Itchy Fingers: Subverting the Quandary of Cinematic Violence
By: Micah Streeter
Tags: Film Violence, Film, Media Criticism, Francois Truffaut, Indie Film

Itchy Fingers premiered in October 2020 via the Tallgrass Film Festival

There’s a long-standing argument, conflict, problem — what have you — in modern cinema concerning how a film depicts violence. Francois Truffaut famously asserted in 1973 that there is no such thing as an anti-war film, because just showing war onscreen inherently glorifies it. The idea of the ethics of filmic violence have been debated considerably over the years, but increasingly so in the wake of terrible acts of mass gun violence. Hollywood has been caught in the competing crossfire of their money-making addiction to violence, and their public persona of staunch progressiveness.

But the question still remains — What are the moral responsibilities of a film when depicting violence? More cosmically, what are the responsibilities of a media culture in general when depicting violence? This question is especially prescient when related to real life tragedy. Whenever a school shooting happens there are countless documentaries, countless hours of news broadcast solely dedicated to giving updates and explanation for the tragedy. True these are news sources, but how much do these seemingly moral-high-ground-having media sources profit from these tragedies? I know for certain that many people don’t even watch the news — except for when a national tragedy has occurred. The same problem goes of course for narrative films, TV shows, podcasts, plays and any form of media/art that concerns itself with real life tragedy or the likeness thereof.

These are the quandaries explored brilliantly in Anna Nilles and Marco Jakes’ Itchy Fingers, the most though-provoking film I’ve seen all year and verily one of the best. Itchy Fingers follows a young amateur comedian who somewhat mysteriously gets involved with a local theater troupe and is cast largely unwittingly as the shooter in a stage production about a school shooting.

The film is tactically simple and precise. It takes place purely in an auditorium, a house, and sometimes on the sidewalk or in a car. As plain as the film presents, it is full of mystery, employing casual surrealism that hints ever so gently that what we’re seeing is not reality. Through this stylistic conflict between realism and surrealism, the film manages, I believe, to probe these aforementioned questions of violence and tragedy in media and art in a way no film before it has done.

The film somehow now only gets away with long dialog scenes wherein the characters discuss the ethics of portraying such terrible real-life-inspired violence in their art, but thrives on them. Most films indeed would be handicapped by such scenes.

The film brilliantly shows the self-seriousness of the theater troupe’s desire to dramatize real life tragedy for how absurd and problematic it truly is. This can be seen in a scene where the students argue over who should play the shooter — many of them vying strongly to fill the role themselves, and another scene wherein the students present their character backstories to their troupe leader — the scariest villain in recent cinema, played excellently by Elsa Guenther — and she tells them things like, “I like the idea that you lost two of your friends in the shooting because it can give your character some survivor’s guilt for the news interview scene later on.”

Throughout the film, only a couple of characters come close to questioning the ethics of their production. In this way, Itchy Fingers attempts rather successfully to prove Truffaut wrong by subverting the question itself and making a film about the very act of making art/media about real life violence.

Itchy Fingers is somehow one of the best films ever made on the subject of school shootings, without so much as showing a high school parking lot. This is the accomplishment of the film, its spite of Truffaut’s theory, that it is about violent tragedy without showing any violence.

Depending on an audience member’s interpretation of the film’s brilliantly enigmatic ending, this accomplishment either expires explosively or climaxes explosively in the film’s final moments. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

I hope you will find a way to watch the film after reading this and I hope that you will believe me when I tell you that this piece barely scratches the surface of the enigma that is Itchy Fingers. Yes, it’s a film about how violent tragedy is depicted by our modern media and art, but it’s so much more. It’s also about the grim inevitability of violence, the banality of tragedy in a country where a new shooting happens every month, the role the internet plays in procuring and reacting to tragedy, and ever so much more. Books can be written on this film. They should. I for one would love to interview the filmmakers. If by chance they’re reading this, my email is snowglobepics@yahoo.com :)

Thank you for reading and please, I beg you, find a way to see this movie!