The Revenge Genre: Experimentation, Violence, and the Underlying Meaning
William Shakespeare made revenge a staple of pop culture when he penned Hamlet roughly 400 years ago. In the cinema, revenge has found its way into nearly every genre and time period. In the revenge narrative, the main character begins demoralized or on the verge of death and spends the rest of the film seeking justice. Revenge films within the last ten years have taken that formula and mutated it into something entirely new. Modern revenge films often play with narrative structure to create an entirely different arc. These films rely on flashbacks, flash-forwards, narrative reversal, and discontinuity to create a fresh and exciting take on the revenge genre. This study will focus on The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002), Oldboy (Chan-wook Park, 2003), and Kill Bill: Volumes I and II (Quentin Tarantino, 2003/2004). These films provide a diverse examination of the revenge film in a global sphere and illustrate the transformation the genre has undertaken in response to a rapidly changing society. This paper will describe the basic conditions inherent in the revenge film and the ways in which these films modify, mutate, or abandon those conditions to create an entirely new kind of revenge narrative.
The revenge narrative is one of the most simplified in all of cinema. The main character is wronged, often in a brutal way, and spends to rest of the film seeking justice. The revenge film is often extremely violent. It uses the initial attack or wronging to justify the main characters sadistic revenge. Garry Gillard writes, “The idea of revenge not only allows filmmakers to play with ‘relative moral values’, it also provides a very useful structure for the narrative. There is a clear goal…” (116). Often times, exemplified in the rape-revenge sub genre, the act of revenge is satisfying only if it exceeds the violence of the original act. In the brutal murder of a one-time attacker, closure can be gained. Sometimes this revenge can be psychological, but more often than not it is physical in nature. While this is the general revenge plot, it can often be modified to fit into other, pre-existing genres. Tales of revenge can be found as sub-genres of heist, gangster, romantic comedy, horror, and action adventure films. This allows the revenge film to take on many shapes and colors that demands a creative storyteller.
Modern revenge films have increasingly relied on unconventional storytelling. The narrative is often disjointed or told in reverse. Most famously, Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento presents its narrative in two distinct strands: one that travels chronologically backwards and one that travels forward until the two meet. To justify the technique, Nolan’s protagonist suffers from short-term memory loss. Each segment represents the amount the character can actually remember. While the narrative structure is radical, the story it tells is straightforward. Leonard (Guy Pierce) awoke one night to find his wife being raped. The attackers killed his wife and smashed his head, leading to his condition. This general plot highlights a general trend in the revenge narrative. More and more the narrative focuses on a man avenging an act committed against someone he loved, which differs with the traditional rape-revenge films (I Spit on Your Grave) which focus on the woman. In Memento, Irréversible, and The Limey, men hunt down men who raped or killed a loved one.
Irréversible, by Gaspar Noé, follows in the path of Memento by presenting its narrative in reverse order. As with the previous film, Irréversible is the story of a woman’s rape and her boyfriend’s quest to kill her attacker. By presenting the story in reverse order, we witness the vengeful act first without understanding what it is in response to. With this, Noé directly challenges the view expressed by Garry Gillard. The act of vengeance, the traditional conclusion in the revenge narrative, is presented first. In Irréversible, the act is amongst the most brutal displays of filmic violence I have ever seen: a man’s face is literally beaten to pieces by a fire extinguisher. Noé has yet to show us the equally brutal rape scene that has caused the attack. This forces the audience to view the act of revenge for what it is: savage and senseless. To correspond with this display of insane rage, Noé films the sequence in a dizzyingly long single take. The camera spins and turns and snakes its way through an underground gay club called The Rectum. Literally, the scene becomes nauseating to watch.
Presenting the film in reverse order also serves a much more important purpose. The film opens with a character uttering the line “Time Destroys Everything” and this line is flashed on the screen at the conclusion. The reverse narrative order directly confronts the traditional Hollywood mode of storytelling. Eugenie Brinkema writes, “The classical Hollywood forward narration is a method of annihilating the past, which is effortlessly forgotten as the film replaces every moment with the more exciting, more eventful, more desired future (where the hero wins the prize, gets the girl, etc.)” (43). In Irréversible, the future is constantly reinforced as the film ticks on. When we finally witness the brutal rape, it only causes us to think of the subsequent murder. When we find out that Alex (Monica Bellucci) is pregnant, it forces us to wonder if she will still be able to have the child after her rape. While the actions in the film slowly become less eventful, they gain more meaning and resonance. The film offers us a solution to the classical Hollywood narrative that does destroy everything (Brinkema, 41).
Kill Bill also presents its narrative in a disjointed manner. Whereas the chronological disunity in Memento and Irréversible serve a direct purpose to the story itself, the same is not true for Tarantino’s film. The film could have been told in chronological order and it would not have changed a thing. The story, as presented, begins with the attack on Beatrix (Uma Thurman) and ends with her killing Bill (David Carradine). The sequence of the killings in between does not matter, and thus, Tarantino moves them around as he sees fit. Tarantino is more concerned with stylistic panache than the philosophy of narrative structure.
The Limey, by Steven Soderbergh, presents one of the most interesting takes on the revenge narrative. As opposed to the previous three films discussed, The Limey follows are rather basic arc. The story is told chronologically, aside from a few, short flashbacks. Soderbergh, however, is not content to let the film play out in a basic manner. Instead, he uses editing to manipulate time and space. Conversations will flow in a natural way, but the images will cut between two people conversing on a porch, in a car, by the beach, etc. This rapid translocation plays with the audience’s sense of space and time (Goss, 241). Soderbergh said, “I could get away with a certain amount of abstraction because the backbone of the movie is so straight” (Johnston). This narrative device puts us directly into the character of Wilson (Terrence Stamp). He has been imprisoned for most of his life and has journeyed to Los Angeles to avenge the murder of his daughter. By playing with space and time, we understand the sheer vastness of Los Angeles, especially for a man newly released from jail. More than anything, Soderbergh uses a straight genre to experiment with narrative structure and the boundaries of storytelling.
As we have seen, the revenge genre provides a perfect space for filmmakers to play with storytelling strategy and film chronology. At a more basic level, however, these films all share one thing in common. They are all exceedingly violent. In fact, the revenge genre seems to advocate the use of violence as a way to gain a proper amount of retribution. The more violent the conclusion, the more satisfied the main character is. These films provide a variety of displays of violence that adopt, and in some ways co-opt the traditional spectacle. “Movies call upon us to imagine that film violence is real violence, that no barrier separates us from the world on film, and that is one key to the pleasure we receive from them” (Rothman, 44). The violence inherent in The Limey most adequately matches this criterion. Most of the violence occurs off-screen, but when it does occur on-screen, it is quick and realistic. In the films climax, Wilson chases Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda) across a beach covered in rocks. As Valentine runs, he slips and snaps his ankle and the bone pokes through his flesh. We, the audience, automatically cringe at the injury. As Wilson approaches him, that cringe turns towards satisfaction because we realize he has gotten what he deserved.
Kill Bill approaches violence in a different manner. The film is so over-the-top that the audience is effectively distanced from the images onscreen. Beatrix uses her Hanzo sword to dismember and maim everyone in her path. Blood shoots out of the wound with such ferocity that the audience cannot help but laugh. The film’s goriest segment is done in animation, creating another barrier that separates the audience from the violence on-screen.
Irréversible pushes Rothman’s argument to its breaking point. The violence displayed in the film is so realistic that audiences were revolted by it. Critic Stephen Rea, in his one star review, wrote, “Before long, someone's getting his head bashed in - literally, with a fire extinguisher. The body jerks on the floor in a bloody pulp, and the audience, I dare say, experiences similar sensations” (Rea). While the merits of Rea’s distaste for this scene are up for debate, the fact remains that Noé has created a piece of work that challenges the typical Hollywood spectacle of violence. He presents violence and dwells upon it, forcing the audience to soak in every aspect; forcing them to deal with the impact of what is being presented. Whether they are embracing violence or co-opting it, modern directors use the revenge paradigm as a test for the aesthetic possibilities, positive or negative, of violent acts.
Up to this point, this paper has analyzed the revenge genre is a strictly filmic way. What is also interesting about the rather simple revenge genre is the way these film-makes have embedded themes and ideas that reflect society at large. Oldboy, directed by Chan-wook Park, is an unconventional and exciting addition to the revenge genre. The film is the story of Dae-su Oh (Min-sik Choi) who is kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years. After 15 years, he is released and told he has five days to enact revenge. Speaking about working within the revenge genre, director Chan-wook Park explained that people, in South Korea and elsewhere, are forced to increasingly hide their rage. They are losing outlets through which they can express the anger building up in them. Therefore, they blame other people for their problems instead of looking within (Hollywood Reporter). In the film, the villain Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae Yu) holds Dae-Su captive because of a rumor he started during high school. The man never came to grips with his own problems and projected them on to a classmate.
The Limey offers a much different societal criticism. Brian Michael Goss argues that the film is a subtle examination of class striations. The antagonist in the film, Valentine, is a rich record mogul who has used the talent of others to accumulate wealth. In direct opposition, capitalism creates a lower class of criminals who attempt to recoup that wealth from the rich. Radical shifts in economic status lead to violent acts. Valentine stumbles into financial strain and resorts to cooperating in a drug organization to make money. While previously he was only an economic parasite, the switch into drugs leads to wealth at the expense of the people’s health. In a radical move, he is willing to have his girlfriend killed to protect himself (244-245).
Kill Bill offers an entirely new critique. Because the hero is a woman, an examination is better suited along gender lines. Judith Franco, writing about the violent French revenge film Baise-moi, details an environment in which women counter the violence of men with lunatic rationality, a symptom of the general anxiety about the state of the heterosexual couple (1). In many ways, this examination gains more forceful weight when applied to Tarantino’s epic. Beatrix is left for dead on her wedding day. Moreover, a man she truly loves shoots her. This betrayal angers her more than the act itself and sparks a trail of revenge. Franco writes, “The female protagonists take masculinity codified traits such as directness, violence, aggression, independence and control in their stride, thus challenging social prescriptions of femininity in terms of attitudes and behaviour” (3). Her brevity in speech and combat typifies Beatrix. She is utterly remorseless in battle. After killing Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) in front of her daughter, Beatrix coolly informs the daughter that if one day she wants revenge, she has a right to it. With that, she is off to her next killing. What is perhaps more interesting to me, after viewing both films dozens of times, is that Quentin Tarantino does not sexualize Uma Thurman. Of course she is a sexy woman, but in the film she is after one thing: revenge. There is no room for sexuality. In many ways, this tempered display matches Franco’s argument better than her intended subject, Baise-moi, which contains numerous lesbian sex scenes, in conjunction with brutal violence. Tarantino bypasses this altogether and presents a woman who does not conform to the basic tenets of femaleness. Even when it appears that Beatrix has settled down with her daughter, we feel as though she cannot completely leave her life of danger. As Bill said, it is her nature. In this respect, Taratino is able to present a woman that has emotional needs but is not subjugated to the typical “Leave it to Beaver” type of motherhood.
The revenge genre provides a perfect setting for modern directors to experiment with storytelling techniques, especially in non-traditional ways. Still, these directors stick to a basic story, but approach it in different ways. While the films may seem to be superficially violent, this display often serves different functions. Additionally, the revenge genre provides a perfect, popular genre to embed societal criticism and observation.
The revenge narrative is one of the most simplified in all of cinema. The main character is wronged, often in a brutal way, and spends to rest of the film seeking justice. The revenge film is often extremely violent. It uses the initial attack or wronging to justify the main characters sadistic revenge. Garry Gillard writes, “The idea of revenge not only allows filmmakers to play with ‘relative moral values’, it also provides a very useful structure for the narrative. There is a clear goal…” (116). Often times, exemplified in the rape-revenge sub genre, the act of revenge is satisfying only if it exceeds the violence of the original act. In the brutal murder of a one-time attacker, closure can be gained. Sometimes this revenge can be psychological, but more often than not it is physical in nature. While this is the general revenge plot, it can often be modified to fit into other, pre-existing genres. Tales of revenge can be found as sub-genres of heist, gangster, romantic comedy, horror, and action adventure films. This allows the revenge film to take on many shapes and colors that demands a creative storyteller.
Modern revenge films have increasingly relied on unconventional storytelling. The narrative is often disjointed or told in reverse. Most famously, Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento presents its narrative in two distinct strands: one that travels chronologically backwards and one that travels forward until the two meet. To justify the technique, Nolan’s protagonist suffers from short-term memory loss. Each segment represents the amount the character can actually remember. While the narrative structure is radical, the story it tells is straightforward. Leonard (Guy Pierce) awoke one night to find his wife being raped. The attackers killed his wife and smashed his head, leading to his condition. This general plot highlights a general trend in the revenge narrative. More and more the narrative focuses on a man avenging an act committed against someone he loved, which differs with the traditional rape-revenge films (I Spit on Your Grave) which focus on the woman. In Memento, Irréversible, and The Limey, men hunt down men who raped or killed a loved one.
Irréversible, by Gaspar Noé, follows in the path of Memento by presenting its narrative in reverse order. As with the previous film, Irréversible is the story of a woman’s rape and her boyfriend’s quest to kill her attacker. By presenting the story in reverse order, we witness the vengeful act first without understanding what it is in response to. With this, Noé directly challenges the view expressed by Garry Gillard. The act of vengeance, the traditional conclusion in the revenge narrative, is presented first. In Irréversible, the act is amongst the most brutal displays of filmic violence I have ever seen: a man’s face is literally beaten to pieces by a fire extinguisher. Noé has yet to show us the equally brutal rape scene that has caused the attack. This forces the audience to view the act of revenge for what it is: savage and senseless. To correspond with this display of insane rage, Noé films the sequence in a dizzyingly long single take. The camera spins and turns and snakes its way through an underground gay club called The Rectum. Literally, the scene becomes nauseating to watch.
Presenting the film in reverse order also serves a much more important purpose. The film opens with a character uttering the line “Time Destroys Everything” and this line is flashed on the screen at the conclusion. The reverse narrative order directly confronts the traditional Hollywood mode of storytelling. Eugenie Brinkema writes, “The classical Hollywood forward narration is a method of annihilating the past, which is effortlessly forgotten as the film replaces every moment with the more exciting, more eventful, more desired future (where the hero wins the prize, gets the girl, etc.)” (43). In Irréversible, the future is constantly reinforced as the film ticks on. When we finally witness the brutal rape, it only causes us to think of the subsequent murder. When we find out that Alex (Monica Bellucci) is pregnant, it forces us to wonder if she will still be able to have the child after her rape. While the actions in the film slowly become less eventful, they gain more meaning and resonance. The film offers us a solution to the classical Hollywood narrative that does destroy everything (Brinkema, 41).
Kill Bill also presents its narrative in a disjointed manner. Whereas the chronological disunity in Memento and Irréversible serve a direct purpose to the story itself, the same is not true for Tarantino’s film. The film could have been told in chronological order and it would not have changed a thing. The story, as presented, begins with the attack on Beatrix (Uma Thurman) and ends with her killing Bill (David Carradine). The sequence of the killings in between does not matter, and thus, Tarantino moves them around as he sees fit. Tarantino is more concerned with stylistic panache than the philosophy of narrative structure.
The Limey, by Steven Soderbergh, presents one of the most interesting takes on the revenge narrative. As opposed to the previous three films discussed, The Limey follows are rather basic arc. The story is told chronologically, aside from a few, short flashbacks. Soderbergh, however, is not content to let the film play out in a basic manner. Instead, he uses editing to manipulate time and space. Conversations will flow in a natural way, but the images will cut between two people conversing on a porch, in a car, by the beach, etc. This rapid translocation plays with the audience’s sense of space and time (Goss, 241). Soderbergh said, “I could get away with a certain amount of abstraction because the backbone of the movie is so straight” (Johnston). This narrative device puts us directly into the character of Wilson (Terrence Stamp). He has been imprisoned for most of his life and has journeyed to Los Angeles to avenge the murder of his daughter. By playing with space and time, we understand the sheer vastness of Los Angeles, especially for a man newly released from jail. More than anything, Soderbergh uses a straight genre to experiment with narrative structure and the boundaries of storytelling.
As we have seen, the revenge genre provides a perfect space for filmmakers to play with storytelling strategy and film chronology. At a more basic level, however, these films all share one thing in common. They are all exceedingly violent. In fact, the revenge genre seems to advocate the use of violence as a way to gain a proper amount of retribution. The more violent the conclusion, the more satisfied the main character is. These films provide a variety of displays of violence that adopt, and in some ways co-opt the traditional spectacle. “Movies call upon us to imagine that film violence is real violence, that no barrier separates us from the world on film, and that is one key to the pleasure we receive from them” (Rothman, 44). The violence inherent in The Limey most adequately matches this criterion. Most of the violence occurs off-screen, but when it does occur on-screen, it is quick and realistic. In the films climax, Wilson chases Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda) across a beach covered in rocks. As Valentine runs, he slips and snaps his ankle and the bone pokes through his flesh. We, the audience, automatically cringe at the injury. As Wilson approaches him, that cringe turns towards satisfaction because we realize he has gotten what he deserved.
Kill Bill approaches violence in a different manner. The film is so over-the-top that the audience is effectively distanced from the images onscreen. Beatrix uses her Hanzo sword to dismember and maim everyone in her path. Blood shoots out of the wound with such ferocity that the audience cannot help but laugh. The film’s goriest segment is done in animation, creating another barrier that separates the audience from the violence on-screen.
Irréversible pushes Rothman’s argument to its breaking point. The violence displayed in the film is so realistic that audiences were revolted by it. Critic Stephen Rea, in his one star review, wrote, “Before long, someone's getting his head bashed in - literally, with a fire extinguisher. The body jerks on the floor in a bloody pulp, and the audience, I dare say, experiences similar sensations” (Rea). While the merits of Rea’s distaste for this scene are up for debate, the fact remains that Noé has created a piece of work that challenges the typical Hollywood spectacle of violence. He presents violence and dwells upon it, forcing the audience to soak in every aspect; forcing them to deal with the impact of what is being presented. Whether they are embracing violence or co-opting it, modern directors use the revenge paradigm as a test for the aesthetic possibilities, positive or negative, of violent acts.
Up to this point, this paper has analyzed the revenge genre is a strictly filmic way. What is also interesting about the rather simple revenge genre is the way these film-makes have embedded themes and ideas that reflect society at large. Oldboy, directed by Chan-wook Park, is an unconventional and exciting addition to the revenge genre. The film is the story of Dae-su Oh (Min-sik Choi) who is kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years. After 15 years, he is released and told he has five days to enact revenge. Speaking about working within the revenge genre, director Chan-wook Park explained that people, in South Korea and elsewhere, are forced to increasingly hide their rage. They are losing outlets through which they can express the anger building up in them. Therefore, they blame other people for their problems instead of looking within (Hollywood Reporter). In the film, the villain Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae Yu) holds Dae-Su captive because of a rumor he started during high school. The man never came to grips with his own problems and projected them on to a classmate.
The Limey offers a much different societal criticism. Brian Michael Goss argues that the film is a subtle examination of class striations. The antagonist in the film, Valentine, is a rich record mogul who has used the talent of others to accumulate wealth. In direct opposition, capitalism creates a lower class of criminals who attempt to recoup that wealth from the rich. Radical shifts in economic status lead to violent acts. Valentine stumbles into financial strain and resorts to cooperating in a drug organization to make money. While previously he was only an economic parasite, the switch into drugs leads to wealth at the expense of the people’s health. In a radical move, he is willing to have his girlfriend killed to protect himself (244-245).
Kill Bill offers an entirely new critique. Because the hero is a woman, an examination is better suited along gender lines. Judith Franco, writing about the violent French revenge film Baise-moi, details an environment in which women counter the violence of men with lunatic rationality, a symptom of the general anxiety about the state of the heterosexual couple (1). In many ways, this examination gains more forceful weight when applied to Tarantino’s epic. Beatrix is left for dead on her wedding day. Moreover, a man she truly loves shoots her. This betrayal angers her more than the act itself and sparks a trail of revenge. Franco writes, “The female protagonists take masculinity codified traits such as directness, violence, aggression, independence and control in their stride, thus challenging social prescriptions of femininity in terms of attitudes and behaviour” (3). Her brevity in speech and combat typifies Beatrix. She is utterly remorseless in battle. After killing Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) in front of her daughter, Beatrix coolly informs the daughter that if one day she wants revenge, she has a right to it. With that, she is off to her next killing. What is perhaps more interesting to me, after viewing both films dozens of times, is that Quentin Tarantino does not sexualize Uma Thurman. Of course she is a sexy woman, but in the film she is after one thing: revenge. There is no room for sexuality. In many ways, this tempered display matches Franco’s argument better than her intended subject, Baise-moi, which contains numerous lesbian sex scenes, in conjunction with brutal violence. Tarantino bypasses this altogether and presents a woman who does not conform to the basic tenets of femaleness. Even when it appears that Beatrix has settled down with her daughter, we feel as though she cannot completely leave her life of danger. As Bill said, it is her nature. In this respect, Taratino is able to present a woman that has emotional needs but is not subjugated to the typical “Leave it to Beaver” type of motherhood.
The revenge genre provides a perfect setting for modern directors to experiment with storytelling techniques, especially in non-traditional ways. Still, these directors stick to a basic story, but approach it in different ways. While the films may seem to be superficially violent, this display often serves different functions. Additionally, the revenge genre provides a perfect, popular genre to embed societal criticism and observation.
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