Comparing The Pillowman And The Seven Psychopaths

Martin McDonagh is well known for his controversial dark humor works set in Ireland. The Pillowman was the first play not set in Ireland and lead to various other works set outside of Ireland. Across McDonagh’s many successful works, one very similar aspect is the prevalence of violence portrayed. Out of all the plays and movies he wrote, the Pillowman and the Seven Psychopaths are two that are very similar. Although they were written about a decade apart, they both have a story telling a story with a similar message using violence. The Pillowman is a play about a writer, Katurian Katurian Katurian, who gets arrested for the murders of children who are murdered like the characters in his stories. Seven Psychopaths is a movie told in a similar way about a screenwriter, Marty Faranan, who is struggling with writing his latest film about psychopaths and killers but wants the message to be about love and peace.
Despite numerous criticisms about how the play was violence was “gratuitous”, McDonagh says, “The violence has a purpose . . . otherwise there’s nothing particularly interesting about shooting people on stage.”

McDonagh’s works uses violence to attract audience’s attention in order to show the other side of society. The necessity of violence is used in order to portray and emphasize the harsh realities of the many wrongs of society especially in his two very similar works, The Pillowman and the Seven Psychopaths.
Violence was necessary in The Pillowman in order to portray the reality of society’s many problems like police brutality, constructed reality, and the destructiveness. The very first scene opens with two police officers, Ariel and Tupolski, interrogating Katurian and threatening him with violence saying things like “I am going to hit you so hard in the fucking head.” and “Look, why don't we just start torturing him and cut out all this shit?” Police brutality continues throughout the rest of the play and even ends with it. Tupolski shots Katurian in the head, executing him for his crime without a fair trial. This parallels with the police brutality happening in society. In current society, police brutality has been a problem for decades. The number of violence scenes associated with the police, pushes the problem of police violence into the limelight, revealing a major problem in society.
Throughout the play, McDonagh also incorporates ‘fairy tales’ into the play which are symbolizing the stories we see in the news.

These stories are being told to us in the media and we believe them as they’re being told but the actual content of them are questionable whether or not they are trustworthy. Likewise, the stories told in The Pillowman are questionable in content. The story about the Writer and his Brother was told untruthfully in the Pillowman. The details were altered to tell an alternative story. The real story is Katurian is the writers and his brother is Michal but he wrote it with Michal being the writer and himself as the brother. This unveils the problem that reality is constructed through media. The abuse of the brother incorporated in the story was the violence element being used to portray the constructed reality in the

world.
The resulting message that signified the destructive society came from the main story told by Katurian about how the Pillowman helped children kill themselves before their lives turned horrible, sparing them from future suffering. This story seemed to say that it was better to die than live in a society where it was possible to be abused by family members, loved ones, and many other terrible things happen. The violence element was the suicide happening, emphasized the cruel aspects of humankind.
Similar to The Pillowman, Seven Psychopaths incorporates violence in order to stress the fragmented aspects of society. Other than the similar storytelling technique used, the two main characters have parallel. Michal kills the children in the Pillowman because of Katurian. Billy is the Jack of Diamonds killer because of Marty. They both kill people for someone else. Although these two works of McDonaghs are very similar, Seven Psychopaths uses more ironic violence and parallels with religion to portray society and centers more around the film industry.
The movie starts off like The Pillowman with violence where two hitmen are waiting for their victim and discuss torture and killing people through their eyeballs. They suddenly get killed by a masked figure who comes up behind them and shoots them in the head. This scene is extremely ironic, two hitmen getting killed instead of doing the killing, but it cites that we live in a world where people are killing each other.
Despite the irony of this movie, there is still a serious message about society. The movie is set in Hollywood, Los Angeles, an area where society is supposedly the safest. Yet one of the major conflicts in this movie is that Marty’s friend, Billy, a dog thief, makes the mistake of stealing a guy, Charlie’s, dog who is extremely precious to him starts hunting Billy down in order to get his dog back. This major conflict with the numerous psychopaths in this film reveal that Hollywood is not as safe as portrayed in media. This is also an attempt at making fun of how ridiculous society is. Because of his dog, the guy will do whatever it takes to get him back. He kills Billy for his dog, who willing dies for Marty’s story.
The two main stories told in Seven Psychopaths are about a Quaker and a Buddhist include elements of violence in order to portray a dooming message about society. The Quaker story is about a Quaker’s daughter who got killed. The kill feels guilty and turns himself and becomes a religious changed man in prison. He gets released early but the Quaker stalks him until he eventually goes crazy and slits his throat. The Quaker is watching while the killer does this and follows him in slitting his own throat to kill himself. The Quaker says “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” endorsing Gandhi's belief in revenge. The Buddhist monk starts with the intent of taking revenge for the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, ends up setting himself on fire and killing himself as well. These two stories tie together to form a message that death is a better option than to live in society which was a message delivered in The Pillowman as well.
The Seven Psychopaths are also a reflection of the people in society. The seemingly normal people in society can be psychopathic, everybody could be psychopathic. This is because society is so messed up and the world has many problems that can’t be solved that the result is only to kill yourself in order to have a happy ending where you don’t suffer from future events happening.
The previously mentioned scenes of violence attract the audience’s attention with the emotional distress as well as the horror of what they are seeing. Sarah Hemming, a critic, describes the violence as making “you question values: yours, the playwright’s, the world’s. We need these moral ordeals even if we have to pay for them”. We question the moral values of everything when seeing the grotesque in this play. The characters are also seen as more realistic because of their major flaws which allows the audience to empathize for them. They are more humanized and we are able to see more clearly how these scenes and characters connect with society.
Society can be a wonderful place but there are many obstacles. It’s not all rainbows and flowers. With many literature and film that we read or see, it is typical to see the side that we want to see, the good aspects of society. Without the violence in McDonagh’s plays, they would not work as well as they did. His works would probably not have been as successful as they were and the message would be entirely different. In order to show the very real problems happening in society, violence was used to give the audience a reality check.