The Real Carnage
Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski, 2011.
TOWARDS THE end of Roman Polanski’s Carnage, a woman drops her husband’s phone into a beaker of water. That is the extent of damage any character perpetrates in a film with such a grisly-sounding name. No one is killed in Carnage. Two middle-class New York couples meet in one of their apartments to resolve a fight between their children that took place in Brooklyn Bridge Park: the movie is the duration of their meeting. Watching it again the other night, however, it seemed to me a tremendously violent film. The violence is inflicted by the viewer, I thought, as we watch the couples argue and shout.
Regardless of whether one thinks of watching itself as a complicit act, we seem to, we are all jittery and wide-awake, unmindful of everything else, impatient to keep watching.
