Too much to bear: the classic movie Kurt Vonnegut walked out of
Obviously, there’s a huge difference between reading or writing about violence and watching it unfold on the screen in live-action under either a fictional or authentic guise, and it turned out that Kurt Vonnegut was a lot more comfortable dealing with it on the page than he was at the cinema.
The influential author’s work heavily relied on notions of equality and pacifism, but he wasn’t averse to detailing the violent side of existence, either. Eggs need to be broken in order to make an omelette, and Slaughterhouse-Five stands out among his bibliography as an exploration of how humanity’s predictions for violence and conflict beget nothing but death and destruction.
Vonnegut was anti-war, anti-nuclear, an atheist, a socialist, a pacifist, and a self-proclaimed Luddite, so it makes sense that watching a chainsaw on a massive screen mutilate somebody would prove too much to bear. It might be a classic and a pop culture staple that continues to capture the imagination of each new generation, but Scarface was a hugely controversial title at the time of its release.
It was never going to be anything less than entertaining when it was powered by the 1980s dream team of writer Oliver Stone, director Brian De Palma, and leading man Al Pacino, though, but negative headlines followed the loose remake of Howard Hawks’ 1932 original from pre-production to premiere.
If the movie wasn’t fielding accusations that it was stereotyping and dehumanising Cuban-American immigrants and their attempts to build a new life for themselves in the United States, then it was being criticised for its depictions of rampant drug use or the graphic scenes of violence and gunplay that made a life of crime look like something worth aspiring for.
The great and the good were out in force when Scarface held its premiere on December 1, 1983, but Vonnegut didn’t stick around for long. Including credits, De Palma’s orgy of excess clocks in at a hefty 170 minutes, but the author barely even made it past half an hour before he’d decided he’d seen enough, got up, and walked out of the auditorium, never to return.
Variety‘s report from the first celebrity-stacked screening of Scarface, which was attended by Cher, Raquel Welch, Lucille Ball, and Eddie Murphy, noted that Vonnegut “walked out during the grisly chainsaw shower scene,” having realised then and there that this wasn’t his kind of movie.
More than 40 years on from its release and Pacino can barely comprehend the fact that Scarface has yet to come down from its cultural pedestal, but if Vonnegut decided that the chainsaw sequence was about as much as he could stomach, it stands to reason that he never returned for a second bite at the coke-fuelled cherry to see what all the fuss was about.
