UPDATE: In the wake of the Aurora killings at a movie theatre showing The Dark Knight Rises, and with so many opinions being propagated around movie violence and it’s potential influence on what happened, I thought it would be appropriate to repost my thoughts on the subject to my home page…
I watched Captain America last week, and as you may have noticed by my earlier review I enjoyed it – it was quite entertaining, but in one respect I was also a little troubled by it. I noticed that the energy weapons the Nazis… oh, sorry, they need to sell action figures… “Hydra” used destroyed their victims in a puff of light and smoke. I noticed the same thing in Transformers 3, and Green Lantern, and.. so on.
This is not only a symptom of our culture but also a very very bad thing for movies.
I think it started with Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, where the Martians dehydrated their victims and instantly turned them to dust with their heat ray. In War of the Worlds, the idea was framed well – the harrowing nature of the horror was put into the proper perspective through the reaction of the main character. Tom Cruise played someone who was covered in.. well, dead people. And it was horrible. And, while there was an obvious 9/11 allegory… Hollywood missed the point, and saw an easy way to get around the rating system so they can sell more wholesale carnage to more ticket buyers.
This is cartoon violence, writ large. Just imagine if they had shot the end of Chinatown, or The Godfather, this way. The rival families to Michael Corleone are simply vaporized, or Faye Dunaway’s character simply disappeared when she was shot in the back of her head. Yeah, it wouldn’t have worked. Because the violence was real and true and horrific and necessary.
Conflict is the heart of drama, and there has to be consequences. If you create a story where the dead just “disappear” then you don’t have any weight to the loss. The old saying of “one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic” is now the new norm when it comes to movies. Personal tragedies need not apply. Blockbusters must raise the stakes continuously… and when you remove the personal from the story, and just show CGI-driven violence and vanishing corpses… you fail as storytellers.
There is an astonishing interest in zombies right now. The sociologist in me asks “Why?” I think I may have hit on the reason. The show “The Walking Dead” isn’t about zombies at all, it’s about those we leave behind. It’s about the bodies. Bodies that come back. We are haunted by death, scared (literally) to death of it, because it will come to all of us in the end.
We need to know that. It helps us appreciate what we have to relish the life we are living right now. Some of us are aware of that fact. The ascent corpses in our entertainment makes us embrace stories that put death in center stage. Many… most, I think, in America… they want escape. Provocation, ideas… need not apply. I state this not in judgement but in simple observation.
We’re afraid. We see the news and the unemployment rate and the constant wars and we’re scared. And we want to get away, to escape.
Thus, the absent corpse of our blockbusters. The preponderance of superheroes at our cinemas. We are what we watch… and it’s a sweet comfort to many of us when we see death as a vanishing poof of smoke.
It isn’t that. Not by a long shot.