In the American cinema, violence breathes comfortably within the confines of genre movies: action films, crime pictures, thrillers. The conventions of such movies both release the formal beauty of violence and remove it from a world that might actually threaten us. When violence is aestheticized, converted into style, we can enjoy it---even enjoy it ten of fifteen times a year. But violence unpropped by convention---that is violence connected to pain---is something of a rarity, and it is always a risk, for it must rise to the level of art or fail altogether, as a graceless miscalculation.