"It's just a flesh wound!" The Black Knight's famously hilarious line in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" toys with our expectation of the relationship between the graveness of events on screen and their effect on the characters contained therein. Here's why (aside from the absurd) injuries are never an accident in film.
Coming to you from Now You See It, this great video essay examines the purpose of physical injuries to a character in film. I think one of the hallmarks of great writers and directors is a marked intentionality, where everything is a careful choice and nothing on screen is left to chance, an example of such being an injury to a character. Film by its nature offers a limited construct within which to create a world sufficiently complex in its characteristics to be entertaining or insightful while not overrunning the very literal temporal boundaries that are inherent to viewer expectations. Thus, film has developed its own language for explaining the intricate psychological makeup of a person efficiently and effectively, one of the most powerful tools being physical injury, which (depending on the context) can mean numerous things. The video takes an interesting look at the possibilities.
