I’ve noticed that most stories have a strange perspective of violence: Though many of them contain moral injunctions against the acts of violence themselves, they are also strikingly disinterested in depicting that violence from the perspective of its victims. What is the last movie or show you’ve seen, book or story you’ve read, where violence is a terrifying event to be escaped or fended off or recovered from – rather than a mode of engaging with and achieving change in the world? When we are invited to empathize with a victim of violence, it is usually with the anticipation of future righteous violence inflicted against their victimizer. Seldom are these moments of violence just tragic outcomes, unfortunate conclusions to interpersonal interactions: They are almost invariably a thread in a plot intended to begin and conclude in some greater juster and more beautiful violence. Thus, violence exists in two narrative roles: To define bad guys and subsequently to punish them.
This is perhaps simply the structure that emerges when you decide ahead of time that you want to your heroes to partake in violence but don’t want it to be completely random. We want our heroes, we want our heroic bloodbaths, we want to still be able to admire the heroes after they are bathed in blood – so the structure of the story is placed radially around that point, setting up hapless victims, vicious villains, and heroes who have no choice but to intervene in the language of unmediated massacre. The artistic perspective emerging from these constraints one of a deranged and atavistic view of the world, a world where bloodshed is the only language and all reason is gibberish. Over time and repetition and through judicious pruning of the process that selects heroes and villains, this also serves more and more to prop up and justify institutional violence as the sole legitimate bulwark against a violent world.
At the same time, I’m not one who believes there is never any justification for violence, or one who believes people have no right to self-defense. Violence is unavoidable under many circumstances, and reasonable under many others. However, consider the way our conception of violence is shaped by this structure: Victims are erased and flattened, reduced to prizes to be won or infantilized into non-existence, and perpetrators are neatly sorted into Good and Bad, largely based off of who kicks fewer puppies. There is little overlap: There are those privileged to speak the language of blood, and those who are too weak to learn it. This is, we learn, the way the story must be told, the way of the world.
This is all broadly true across genres with one notable exception: Horror. Horror positions violence as a strange and invasive force, one not wieldable by the protagonists for a variety of reasons, ranging from physical disparity to supernatural interference to moral or legal compunction. Even if these protagonists do find a means to fight back, they are usually left scarred by the intrusion of violence into their lives. If there is triumph, it is the triumph of survival, not of justice. Some mention also must be made of True Crime: Even if it isn’t a genre of fiction, it is still a story of violence and victims, and we choose what to focus and emphasize on even if the facts of the story are known. What role do victims play in these stories? Usually, by definition, a mute one. Of course, true crime needn’t necessarily be a story of murder or even of violence – but let’s not kid ourselves, this is usually what crime means in this context. The victim’s role in this story is one of haplessness and innocence, of being the effigy to the sins of society. The story of their death becomes the story of how Evil is real and it is here and it is vested bodily in the form of a bad person. Often left unstated but implied is the conclusion: We must therefore build a counterbalancing bulwark of righteous violence against this evil. Or perhaps I’m wrong about these genres – I am a devotee of neither. These are merely the impressions I have gleaned.
Isn’t it odd, though, that the only time we’re interested in the stories of victims is as they are victimized by supernatural external sources – or criminals so powerful and brilliant they border on the supernatural themselves? There are so many people in this world forced to flee from violence, to redefine their lives around the hole it leaves, to walk in knowledgeable fear of a knife or a gun or a bomb, people who, if they are ever spoken of at all, are used as props to justify further retributive violence. Do we avoid looking at their stories because we are scared of what we may see if we look too close, too deep? An uncanny resemblance in the shape of their suffering, a familiar hand behind the circumstances that torment them.