5/2/2005
I’m torn…
On one hand, I’m such a huge scifi geek that the idea of Steven Spielberg doing a remake of the scifi classic “War of The Worlds” with stars like Tom Cruise and Tim Robbins thrills me. Mr. Robbins might be a hopeless liberal, but the guy can act!
On the other hand, do I REALLY want to see another movie with the general theme being the untimely deaths of tens of millions of innocent men, women, and children? I thought the disaster movie craze of the 1970’s was bad… That was NOTHING compared to these past five or ten years! And, these days, it’s just really difficult for me to watch that kind of movie.
Five years ago, when I first became a Dad, strange things began to happen to me. First of all, I began noticing that there really was a lot of crap-ola on television. “Uh oh,” I thought, “how am I going to protect my kids from all of this?”
Part of my solution was to do the opposite of what some family groups have recommended. Where quite a few conservatives downgrade their television and confine their scope only to local channels, or get rid of the thing entirely, I UPGRADED our cable service and am actively locking out any channel I don’t like. That way, I get to keep the channels with the good content and filter out the bad. Yes, I’m paying more for less, but there really is a lot of great programming for kids on cable TV, and I want them to have access to that.
But I digress…
Another strange thing began to happen to me after becoming a Dad… I suddenly became almost hyper-aware of all the terrible things that happen to kids in the world every day. Yes, I knew about it all before, but, for some reason, all of it really began to impact me on more of an emotional level, whereas, before, it was more factual.
My wife even got upset with me recently because, when she tried to tell me something she had heard on the news regarding some children, I cut her off and asked her not to tell me. At first, she was just surprised by my reaction. Which makes sense because, in her mind, she was asking me to take note of an incident so that, ultimately, we could better protect our own children.
In that, she’s absolutely right. But, you know, I just couldn’t deal with it.
I hear almost daily a litany of these kinds of stories on the news… We all do.
We hear about children being kidnapped, raped, murdered, abused, etc., and sometimes it just gets to be too much to bear. I get to the point where I feel that if I hear just one more sad story, I’ll just lose it.
How does that relate to the remake of WOTWs?
Well, about a month or so ago, I was watching one of the early trailers and, in one scene, a bunch of families basically are wiped out by the cold, ruthless aliens. Men, women, children, instantly incinerated as if they never even existed.
And I immediately thought to myself, “if I see that movie, and they have a lot of scenes like that one, I’m going to feel terrible for a long time to come.” Either that, or I’m going to have to shrug it off and treat it like it doesn’t mean anything.
But I don’t want to just shrug it off and, if you ask me, Steven Spielberg doesn’t want me to either.
If I shrug off the violence of the movie, then I have to lessen my sensitivity to human suffering. Yes, the suffering in the movie is all make-believe, but heardening your heart to that which you see in the movie can mean that you harden your heart to REAL human suffering; of which there is much.
Spielberg does not want you to simply shrug off the violence because he WANTS the movie to have an affect. Moviemakers want you to be moved and affected by their work; it’s one of the main reasons why they make films in the first place. And in the case of movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” and “Schindler’s List,” you should be moved!
Films like “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” remind us how bad and how good humanity can be. From the depravity of the Nazis who tried to eradicate an entire culture, to the goodness and bravery of people like Oscar Schindler (Schindler’s List) and Captain John Miller (Saving Private Ryan), who sacrificed everything to do the right thing.
Do you remember in the movie “Schindler’s List” the scene where Oscar Schindler is sitting on his horse, having gone for a brisk and enjoyable ride through the countryside, overlooking a town where the Nazis are rounding up Jews? The Nazis were beating them up, shooting them, looting their homes, brutalizing the women.
Then, Schindler notices a small child, wearing red, walking calmly amidst the chaos. The fact that the movie was shot in black and white made this little girl stand out all the more.
There she was, walking down the street, while death and chaos reigned supreme, and innocents were being slaughtered like cattle. Then she walks out of sight and is not seen again until later in the movie, when Schindler spots a small red bundle of a girl lying dead in pile of human bodies, ready to be either burned or buried in a mass grave.
This is the kind of think Spielberg wants us to remember. And remember we must.
That is because the violence in this movie, and in “Saving Private Ryan” is not gratuitous. It has a purpose and, though devastating to watch, it actually makes us better people to watch it.
But these days, my tolerance for gratuitous violence is at historically low levels. And modern films are better than ever at delivering violent content and messages. I think of movies where the violence is senseless and ceaseless; basically a parade of human carnage. Movies like “American Psycho,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” and series like “Friday The 13th,” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” the “Alien” series, and on and on and on!
And each movie tries to be more frightening, more violent, and more offensive than the last, just to capture the hearts and minds of the increasingly hardened audience. Not that Spielberg is necessarily taking that approach with “The War of The Worlds,” but, overall, the trend is clear; how many humans can we kill in a single movie?
And I’ve found that, with each passing year, my tolerance for the mass-murder-movie experience grows less and less. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing.
With all that said, the jury’s still out on whether or not I’ll show up for “War of The Worlds.” It is scifi after all.
David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com
2 Comments
The Mass Murder Movie Experience
How many humans can we can kill in a single movie?
Trackback by Blogcritics — 5/2/2005 @ 9:26 pm
You gotta learn to take the bad with the good, Mr. Flanagan. After all, we homo sapiens have a very violent history. Perhaps all this fictional mayhem and virtual violence you lament is somehow cathartic. Or perhaps it’s simply the price we pay for being aware of our own mortality. Whether or not we want to be reminded, humans beings are complicit in a quotidian carnage across the planet. Millions of animals are slaughtered for food or for sport and entertainment (Prada handbags don’t grow on trees, you know, and neither is bullfighting an abstract activity — the bulls really die). Thousands of people are raped, murdered and mutilated by other people (not only in Iraq and Afganistan but all over the world). Can it be surprising that perpetrators of violence on so a grand scale are haunted by these terrible deeds? Can we really expect to avoid complicty in wholesale violence that is conducted — if not by us directly — then in our name and for our benefit? Whether on the movie screen or in the voting booth, each of us are obliged to look deep within our souls to see what we have wrought. It’s not a pretty picture but there’s no one to blame but ourselves.
Comment by Martin Gorda — 6/6/2005 @ 5:08 am