Shock

Last night I watched Paddy Considine’s extraordinary film Tyrannosaur and, like all good pieces of creativity, it got me thinking about a lot of things – show, not tell vs tell not show, violence in cinema and literature, among other things. The stand-out scene for me in the film – without giving any spoilers away – was the confrontation between Peter Mullan’s character (Joseph) and Olivia Colman’s character (Hannah). There’s a crucial line in which Hannah speaks of the abuse she receives from her husband and that one line – I’m not going to say it, you’ll have to watch the film to find out – really shook me. I think saying something – merely mentioning something horrific that has happened in the past – can sometimes be more shocking than actually showing us. This haunts imaginative people the most because they think up a thousand different scenarios of what happened – they think of the smell of the room, the weather outside, the look on their faces, everything.

The film was gritty and dark and, of course, shocking – it stayed with me through the night and my mind kept overlapping, thinking of every scene, every section of it. In short, it was brilliant and I would definitely recommend watching this amazing film. It’s not a comfortable watch but I think time has told me I like watching films that unsettle me a bit, films that haunt me and influence me.

Tyrannosaur really made me want to write a story about domestic abuse and when I was in the shower I came up with an idea. Because domestic abuse has been written about and examined and will forever be put forth in all forms of art it’s hard to write it in a refreshing way – Tyrannosaur hit the nail on the head mainly, I think, because it didn’t try to be original, it just...worked. My story – if I peruse it – will demand more thought. The film, however, did bring back memories of a novella I wrote called The Orange Demons which is about violence – just like this film. Tyrannosaur seems to be a film about struggling with violence – Joseph has to keep his anger and his violence under control when Hannah is trying to free herself from the violence in her life – it’s kind of a run away from violence film.

The Orange Demons was a three month project written with people like William Burroughs in mind. I guess the story is a more a ‘what if’, the extreme version of a society crumbling by violence and people giving up, people stop fighting. Stories like The Orange Demons or any sort of post-apocalyptic story comes from the writer asking questions – what if this happened? What if we had no order? What if the bad guys win? My problem, however, with The Orange Demons is not only that it needs a bloody good edit but that it’s not as scary as it could be. When I say scary I don’t mean ghosts banging on the door or the bump in the night I mean actually “Oh My God this could happen to me” scary. This is purely because it is set in the future so it works on the basis that “this could happen” but the reason films like Tyrannosaur or Harry Brown work and are shockingly scary is because it is showing us a world we live in but know nothing about. Or, for some us, do not something about.

 I think one of my next short stories will enter into the gritty, dark, shocking world. I’ve been working on fairy tales and fables recently – all of which are dark, I should add – but I have yet to write a short story that is gritty and dark enough for my liking. I’m working mainly on short stories because I’m doing research for a novel proposal I have to give to an MA course I want to do when I finish University. So, here’s hoping!