I watch a lot of TV. Too much tv really. But I notice that over the last few years films and TV are becoming more and more violent.
I started to watch a movie called Pearl: the Assassin. It began with a man crawling across the floor trying to reach a gun. The floor was covered in blood and broken glass. Already the body is cringing at the effort observed. Inevitably a pair of legs in black appear and a gun is pointed at his head. And fired.
Camera cuts to the bloodied face of a man whimpering somewhere, possibly behind a pool table. A pair of boots are seen walking beneath the pool table. Let me rephrase that. Seen from beneath a pool table a pair of boots walk threateningly. A wide shot shows a woman carrying a heavy lump of metal, the man is still whimpering. Then comes an extremely violent scene of the woman, little more than a girl, smashing the metal tube down on something repeatedly.
My reaction was to think. This is the result of primal therapy which recommends – express your anger.
In the 1960s and 70s a stream of psychological thought ran that it was very unhealthy to keep things in, and recommended using a surrogate, a cushion or a teddy bear, to express the anger felt upon the innocent item. Punching it remorselessly.
This was the outcome. As a society we should not be surprised when violence erupts when these therapies, and more importantly these depictions of unrestrained violence appear so frequently before us.
There is no attempt to express self-control, only violent indulgence of a supposed injustice. Since the movie had just begun there was no indication why the girl should be feeling so violent towards the person. As far as the audience is concerned these are random strangers. There is no backstory, no unfoldment that leads to the action. Simply the confrontation.
I agree it is my choice what I watch. Personally I prefer whodunnits like Midsomer Murders,, Vera or Poirot, but given the choice I will watch an action movie. Bond, goes without saying. Van Damme, less so Seagal who seems to have got steadily less interesting as the years pass. Dolph Lundgren, where the opposite is true. Bruce Willis the list goes on. But given a choice I will watch Mission Impossible or the Bourne Trilogy, even the Expendables. Far more entertaining not merely smash, crash, pummel you out of existence.
But glorifying violence can only lead to the normalisation of poor behaviour. So is it any wonder I don’t like Mondays, where the lesson today is HOW to DIE? We are not given the chance to value strong human values and instead see continuously the presentation of poor, the poorest, of human behaviour.
I don’t advocate suppression, but neither do I believe that indulging a poor feeling is any way to create a strong individual, let alone society. Spewing the emotions into the world does not deal with the issue, just makes a mess of the place.
