Everyone worries about violence. Even people who perpetrate violence habitually or frequently, tend to do so because they believe that they're pre-empting violence that will surely be coming to them or their loved ones or whoever. The rest of us just worry about getting caught in the cross-fire. And we worry about what causes violence.

As often as not it's Hollywood, apparently. Or computer games. Sometimes even music. Many of the people who worry most about violence seem to view the arts as some kind of malignant force, some kind of nightmare of Plato, a creature that if left to its own devices (or, more correctly, to the devices of those who create it) will wreak havoc on the impressionable minds of our youngsters - because it's always the youngsters who are in trouble in these scenarios, always the youngsters who watch too much T.V., who take the images they're increasingly subjected to too much to heart. It's the youngsters who are going to see somebody being shot in a movie, and then get hold of a gun and go and shoot someone themselves. (Curiously, it rarely seems to be the gun's fault.) It's the youngsters, in short, who are most impressionable.

I believe youngsters are impressionable. Of course they are: they're trying to figure out exactly how the hell they're supposed to make this "life" thing work, and they've got different people telling them different techniques from every corner. However, the more histrionic accusations of some of the anti-arts brigade are downright baffling to me: do these people seriously have so little faith in their children that they genuinely believe that a healthy and empathetic youngster can be turned into some kind of killing machine just because they watched a violent movie? I wouldn't be surprised if more than a few people have gone out and killed or harmed others after psyching themselves up on a feast of imaginary violence - but if you want to convince me that there was nothing wrong with those people in the first place, you've got an uphill battle ahead of you (to use a commonplace yet violent idiom - see, the movies didn't invent violence).

However, I do strongly believe that the arts, including movies, have a role to play in shaping human morality. I believe movies - and other art forms, but we're talking about movies here - I believe movies can plant in a person's mind the idea that a certain code of behaviour is morally acceptable. This is not the same thing as saying that movies will make a person go out and kill somebody else - but I am saying that movies can, over time, lead a person to think that violence towards some people, in some circumstances, is acceptable or even laudable. This, I think, is a far more pernicious and sinister influence. It doesn't mean that that person is going to go out and act upon this moral viewpoint - that still depends entirely, I think, upon the person's original mindset. But violent acts perpetrated by individuals, though catastrophic for those they touch, only touch a handful of people. Violent morals, on the other hand, work their way into society and spread throughout it, quietly and inexorably until they become ingrained. They slowly rot away
the heart of our communities.

Now, don't for a moment think that I'm suggesting that a single film can have such a devastating effect on society's moral fibre. I'm not, that would be ludicrous. But film culture - ah, well that's another issue entirely. When the culture of a film industry is that killing people is broadly morally acceptable, or at least morally neutral, then I think we have a problem. Of course this gets into the whole sticky issue of who's setting the cultural agenda: the film-makers or society at large. To put it another way, when it comes to violence does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? To be honest, I think it's a mixture of both. This isn't a simple issue and there isn't a simple answer. There usually isn't in life - that's what makes life constantly interesting. However art, especially popular entertainment such as films, I think plays a major role in perpetuating moral views that may already exist within society. Whether they could change society's morality, I don't know. I suspect not, or at least not very effectively. But that doesn't really mean that giving society the proverbial pat on the back and telling not to worry, it's doing just fine is the best way to go. Especially when society's got things a little bit wrong.

You're probably thinking right about now that this is all a bit excessively heavy, especially for what is ostensibly a discussion of a comedy - namely, Hot Fuzz. That's probably a fair accusation. But questions of morality have always fascinated me, and I think that when you get to the point of saying that there are some aspects of life - such as funny films - that are irrelevant as far as morality is concerned - well, then you're taking a big step in the direction of arguing that morality itself is irrelevant, and that's getting into pretty scary territory. I don't think we want to go there.

I'm thinking about all these things because: (A) I saw Hot Fuzz over a fortnight ago now, and I've finally stopped laughing (though not at the Chinatown rip-off line: I'm going to be laughing at that one for a good few years yet, I think), and (B) Hot Fuzz is a parody of the kind of movies that have always bothered me.

Movies like Die Hard. Of course, Die Hard is never explicitly mentioned in Hot Fuzz, and as far as I'm aware it's not parodied either (though a second viewing could well put the lie to this statement), but it's of the same broad genre that Hot Fuzz so relentlessly sends up: the action-cop-killing spree genre. Die Hard's a pretty good film as far as these things go: it has some good lines, it has a lot of exciting action, and it pays at least lip-service to some kind of realism, relatively speaking. But it's also got a great big moral black hole at its heart.

What I'm talking about is this: throughout its running time Die Hard unashamedly, overtly, perhaps even deliberately, puts forwards the idea that human life has a definite value that can be instantly negated. The bad guys in Die Hard are bad, really bad: they kill people on a whim, they subject people to acts of terror, and - nastiest of all - they're mercenary. (Oh, and a lot of them are European - i.e., UnAmerican.) They are undoubtedly people who deserve to be brought to justice.

Unfortunately, Hollywood isn't generally too interested in justice. Straight-up vengeance is more its cup of tea. So the bad guys in Die Hard don't get arrested, they don't get tried, they don't get imprisoned - they get slaughtered. By a single character who is judge, jury, and executioner - well, actually, just judge and executioner. The jury is irrelevant here. By being bad guys, the bad guys have effectively forfeited their life. Life in the mindset of your average Hollywood action flick is not a right, it's a privilege.
Now, if the crimes depicted in Die Hard or films like it were committed in real life I'd be clamouring for the perpetrators to be locked up for a long, long time. I wouldn't really care if they'd had an unhappy childhood, or whatever, I'd pretty much be of the opinion that they'd given up their right to freedom when they deliberately set out to commit the crimes in question. But giving up the right to freedom is a long, long way from giving up the right to life. I'm not going to get into a debate about the death penalty here because that really would be going a bridge too far, but I am worried about the morality of films like Die Hard. It's not just because they place so little value on human life - but because they seem to revel in it. Witness the way the camera lingers on Alan Rickman's anguished face as his character plummets to his death in slow-motion at end of the film. This is meant to be the big pay-off: the eye-for-an-eye that the chief villain surely deserves. Personally, I find it sickening.

It's not even because of the problem that after a while villainy becomes subjective - bank-robbers one day, "enemies of the state" the next. That's worrying enough in its own right, but it's not what I'm explicitly concerned about here. No, what disgusts me about displays of violence such as those depicted throughout Die Hard are their sheer denial that human life has any intrinsic, inalienable value that can never be entirely removed. It's this sense of human worth that's supposed to separate us from the bad guys: it's the simplest of dichotomies - they don't value human life, we do. But no, Hollywood action films largely prefer to present the morality of the schoolyard: "They did it first." They killed, therefore we can kill them. There's no moral high-ground here, just quicksand. And it's not just in films: witness the way any act of terrorism in the world today invariably results in the victimised society lashing out at its perceived "enemies" with ever more destructive acts of violence. It's quick and easy and gives you a cheap thrill. It doesn't get you a lot of justice, though, and nobody looks good when they're rolling around in the mud with the other lowlifes. Once everyone's covered in muck it doesn't really matter who got dirty first.

Sometimes you can sense Hollywood films getting a little bit fidgety about this. One of the films referred to frequently throughout Hot Fuzz is Bad Boys II. I haven't seen it, but Channel 10 here in Australia screens the original often enough that in my more bored and uninspired moments I've sat down to watch it. At the end of the film the two main characters have finally cornered the main bad guy. One of the good guys aims his gun at the bad guy's head, but he's stopped from pulling the trigger by his buddy saying words to the effect of "He's not worth it." This is a favourite refrain in Hollywood films, and it has the nice effect of looking on the surface like an attempt to claw back the moral high-ground. But it's not, really. It's not morality by elevation, it's morality by lowering: the speaker and the person he's speaking to stay where they are, morally speaking; the guy at the wrong end of the gun, however, is lowered to the level of some kind of subhuman scum. Not even worth killing. Note that: it's not that the bad guy's life has any inherent human value in it, despite all the horrific things he's done - it's that he's so bad that he doesn't even deserve to be killed. Not yet, anyway.

But this isn't really the pay-off the film's audience has paid to see, so some films - such as Bad Boys - pull a kind of moral sleight-of-hand in which, when the good guys aren't looking, the bad guy suddenly pulls out a hitherto unseen gun and - but wait! No! Someone spotted him! BANG! BANG! BANG! And the day's saved, and the bad guy's dead just like he's supposed to be, and the credits roll and everyone lives happily ever after. Except the bad guy, of course, but that's what you get for being a bad guy.
Like any sleight-of-hand this isn't moral magic, it's just a con. The film's writers and director and producers hope that the audience won't notice that they've just been conned into believing that the film has some kind of moral heart after all. There was a bullet with the bad guy's name on it from the moment the film was first pitched. It was just a matter of finding a way to deliver that bullet to the bad guy's head. It was just a matter of making the bad guy just a little bit badder, so that the more squeamish members of the audience would feel okay about him getting killed in the end.

Perhaps the most disturbing film I've seen in this regard is Shrek. Yes, I know, that sounds weird: after all, it's a kid's film - ostensibly, anyway, though like most kid's films these days it has plenty of nods and winks to keep the adults amused. And for the most part I found it amusing. (Though the "it's what's inside that counts" message that the film was supposedly put forward gets a bit muddled at the end there: Shrek isn't attracted to the princess because she has a great personality, he's attracted to her because he's an ogre and, well, gosh, turns out she's an ogre too, and because he's an ogre he finds other ogres attractive. If a dog chooses to mate with another dog instead of a cat, it's not because the other dog has a better personality.) But when I think back to Shrek these days it's with a great sense of disquiet deep inside. This is because the abiding image I take away from the film is one of terrible vengeance.

As in any fairy-tale, there's a villain in Shrek. And he's nasty, and he's a torturer, and naturally we in the audience don't like him. But in a film in which nobody really seems to suffer terribly much - even the gingerbread man keeps taunting and accusing even while he's being dismembered - the villain of the piece pays an awful price for his wicked ways. In short, he's killed. And in a most horrific way, too: he's eaten by a dragon. If that's not the stuff of childhood nightmares then I don't know what is. The whole scene is a bizarre and disturbing anachronism in a film that preaches a cheery message throughout, with the characters continually cracking jokes even through the direst peril. Indeed, the most disturbing aspect of the whole baddie-killing scene is just how light-hearted it is: an horrific death, then celebrations all round and a jaunty song to finish things off. I don't know about you, but I find that a deeply unsettling way to finish a kid's film. It would be different if the film itself were different, of course: traditional fairy-tales are not exactly renowned for their cheerfulness or careful avoidance of horror. But Shrek - the film, anyway, I must admit to not having read the book - isn't a traditional fairy-tale. It's a modern Hollywood fairy-tale, with all the jokes and bright colours and light-heartedness that implies. And in one scene, all the violence that we've come to expect from Hollywood.

There's plenty of violence in Hot Fuzz, too. That won't surprise anyone who saw Shaun of the Dead, and indeed the violence, or at least the way in which the violence is depicted, is far worse than anything you might see in your average Hollywood action film (or kid's film, perhaps). There are close-ups of dismembered heads. Even more horrific, there's a head that actually explodes under the pressure of a falling chunk of masonry - and the camera gazes for a long time on the aftermath of that incident, as it does on all of the incidences of violence in the film. Whether it was necessary to depict these scenes in such gruesome detail is debatable, but let's face it: Hot Fuzz is a film about a terrifying murder spree. People are gonna get killed in it. That's the nature of the beast.
But I find it notable that, at least to my way of thinking, the murders aren't played for laughs. The exasperation of Sean Pegg's police officer is, yes, the indifference of his colleagues, sure, the unpleasantness of the murder victims, you bet - but the murders themselves? The audience might be tempted to laugh in queasy disbelief at the sheer audacity of the manner in which the film depicts the murders, but I don't think the audience is ever intended to laugh at the actual act of murder. These are horrific acts, perpetrated against innocent people, and they're depicted - in excruciating detail, yes - as precisely that.

However, the treatment of the murder victims isn't what really caught my attention when I saw Hot Fuzz. What interests me infinitely more is the way the film deals with the murderers. It's fair to say that in probably just about any of the films that Hot Fuzz lovingly and scathingly sends up, the murderers would themselves suffer some violent and lethal retribution. Yet in Hot Fuzz, no such thing happens: the only one of the conspirators who dies, does so as a result of an accident. When it appears that one of the other murderers is about to die in that most gruesome and yet most clichéd Hollywood way, being impaled on a large spike (see the conclusion to the Crow for an example), the scene is indeed played for laughs - and then again for a few more laughs later on, just for good measure - but the joke is entirely dependant upon the fact that the bad guy doesn't die. And in fact, with the one exception noted above, that's the case with all of the bad guys in Hot Fuzz: the film even goes out of its way to demonstrate that they're all still alive, and facing justice through the legal system. A long way from the standard fate of most bad guys in most Hollywood action films.

So at the end of the day, Hot Fuzz comes across as a bizarrely moral film: yes, it has a high body count, but we are never in any way invited to conclude that any of the victims deserved their fate. Indeed, a central conceit of the film's plot is that in the deranged view of the murderers (who naturally we as the audience come to hate), their victims are indeed "bad guys" ruining the town in which they lived, and thus "deserved" to be killed. Sound familiar? Of course, you'll rarely hear such sentiments verbalised in a Hollywood film - but as they say, actions speak louder than words. Perhaps the problem is that we have a very literal understanding of the word "action": killing a bad guy is an action; sending him to prison isn't. I don't expect that the makers of Hot Fuzz ever intended it to be anything much more than a very funny film - and for the record, they achieved that task admirably - but for me at least, it was also one of the most unexpectedly moral films I've seen recently. Maybe I just have strange priorities, but when I think back to the film the scene that most vividly comes back to me is that of the murderers having their mug shots taken.

Well, that and the guy's head exploding. Even the funniest comedies have a tragic edge.