself in ways that make action more consumer-oriented and passive, and life ironically less actionable?

To point this out is to raise an alarm about agoraphobia. For Deutsche (1996: 326; see also Bankey, 2004), who uses the term agoraphobia in my manner, democracy, denying its own lieu vide, may become obsessed with a ‘fantasy of social completion’, of unsurprised grasp and manipulation of its world (Lefort, 1986: 199, 279). This fear of open and ambivalent spaces, and the desire to give them a determinate meaning, amounts to a desire to conquer them. An anti-agoraphobic approach to film, spectatorship, and democracy worries that highly advertised, globally exportable Hollywood action films are essentially opposed to the collective exchange of speech in the public square, where speech – not violent deeds, not ‘mere talk’, and certainly not disengaged spectatorship – is ‘the arch-Arendtian theme of action’ (Villa, 2008: 320; see Arendt, 1998: 178–80).

This may seem like a lot to lay at the feet of cinema, and it is crucial to enlist film and film theories’ internal resources to quell these concerns, as I try to do below. Nevertheless, theorists have long observed that popular art is able to make isolated and individual experience into common experience (Mattern, 1999: 55, 61–2). Millions of Americans are familiar with the expression, ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ from watching films. How does cinema embody the responsibility pointed out in democratic theory? And how can film studies contribute not only to a risky, action-embracing cinema, but to an improved, less reifying democratic theory?

To anticipate the argument, I side with Pitkin. While ‘The Social’ and its blob-like character is even closer to us than it is in Arendt’s theory, even violent Hollywood blockbuster action movies and their surrounding marketplace of ideas do not construct a monolithic, uninhabitable non-public social sphere. Being represented in complicated and manifold ways within it remains possible, something that is clearly not possible when the Blob rolls into town and absorbs the citizens. Spectator-citizens can disagree with, and about, the super-entity hypostatically called The Social. Pitkin (1998: 252) is therefore (still) correct that our socialization is a ‘matter of degree’ and not a ‘metaphysical change of state’ from individual to blob.

Film action: A brief history

Context clearly matters if the aim is to look at action films holistically from the point of view of democratic theory. New Hollywood cinema, 1960s youth counterculture, and the US involvement in Vietnam changed American action cinema forever, as did the influence of new genres: Hong Kong action, Blaxploitation, vigilante films, and spectacles such as Star Wars (Lichtenfeld, 2007; Slocum, 2000).³

The traditional answer regarding the venerable question of cinematic violence is that the Motion Picture Production Code (1930–66) was loosened, permitting the public to have new access to violent action in films. The updating and ultimate abolition of the Production Code in 1966 and 1968 have, in the background, Hollywood’s partnership with the Office of War Information in World War II and the partially televised war in Vietnam (Slocum, 2001), televised urban violence, and worries that cities such as San Francisco and New York are on their way to becoming a new frontier of urban violence, as they are depicted in the 1970s in the purported Fascism of the Dirty Harry films, and the gang violence of Scorsese’s Mean Streets.

While Ebert (1968) is concerned with the exploitation of real violence, Ebert (2006) blames the decade after 1977’s Star Wars for contorting cinema into a formulaic inauthenticity. He criticizes the era as one of ‘special effects, nonstop action, humor based on violence’. It was ‘entertainment so direct and simple that all of the complications of the modern movie seem to vaporize’ (2006: 341–4). Film scholars such as Kendrick (2009) look at the nexus of Reagan-era conservatism and consumerism to explain the 1980s action film. Tasker (1993) examines the same films for gender concerns, and O’Brien (2012) for the reactive quality of action. Following the money also helps. As Pauline Kael astutely notes in a 1998 interview, ‘Conglomerate financing means you get big action films. They’re the safest; they travel internationally.’ She adds, rightly or wrongly, ‘and [they] work with an illiterate or subliterate audience’ (see Goodman, 2020).

One of the ways that the 1980s emerged out of formulaic spectacle was, ironically, the awakening of the public to the realities of actual urban violence. Of these films, perhaps the most successful in crossing the line between celebrating and criticizing street violence is Spike Lee’s 1995 film, Clockers. In a roughly Arendtian sense, Lee (1995) wanted to drive ‘the final nail in the coffin’ into the genre of the commodified gangster film by showing violence’s predictable human consequences. The film’s credits contain a reenacted sequence of crime scene photos from the ‘family album’ (the book of crime scene photos) of New York police, and the movie begins with police officers making disrespectful jokes about a drug dealer who has been shot dead. Clockers thus re-represents violence that has become real, routinized, and inglorious; a violence that closes doors and destroys futures. The bloody and tragic denouement of the film depicts violence prior to what Christopher Finlay (2009: 42) describes as ‘a violence which ends past injustices while leaving the beginning of something new open to properly creative forces’.

Film popular culture today is both more and less rich. It has ‘connected critics’ who speak in the people’s language about a medium they love (Walzer, 1987: 39–66; cf. Sobchack, 2004: 53–4), and it also has its uncurated online sites of engagement: Youtube clips and their mini-publics, fan-made tribute films, and Reddit discussion boards. Action films remain near the core of contemporary popular culture. The online website Box Office Mojo shows that the top-grossing US domestic films are very often, if not exclusively classifiable as either action films or children/young adult films (animated films or from the Harry Potter franchise). This is true of every hit over the last 25 years, with the possible exception of Titanic. Action films from the Star Wars franchise and comic book films can hope to make 11-figure sums. During its initial 45-week theatrical release, for example, Black Panther made almost US$1.35 billion worldwide, which is more than the economy of Grenada, as measured by 2018 GDP. It is popular culture; but is ‘reel’ action a prophylactic to real action?

Arendt and film violence

Hannah Arendt’s 1970 essay ‘On violence’, which was republished in 1972 in Crises of the republic, asserts that violence is ironically inaction rather than humans in action. In this essay, at least, Arendt is an opponent of violence, and argues that it forecloses power and freedom, both of which are expressible as collective persuasive action (Pitkin, 1998: 1). In other essays, Arendt argues that revolutionary violence may clear a ground for authentic collective action, as in the case of the American Revolution in On Revolution, but here violence merely concludes the crucial conversations in which we transact politics (Arendt, 1963).

The limits of Arendt’s approach are obvious. Violence may open up a space so that the colonized may breathe, as Fanon (2008: 176, 17) argues.⁴ However, as Arendt and Camus (and Fanon) certainly recognize, violence often closes the spaces of dialogue (Camus, 2013: 154–5; cf. Has, 2015).

A violent film is not the same as a violent deed. Violent films are inherently less violent even than para-violent acts such as ‘pounding the table or slamming the door’ (Arendt, 1972: 161). ‘It’s just a movie’, we say when calming children – or defending our own controversial viewing choices. Nevertheless, some films are so violating that the ‘enjoyment of the violence done to the film character turns into violence against the spectator’, a traditional concern about film violence I discuss at length in a later section (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 110).⁵

In order to bring violence within the theorist’s gaze, from which it is often excluded (Arendt, 1972: 110), I use Arendt’s ‘On violence’ to hypothesize four ways in which violence may violate freedom. I then explore the risks to action presented by Hollywood blockbuster action films, and the social media industry that has grown up around them. In doing so, I am not agreeing with Arendt so much as adapting her point of departure to take a first pass at reframing a traditional question: when is film violence too violent?

Violent political disempowerment

Foucault (1980: 83) emphasizes power’s connection to knowledge, and theoretical or exact knowledge’s power to subjugate popular or general knowledge. This may explain why popular culture is democratically relevant: it represents the part of the feedback loop signaling popular resistance to abstraction. While virtual violence may promote thinking and discussion about violence, the concern considered here is that viewers may uncritically consume media/cinema/television without adding their thoughts to the products they encounter (Negt and Kluge, 1993: 170).

Arendt (1972: 143) argues that violence undermines the people’s ‘ability to act in concert’, but in the domain of film violence, this may overstate the case. Although not an action blockbuster per se, having done poorly at the box office, Olivier Assayas’s 2010 film Carlos is a test-case for the thesis that ground-clearing violence opens the way for new forms of solidarity. Carlos defends the use of violence by claiming that ‘[b]ehind every bullet we fire, there will be an idea’. However, Assayas’s film is dialectical and ambivalent, calling the viewer to consider Carlos’s commitment to the ideas behind the bullets. Film – even popular action films – are very capable of existing in dialectical ambivalence, as I argue below.

Violent implement-orientedness

Arendt (1972: 106, 141) cites Engels’s 1878 text, Anti-Dühring, for the suggestion that violence always needs implements. This claim makes sense in light of Arendt’s (1972: 179–80) mid-century belief that the ‘relentless process of more and more’, of increasing technological mechanization, leads to dehumanization. Pitkin similarly theorizes technological change and the increasing mastery of the world by human forces as on balance weakening and enslaving humans.

Changes in implementation – bigger is better – can be said to drive violent Hollywood action films. The Internet Movie Firearm Database tracks the first urban crime appearances of weapons such as the .357 Magnum (1969), the M-60 (1972), the Mac-10 (1975), the Uzi and Ak-47 (after 1982), and the mini-gun (1991). Still, this march toward the biggest, most powerful weapons is not monolithic. It leaves meaningful room for choices between implements. Moreover, in the ultimate moments of blockbuster action films such as Lethal Weapon, a Kojèvian battle for pure prestige is enacted, betraying a strong representational bias for something like a duel, using bare hands alone, de-escalating from the shiniest implements and loudest guns.⁶

Violent predictability

Arendt (1998: 243–7) argues in a related point that humans are unpredictable, and that real action is unpredictable. A process of fabrication leads to a thing that is produced, whereas action ‘can never be reliably predicted’ (1992: 106). Authentic action therefore de-automatizes and interrupts social processes (1998: 246).

The violent action movie, with its sequels and the ad nauseum repetition of plot-points and set-pieces, or the militaristic routinization of violence, is a potential distortion of the unpredictability of action. Violence instead takes the form of a substitute predictability in the face of a hard-to-govern world, and yet another rigidifying element of an intensely choreographed, unreal space. The criticism is on point, although some films use action to subvert the predictability of violence, as in Deep Blue Sea (1999) or many of Quentin Tarantino’s films (Ornella, 2012). Or the violent predictability of the violence becomes the narrative. The colonial marines consider the action in Aliens (1987) to be a ‘bug hunt’, casting themselves as monotonically empowered hunters. Of course, the wildly popular and successful sequel to Alien (1979) exposes the limits of predictability: a harsh dialectic turns the tables, the colonial marines become vulnerable and hunted, and the reversal appeals to audiences.

Violent irreversibility

For Arendt (1992: 177, 1998: 236–43), violence is irreversible: it cannot be undone or taken back in the way that speech can be modified, face can be regained, or recognition belatedly extended. Here, violent films have a significant advantage over real violence. Film’s homogeneous fictional and ‘irreal’ space establishes a ‘different order of care’ about violent fictional deaths than irreversible actual deaths, allowing us to enjoy them without shame (Sobchack, 2004: 270–1). Sobchack (1992: 3–4) brilliantly describes how this irreal space works: film is a ‘fleshly dialogue’ in which perception and expression are reversible and co-related phenomena. In Barker’s (2009: 19, emphasis added) elaboration, the spectator’s lived body and the body of the film are ‘in a relationship of intimate, tactile, reversible contact’. This can be illustrated technically, as Rust (2017) does, by showing how the director directs viewers’ attention from a murder victim back along the path of the bullet to the murderer, establishing moral responsibility and putting the spectator in the unusual subject-position of the victim, without the ensuing real-world consequences.

Film’s plasticity to affirm and deny closure, to reverse perspectives, and to shift from actor to object, doer to passive agent, is one of the greatest representational strengths of film. One of the ways of judging the success of a violent action film is thus the way in which it preserves what Rust (2017) calls the ‘both-andness’ of this dialogue between viewer and viewed, active and passive agents. This evaluative standard is especially important in assessing the action deaths of dismissible agents such as terrorists, foreign nationals, and other suspect classifications, and in narratives such as revenge films.

Action films and ‘the Social’

The ambivalent conclusion suggested above is that passivity is not in blockbuster action films, whether as genre or as artistic medium. But perhaps viewers view films passively? Below, I consider three ways that action in films might blobbify an Arendtian public. Sitting silently, in the dark, watching a heavily advertised mass media spectacle: how could this not propagate an anti-politics and thoughtlessness that loses everything but the name of action? Again, the answer is far from simple, given the representational tools available even in Hollywood’s action films.

Atomized insensitivity

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the period of social distancing, the use of streaming video skyrocketed. Extraction, an action film directed by an ex-stuntman for Netflix, was seen by a projected 90 million people over the first four weeks of its online release (Tassi, 2020). Netflix announced on Twitter that Extraction was on its way to becoming Netflix's biggest film premiere ever on 2 May 2020. Just over three weeks later, George Floyd was killed and Americans poured into the streets in protest.

Clearly, collective, risky, unpredictable action in the age of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the 6 January Capitol insurrection remains possible, as Malkowski (2017: 22, 158, 170–1) argues when discussing collective action occurring in spite and because of the exhibition conditions of ‘spreadable’ activist media posted to platforms such as Youtube. Digital media, which may typically invisibilize some persons and groups, may also bring them into reversible perspective. But what of the global ‘other’, which is often transformed by a thoughtless friend–enemy dichotomy into ‘cannon fodder’ for Hollywood’s action heroes?

Globality

The reified ‘Social’ may have a foreign affairs problem. The ‘red scare’ dramatized by Red Dawn (1984) – or its 2012 remake, which was partially reshot to mis-identify the enemy and preserve its globalized box office viability – feeds into polarizing nativist ideology.⁷ Similarly, 1980s blockbuster action films, products of a last-gasp Cold War politics, often mimic real political violence by exporting reel violence to a Latin American or African or Middle Eastern periphery.

In a nutshell, the basic concern with ‘the global social’ is that it fails to form an inclusive or pluralistic ‘we’. It is the domain of Heidegger’s inauthentic ‘the They’. The specific worry is that Americans do not take responsibility for a democratic republic’s collective deleterious consequences on others, and that a system of domestic securitization privileges a domestic ‘we’ over a global ‘other’.⁸

Extraction’s worrying white-savior politics raises legitimate questions about whether action films inhibit the development of character; cauterize the ability to ‘go visiting’ with one’s imagination; and impede the ability to think in terms of locality and plurality (Arendt, 1992: 43; 1972: 5; Pitkin, 1998: 270). Hughey (2014: 4–16) emphasizes that the appeal of ‘white saviour’ films should not be understood entirely voluntaristically (we have complete control of which films we choose to like) or in a structurally overdetermining fashion (young white men always and only prefer white savior movies). Still, these deficits would be especially worrying if (young male) viewers sought out Extraction precisely because it promised training for a globalized, engaged subject of action, and delivered something entirely different.

As film scholars such as Rust (2017) have noted, this legitimate concern is probably best addressed on a case-by-case basis. Consider a very popular and trend-setting action film, John McTiernan’s Predator (1987). It is not in any obvious sense an aid to clear thinking, but its anxieties are instructive. When a member of an elite military team is killed by, of all things, a camouflaged alien who is hunting soldiers for sport, the frightened members of the team pointlessly and indiscriminately pour automatic gunfire into the jungle in what director McTiernan describes as studio-ordered ‘gun pornography’ (Northrup, 2022). Trees, fallen logs, are shown bursting, breaking in half in the Youtube clip, pithily titled, ‘Shooting Jungle’. It is hard not to read this as a re-scripted version of the Vietnam patrol film, as Tasker (1993: 49, 94) does. In the post-Vietnam context, the fruitless, convulsive destruction of the jungle – ‘an alien nature-space in which men must fight for survival’ (Molloy, 2022: 185), shown in its generic ‘typical particularity’ (Sobchack, 2004: 281) – is a mad moment of hubris and fear.

The way the scene is cut emphasizes that the battle plan adopted by the soldiers does not work. This point is revisited in the ultimate confrontation between Arnold Schwarzenegger’s protagonist, Dutch, and the alien. Dutch goes back to the jungle, covering himself in mud – changing his skin tone, and (in the movie’s logic) his heat signature – trying to trick rather than directly challenge the predator. Schwarzenegger, the viewer’s surrogate, adopts counterinsurgency tactics against the insurgent. While the pacifist would surely counter that this is merely the replacement of an ethic of hunting for an ethic of asymmetrical warfare – and, indeed, hunting is text and subtext in the 1985 script, Hunter (Mikulec, n.d.) – McTiernan invites the viewer to revise this thesis iteratively. The camouflaged alien sets off a jungle-leveling bomb in its death throes, acting more like the imperial outsider than a defeated indigenous insurgent or hunter.

The movie reflects on several themes in the conceptualization of violence, in both Arendtian and non-Arendtian ways: to don deeper camouflage – mud, not paint – is to meld with the jungle that is (seemingly) attacking humans; to eschew weapons for implements and tools of craft is technological de-escalation. The mini-gun is used in the counter-attack on the jungle itself; then, rifles and knives; a bow and arrow; and finally, the protagonist has recourse to sticks and rocks. Tasker (1993: 105) interprets this shift as reversion to frontier imagery, a return to a ‘natural warrior’ or a ‘noble savage’, but the film also serves as text for new anxieties about power and authenticity in a post-industrial age tasked with conquering nature.

Inauthentication

Action films show the absorbed coping of heroes in action, and are thus quite effective at representing and even em-bodying viewers’ fascination with high-stakes, unpredictable encounters. However, they also potentially socialize us to see action as a (commodified) gerund rather than as an unpredictable, creative act, especially if the viewer is invited to focus their attention on the epidermalization of the body-image – the famous muscular actor easily labelled as protagonist and viewer-surrogate (Sobchack, 2004: 50, 179–204) – or if their appeal is to promise what Rust (2017: 19-20, 59) calls ‘unattainable...views’, and ‘fantasies of authenticity’.

Hollywood action blockbusters sometimes achieve their effect by flattening the appeal of everyday life. When not called to action, action film protagonists are almost not alive. Shown in the mundanity of their daily lives, as for example in Taken (2008), the scene is a grim one. They are unskilled in coping with the everyday life-world and its complications. Arendt might observe that theirs is not a rich world of subjects and predicates.

Characteristically, Arendt (1998: 180–1; Tsao, 2002: 104) thinks that an ‘action without a name, a “who” attached to it, is meaningless’. The Arendtian subject is disclosed only in speech, as enacted story. Sobchack (2004), a film studies pioneer of the interpretive approach that seeks to ‘make sense’ of films that touch us, discloses some of the limits of Arendt’s approach by offering an alternative approach influenced not by Heidegger and speech, but by Merleau-Ponty and body. Here, it is the body that is the ground for the reversibility of subject and object perspectives, and film is the conduit of a ‘novel’ way of seeing our seeing (2004: 149). The action film discloses the embodied being that we are, both as spectator and representation, but also the ‘primordial reversibility’ of representation, which thus serves as the common ground of ethics and aesthetics (2004: 310–11, 314–18). Film discloses our shared humanity, in this interpretation.

It is only in her final work that Arendt (1978) relies on Merleau-Ponty as an authority for the importance of a fleshly analysis of spectatorship. Here, Arendt draws attention to ‘the sheer entertainment value’ of the world’s ‘views, sounds, and smells’, and agrees with Merleau-Ponty that the appearance and the ‘look’ of things is primary and fundamental (1978: 19–20).

Although Arendt is drawing heavily on Greek philosophy in these remarks, she is in basic agreement with Merleau-Ponty on the imbrication of subject and object of perception. However, her filiation as a thinker remains with Heidegger (see Villa, 2008: 302-337), and Heidegger theorizes being-in-the-world but pays little attention to the body in Being and Time, according to Hubert Dreyfus (1991).

In the approach inaugurated by Sobchack and developed by other film scholars, the viewer responds as a body to the kinetics of the bodies on screen. Elevated to an archetypal form by the action of the film, action protagonists offer the viewer pure action, possessing names such as Driver (in Driver) or Dirty Harry, which refers not to a quality of the subject but the job itself (he is at ‘every dirty job’); or even more simply and clearly, The Man with No Name. The Running Man, The Fugitive, and Run Lola Run are about an action.⁹

The ‘fleshly’ approach deserves consideration in democratic theory, which tends to ‘textualize’ the subject, whether, as Arendt argues, because action is conducted collectively in speech, or, as Foucault argues, because each body is too particular to justify a somatic turn to a general body-schema. Conversely, democratic theory’s global concerns with bodies that do not appear, and with bodies whose motion is sped-up, simplified, or rendered un-dialogic and irreversible, also deserves consideration in film studies, especially those which center their analyses on metaphors of a dialogue between viewer and viewed. When, that is, does the specific body-image fail to excite the viewer, despite sharing the basic structure of experience with the person represented, and when is the particular body-image, the corps propre, something that no longer feels like home, or like my own body (Sobchack, 2004: 146, 190–1)? Obviously, this is the place to discuss race, gender, national origins, and the place of theory in thinking about action films’ tool-box of representation.

‘The Social’ and the colonization of the public sphere

Pitkin (1998: 252, 255) suggests reframing Arendt’s criticism of the Social in less totalizing terms: as institutional failure, failure of education and character-formation, failure of ideology, failure of ideology critique, and failure simply to act. Both Arendt and Pitkin also invite new attention to the Social in an online age. For Pitkin (1998: 254), the internet is likely to draw us further away from action, freedom, and collective judgment; weaken our ability to act as autonomous, free human beings (1998: 244); and inhibit us from the central human power of starting and creating new orders and projects (Arendt, 1998: 177, 247, 1972: 5). How can democratic theory support film studies in theorizing freedom and globality?

Media may organize the masses to become a deterritorialized spectator that can follow the ‘action’ to far-flung places, taking the globe as its playground and in doing so rendering action a collective fantasy. Such ‘global’ citizen-spectators, ironically attracted by the creative promise of action, where ‘the being of the doer is somehow intensified’ (Dante, quoted in Arendt, 1998: 175; Pitkin, 1998: 264), become tranquilized to the difference of different local and historical situations. Pitkin’s (1998: 7–8) Arendt is primarily concerned with the ‘fascinated horror’ of spectators in a television age, but what of excited, eager viewers in a Hollywood studio and now a Netflix streaming age? Scholarly research by Fu and Govindaraju (2010: 216, 219, 232) suggests that while local mediation processes allow different societies to react differently to the same media products, world cinematic audiences ‘have acquired increasingly indistinguishable preferences in choosing Hollywood features’. This concern demands further attention, and I offer one way of theorizing it below.

The Social

If, as the empirical literature suggests, viewing violence, whether real or ‘reel’, changes the tastes and even the habits of those viewing it, the venerable question of whether to condemn cinematic violence must be addressed once again in the age of streaming media.¹⁰ An inspection of the function of the social space around action films may help to allay Arendtian concerns that, even while at play, Homo Faber undermines their resources for (actual) action.

For help addressing this question, I turn to democratic upvoting on Youtube, which allows a bulk and retail assessment of fans’ reactions to ultraviolence.¹¹ Returning to McTiernan’s Predator, the most liked comments on the clip ‘Mac says goodbye to Blaine’ memorialize interracial friendship and praise the film for humanizing characters. The most-liked comment containing the film’s now-famous gonzo line, ‘Get to the Choppa!’ praises Arnold for success in a variety of professional fields. Similarly, the clip of perhaps the most famous action one-liner, 1984’s The Terminator and the line ‘I’ll be back’, provokes commenters to make political jokes about the efficacy of the US military, discuss cinematic mood and music, and compare the film to its sequels. Precisely where script and film are the most accessible and even at their most vulgarly silly, the commentary offers more nuance than the ignorance, forgetfulness of death, and vulgar politics that we might expect from fan culture.

The body being touched by action in film sometimes leads to disturbing turns, even in the mainstream on Youtube, not to mention the ‘death porn’ sites that Malkowski (2017) considers. The discussion of the scene in Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where the film’s protagonist, Cliff, fights with a female Manson family member centers on this comment: ‘It was weirdly satisfying to see him bash that woman’s face into everything in the house lmao [laughing my ass off].’ At the time of writing, five users criticized the comment, two more regretted the enjoyment they felt, and more than 150 provided approving replies.

Among the replies that are most disturbing are those that try to put into words exactly how the scene touched them. One user explains that it ‘felt extremely tingly and visually pleasing with the audible crunches’. Another transposes the scene to other social contexts: ‘Everyone has a person they want to do that to. I imagined my ex, as it happened. Next time I saw it, I imagined my boss. Lol’. Another politicized the scene: ‘Take that “woke warriors.” Reminds me of T3 when Arnold bashed the female terminator into a toilet.’ Another poster simply sums up the communal experience: ‘I remember when this scene happened the whole movie theatre and I could not stop gasping and laughing to the shear amount of violence that went from 0 to 100 just in seconds [sic].’

One expects to find that the worst of the worst sort of fictional film violence attracts – to use Pitkin’s language – the most uneducated and ideological commentary – or – with Sobchack in mind – the most irreversible and monological perspective. Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) is not a blockbuster Hollywood action film, but it is worth considering whether its violence, taken out of context and clipped on Youtube, results in a cancellation of Rust’s complicated ‘both-andness’. What is the ‘fleshly dialogue’ the social media commentator has with ultraviolence?

The clip in question – salaciously labelled ‘Head Crushing Scene from Irreversible’ – tells a complicated story. Comments are divided between horror; excitement; solicitations for advice on other titillating scenes (‘Are there any other gory movie scenes where someone gets there head bashed in? If so please reply and tell me which movies [sic]’, followed by 13 replies); and interest in the technical difficulties of filming the scene. There is a discussion of how the law intersects with violent revenge, and an extended discussion of cinema versus movies, citing Scorsese and Noé’s criticisms of comic book movies. In this case, the democratic marketplace of opinions does not simply help troll-under-the-bridge types find and consume acts of ultraviolence. Instead, as one poster astutely notes, ‘the whole setup of the film is to totally deny us of gratification from the revenge that takes place [sic]’.

The Youtube discussion of Irréversible refers to a more popular art film, Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive, which grossed over US$75 million worldwide, and to yet another scene of head-crushing. One user explains about Drive that ‘[w]e had watched the whole movie and gained a connection to these characters so it’s disturbing and saddening on many levels’ when the nameless ‘Driver’ stomps on a man’s head, killing him. The Youtube chat picks up on this reversibility, once again critically engaging with Scorsese’s criticism of superhero films and discussing cinematic violence with nuance. In the summary words of one user, ‘It wasn’t like a fast paced, stereotypical action scene. The stomps were excruciating.’

The Youtube comments suggest that an analysis of the culture surrounding film violence partly supersedes the venerable old question of the permissibility of acts of film ultraviolence. Audiences are excited (‘extremely tingly’), but puzzled by their excitement (‘excruciating’; ‘saddening’), in a way that suggests that a prohibited list of reprehensibly violent acts such as head-crushing is not needed. The violent action film’s version of ‘the Social’ is divided internally against itself. ‘The Social’ is even aware in a semi-critical way of its blobbish moments: it ironically admits and confesses blobbish thoughts in order to be recognized, affirmed, and criticized by the rest of the blob. If these Youtube publics are representative of popular culture’s consumption of film violence, they are like snowballs, not blobs, gaining mass as they move – ‘are there any other gory movie scenes…?’ – and also liable to melt in the sunlight of critical reflection – ‘the whole setup of the film is to totally deny us of gratification…’.

Conclusion

Viewing publics, audiences, critics, and scholars have moved cinema – and have been moved by cinema – very far from the concerns about ‘reel violence’ prevalent in the mid-1960s. Instead of pre-Peckinpah bloodless deaths in the era of the Production Code, or 1960s era cinematic ultraviolence, viewers can now easily find very violent films, along with highly curated spaces of online ‘kill count’ and ‘body count’ videos that extract the most extreme cinematic violence from films, and a broader Youtube marketplace of all and everything. There is also a busy, sometimes vapid social media industry built up around commenting on and sharing action videos.

The Arendtian worry is that these films, and their thoughtless publics, will lose the capacity for autonomous action precisely by consuming and celebrating Hollywood action films and ‘reel violence’.

Like Pitkin and Arendt, I am worried by the mediocritization of the life-world, and media’s possible contribution to thoughtless, xenophobic banality. Like film scholars, I worry that without any competing sources of experience, audiences will take this to be what action is, and even what violent death is (Malkowski, 2017: 24). And, like Pitkin, I do not have answers except for the general ones, of which I identify one that connects with Rust’s both-andness and Sobchack and Barker’s reversibility of subjective objects and objective subjects: dialectical power (Pitkin, 1998: 246–50).

Pitkin (1998: 247) describes dialectical power as ‘a way of living with ambiguity and inconsistency that permits intellectual comprehension and mastery without resolving the tensions’. Much of dialectical power remains in the eyes of audiences. Resisting the immediate appeal of the action ‘thriller’ and (at least occasionally) seeking out a film like Elem Klimov’s difficult 1985 film, Come and See, preserves dialectical power, ironically preserving the enjoyment in action by finding compelling representations that authentically touch the viewer. But even big-budget action films can preserve and even create critical space for what Arendt calls visiting with one’s imagination, Pitkin calls ‘dialectical power’, and Sobchack and Rust call ‘passionately intertwined’ forms of encounter.

In the reading offered here, the action blockbuster is not the vanguard of a hypostasized ‘Social’, a domain of tool-bound, speechless inauthenticity, nor is it simply a consciousness-raising enabler of collective action. It functions both above and below barriers such as race, class, and gender, touching viewers in ways that sometimes defy good taste or political correctness. In doing so, film teaches about the body, both as a generalized body-schema and as a socioculturally particularized body-image, as my body. The action film signifies an intense, ongoing interest in creative action, in a doing that ‘intensifies the being of the doer’. Thus, while there may be a more threatening ‘blob’ around the corner, Pitkin is correct. We have not been absorbed into the blob, and our blobbification is not (yet) imminent.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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