I want you. I want you to beat me. Erotic Violence in “The Hurt Locker”
A fight is not an inevitable thing. It is a social ritual. It occurs in a context in which all the participants agree that the fight is OK. You chose to fight. You participated in the dance.
There is no actual harm in one man telling another man that his mother sucked his cock the previous night. It is just an invitation to dance
He shoved you and you put your hands up but you did not walk away. We take shoving to be a provocation after which one is justified in committing violence.
What the shove says is, I love you and I want to feel the violence of my love for you by having some contact. The shove says, I want some pain inflicted, will you please engage in some mutual infliction of pain? I need some pain. The shoving says, here, look at what I am willing to do: I am offering myself to you, to be beaten.
Will you please attack me so I feel whole again? Here, look, I will shove you again. That is my request. The shove says, “I want you. I want you to beat me.”
He might as well say, you know, I really love you and want to be intimate with you by fighting. Will you join me in a fight? Will you please slake my thirst for violence? I am attracted to you; I think it would be a deep, erotic pleasure to be beaten by you. Would you please? May I have this dance of violence?
These are film stills from “The Hurt Locker,” and the words are excerpted from an advice column by Cary Tennis of Salon.com.
The more I think about this scene, the more Cary Tennis’s words make sense to me.
In other news, hurray to Kathryn Bigelow for being the first woman to win a Best Director Academy Award!
Definitely a celebratory, cathartic moment similar to many I’ve witnessed in-field. Having faced death together and prevailed through courage and teamwork, they let loose. One question is whether their dubious self-awareness is enough to prevent harm, whether the implied cultural “rules” are enough to enforce boundaries at the knife’s edge. Of course, explicitly negotiating a scene is excluded by the imperative to hide the eroticism of the event, putting them in a rather dangerous closet.
I understand what he is saying, but I strongly disagree. He tried walking away 2-3 times. At that point, it was the other person’s choice…are we blaming him now, too?!