…in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.

Beowulf —  Trans: Seamus Heaney

A culture like ours, rooted in the worship of a man whose hands and feet have been nailed to beams of wood, should be open to possible links between violence and the sacred. And yet in recommending A Prophet (Un prophète), the prison noir by Jacques Audiard that won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year, I feel compelled to warn you about scenes of violence in the film. A Prophet is not a movie for the faint of heart. But part of what’s refreshing about the film is how it treats human violence with depth and integrity, rewarding our attention with some valuable insights.

There’s a premeditated murder early in A Prophet that is particularly harrowing. The protagonist, Malik, a prisoner of French-Arab descent, visits the cell of another Arab prisoner, an informant named Reyeb, for a sexual exchange. Malik arrives with a disposable razor blade concealed in his mouth and we have seen him coached by members of the Corsican mob on how to transfer this razor to his teeth, where it can be used to sever Reyeb’s jugular vein. Malik himself will surely be killed if he fails in his mission, and his visceral fear of the Corsicans overrides any compassion for his victim, whom he scarcely knows. The murder when it comes is brutal and messy, but Audiard has also given it the disturbing intimacy of a sacrificial rite.  As James Joyce famously wrote about the tragic effect, pity and terror here combine to “arrest” our minds, uniting them with the sufferer, but also with the secret cause of the suffering.

In many ways the subject of the film is the odd intimacy that now develops between Malik and his victim. As the story unfurls, Reyeb returns in ghostly form, seeming to confer almost magical powers on the forlorn Malik. Malik begins to display remarkable talents as he navigates the power structure of the prison. Tutored by the Corsican gangster in charge of things, Malik forges alliances with Arab gangs on the outside. After a second spasm of violence, he takes control of the entire enterprise.

Violence on screen, or in any other art form, is upsetting. Adrenalin flows, our breathing turns shallow. It’s impossible to argue with people who don’t embrace to such material…unless it’s a pretext for a more general philistinism. From Homer to Sarah Kane, great art tends to wound us in one way or another. Moreover, our staggering gift for violence is perhaps our defining feature as a species, so it’s hard to know what is being served by avoiding its representation in art. If executed effectively and with integrity, depictions of violence offer glimpses of mysteries that return us to our lives in a more vital and urgent way. In scenes throughout A Prophet, the camera hovers close to Malik as he ponders such mysteries, as do we, rooted to our seats in the movie theater.

This unnerving dimension of human violence, has been explored in depth by the French cultural anthropologist Rene Girard. The author of the seminal Violence and the Sacred, Girard does not flinch from large ideas. His central thesis is that at a certain stage in their development all human communities faced an impending apocalypse of inter-clan violence, and that this blood feud is the terrifying monster vanquished symbolically in every myth (see the Beowulf quote above). Salvation arrived in the scapegoat mechanism, the sacrifice of the Pharmakos in Athens, for example, who would then be worshiped for his very real contribution to the survival of the community. So violent are we as a species, Girard believes, that those cultures which failed to stumble upon the scapegoat mechanism were wiped out in a storm of contagious tit-for-tat killings – the depravity of Rwanda or Bosnia played out to the bitter end.

It would take a very long post to unpack all the evidence Girard marshals and all the implications of his thesis. To Girard our violence is “mimetic,” by which he means it springs from competition for social roles, which are inherently plastic and adoptable. For me, given my engagement with Buddhist thinking, what’s interesting is how mimetic violence relates to the concept of “emptiness.” It is precisely because we lack any intrinsic, enduring form that, in the grip of dualism, we resort to imitation – mimesis. In contrast to our nagging sense of groundlessness, the Other appears fixed and solid. Secretly craving these qualities we seek to become “original” copies of the Other…which can only happen if the Other is eliminated in the process. We find the Oedipal relationship, in which the son seeks to copy and replace the father, so revealing, not because it is special, but because the tangled dynamic of mimesis becomes clearer when lit up by the primal energies of close family bonds.

Paradoxically, aggressive acts temporarily seem to deliver the solidity longed for by the egoic self, and this makes violence as contagious as small pox. Imagine me striking someone you love and feel how definite you become, how liberated from free-floating anxiety. The anger that runs through you is an entirely negative experience perhaps, but you are certainly free from feelings of “lack” or self-doubt. In the grip of anger we truly do become mirror images, replicas, of each other, and our public world becomes a nightmarish echo chamber of reciprocal violence. The mechanism of sacrifice ends the Hobbesian “war of all against all” as the violence is directed at the scapegoat. By common agreement the blood feud is buried with the victim, who is then worshiped as a god, becoming the lynch pin of all culture and myth. But the peace that descends is only temporary, and the seeds of mimetic violence will sprout again.

Certainly, anyone who has spent time working in the dramatic arts recognizes the significance of mimesis and the plasticity of the self, and all tragic dramas are rooted in sacrificial rites. But in Girard’s view social hierarchy in general arises out of the initial, hidden sacrifice. Even the competitive mimesis of the market economy – in which every new product is instantly cloned – is a distant, sublimated echo of the mimetic violence percolating underneath. And whenever we come to resemble each other too closely – when income inequality levels out, for example – the old atavistic anxieties begin to stir. Opponents of the death penalty, for example, miss how the leveling of incomes during the 1970s caused alarm among the defenders of social hierarchy. As recent governors of Texas seem to understand, erroneous executions are to be secretly celebrated; the more innocent the victim the more the execution will function like an actual sacrifice, buttressing the forces of social hierarchy.

There’s much more. The essential narrative of the Old Testament, according to Girard, is the story of the scapegoat mechanism held in abeyance. Abraham comes close to sacrificing Isaac…but then holds back. Joseph’s brothers’ turn him into a scapegoat…but he survives. With Jesus, however, we arrive at the return of the scapegoat mechanism in classic form. In Girard’s view the final lament of Jesus was that with his own sacrifice our bond with violence would only be buried, not broken. The aggression remained, sublimated in the various forms of culture, ready to continue its destructive magic out of view. Seen in this way, the idea that a second reckoning would surely arrive was more the product of clear thinking than prophecy. To survive, Girard suggests, the species must finally and completely shed its bond with violence – both greed and aggression – in its direct and in its sublimated forms.

While Girard may be extravagant in the claims he makes for his ideas, it’s hard to see where he really goes wrong. One reason the issue of mimetic violence is so hard to illuminate is that those who come to understand it directly, like Malik in A Prophet, are rendered mute by what they have experienced. The murderer exists apart, on the other side of language. Whether you define their difference as a form of spiritual insight or as a moral disfigurement, they speak in riddles or remain silent. From Macbeth on the battlements to Raskolnikov on the crowded streets of St. Petersburg, the killer is drawn into the heart of things to his ultimate peril. The genius of A Prophet is how it shows this dynamic operating in a vehicle as unlikely as Malik, an everyman who seems empowered solely by his bond with the would-be lover he murders.

Depictions of violence in art beg the question: what cherished self images are we willing to forgo in order to lessen the actual suffering we are causing? No doubt we would prefer to forget our own shadow material, which today gets played out, not in primal blood feuds, but in gushers of black oil flooding the waters of the Gulf. From a Buddhist perspective, our ultimate opponent is not aggression or greed but ignorance. Artists examine human violence in order to illuminate the Darwinian habits that also explain our current success as a species. But the violence cultivated by the imperatives of natural selection is now a limiting factor when it comes to our continued survival. Evolution itself now calls on us to break our hidden bonds with violence. A first step, perhaps, is to draw them into the light and look at them with an unflinching eye.