It Is Happening Again
I imagine it's unlikely, but does anyone remember a post I made about a year or so ago about how over the past few years I have grown increasingly, inexplicably hypersensitive to seeing or hearing violent acts portrayed in books, movies, television, etc.? I am beginning to think that since then it's gotten just a little bit... ah, worse. That is, I think.
Or that is I really don't know what to think. All I know is that the situation has reached a point where I find myself incapable to sitting through any of the long list of movies that I have been dying to watch for so long without having to leave somewhere during the film when the violence starts up. Even at the hint of violence, or a detailed discussion of it, has me scurrying under the bed faster than my mother's cat when it hears her walking through the house rattling its bottle of ear medicine. Scenes of violence that as of before now would have never even phased me, would have had me making the sort of George Constanza "that's gotta hurt!" wisecracks in the MST3K spirit of the situation much to the amusement of my surrounding friends. And now... huh, wow. Things sure are different these days.
And the thing is that all my life I have always been a big fan of horror movies. I can never get tired of watching Phantasm. The Evil Dead trilogy is Shakespeare to me. I could spend hours discussing the nuances (or that thereof) of Herschell Gordon Lewis gore flicks. But none of these pictures have ever bothered me before. And to be honest they still don't. And I think the reason why I have always enjoyed horror movie violence is because there was never a moment, even as a child peeking between my fingers during the scary parts, that I didn't believe that what I was watching wasn't really happening. Just like listening to the Misfits or watching Tom & Jerry cartoons, the violence was just that -- broad, flashy and over-the-top, like something out of a Technicolor comic book.
But what I am beginning to realize more and more is that I no longer believe that it is the violence itself that's affecting me; it's the suffering. It's watching life in agony, in prolonged torture, wishing and praying for death. And perhaps even meeting death, knowing that it's coming, and that it's going to be the worst possible way that you'd ever imagined dying, and having absolutely no control over the matter. I think that's what's really fucking me up these days. Having the reality of that possibility thrust into my face on occasion, and me unable to take that in and ruminate on it. Forcing me to confront it.
It's gotten so that I can't even leaf through my copy of American Psycho anymore, despite how funny I always thought it was. This album cover by the band Mortician upsets me so much that I have to keep burying it in the back of the bins so I won't have to look at it when I pass that aisle at work. And all I could think about while watching Grizzly Man is please please please don't play Treadwell's last moments on tape being eaten alive by a bear because there is just no way I could go through life after that without his sobs and cries haunting the rest of my days. And what's worse, even though Herzog never played it for the audience to hear, it haunts me worse than if he had played it because the suffering that I hear in my own head must be a thousand times worse than what he could have heard through those headphones on that tape.
So perhaps it's not so much the violence, but the true realism brought on by the act itself. Even when the suffering isn't portrayed onscreen it doesn't matter. In fact it often makes it that much worse, that must more frightening. Because as much as I laughed and thrilled to such cartoonish splatter-fests as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Nightmare On Elm Street, it was Errol Morris' The Fog Of War that really kept me up at night with all the house lights turned up bright. Hands down the most truly frightening horror movie that I've seen in years.
But what I'm talking about here isn't really so much fear. It's sorrow, I suppose. Distress over the suffering of others. Of the realism of true horror and it's consequences.
I also mentioned back in my original post that I was beginning to believe that a lot of this distress and sorrow came along shortly after the events of 9/11. Watching it all unfold on television as it was happening, and even watching it again (I have the entire day's events on NBC recorded on three VHS tapes) didn't really affect me. It was shocking, alarming, yet at the same time not precisely real to me. Like watching one of my many beloved horror movies, I felt disconnected from the actual event itself, with its suspenseful, timely toppling of the World Trade Centers like some outlandish effect from a Michael Bay summer blockbuster. As much as I was aware that it was really happening, I still felt distant from it -- the same sort of distance I always got from any other violent movie where I didn't have anything reality-based invested in it.
But it was a few weeks later when my father showed me a computer screen saver that somebody gave him of the events of 9/11, like a macabre slide-show starting with the planes crashing into the building all the way to the images of firefighters picking through debris for survivors as well as fallen comrades. And yet the image that struck me the fiercest was of the people jumping from the tower windows. These people who were so desperate for escape from death, even if their escape meant inevitable death by other means, were what horrified me to the core. A close-up of one jumper, a faceless balding man in a white shirt and tie who strongly resembled my father, brought immediate tears to my eyes. The realization hit me then that this was somebody's father, someone whose daughter loved as dearly as I love mine. And soon the man jumping from the window did become my father in my mind, and all I could picture was my dad, a kind, gentle and phenomenally generous man who has dedicated so much of his life to community service and philanthropy, being put into such a desperate situation due to violence as to having to make that kind of snap decision on how end his own life, finally put everything into sharp perspective to me. And not just in relation to the events of 9/11, but to all violence and suffering in general.
Gosh... I dunno why I am becoming the way that I am. Who really knows how it all started or why. But it's starting to concern me a little. I'm not usually this much of a wimp about these things. And yet here I am, wimping out in the most wimpy of ways. I used to think it was just a post-9/11 trauma phase, but now I'm just not so certain anymore.
Does anybody else out there feel like the events of 9/11 made them more sensitive to watching violence in movies or television? Or even less sensitive? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
Or that is I really don't know what to think. All I know is that the situation has reached a point where I find myself incapable to sitting through any of the long list of movies that I have been dying to watch for so long without having to leave somewhere during the film when the violence starts up. Even at the hint of violence, or a detailed discussion of it, has me scurrying under the bed faster than my mother's cat when it hears her walking through the house rattling its bottle of ear medicine. Scenes of violence that as of before now would have never even phased me, would have had me making the sort of George Constanza "that's gotta hurt!" wisecracks in the MST3K spirit of the situation much to the amusement of my surrounding friends. And now... huh, wow. Things sure are different these days.
And the thing is that all my life I have always been a big fan of horror movies. I can never get tired of watching Phantasm. The Evil Dead trilogy is Shakespeare to me. I could spend hours discussing the nuances (or that thereof) of Herschell Gordon Lewis gore flicks. But none of these pictures have ever bothered me before. And to be honest they still don't. And I think the reason why I have always enjoyed horror movie violence is because there was never a moment, even as a child peeking between my fingers during the scary parts, that I didn't believe that what I was watching wasn't really happening. Just like listening to the Misfits or watching Tom & Jerry cartoons, the violence was just that -- broad, flashy and over-the-top, like something out of a Technicolor comic book.
But what I am beginning to realize more and more is that I no longer believe that it is the violence itself that's affecting me; it's the suffering. It's watching life in agony, in prolonged torture, wishing and praying for death. And perhaps even meeting death, knowing that it's coming, and that it's going to be the worst possible way that you'd ever imagined dying, and having absolutely no control over the matter. I think that's what's really fucking me up these days. Having the reality of that possibility thrust into my face on occasion, and me unable to take that in and ruminate on it. Forcing me to confront it.
It's gotten so that I can't even leaf through my copy of American Psycho anymore, despite how funny I always thought it was. This album cover by the band Mortician upsets me so much that I have to keep burying it in the back of the bins so I won't have to look at it when I pass that aisle at work. And all I could think about while watching Grizzly Man is please please please don't play Treadwell's last moments on tape being eaten alive by a bear because there is just no way I could go through life after that without his sobs and cries haunting the rest of my days. And what's worse, even though Herzog never played it for the audience to hear, it haunts me worse than if he had played it because the suffering that I hear in my own head must be a thousand times worse than what he could have heard through those headphones on that tape.
So perhaps it's not so much the violence, but the true realism brought on by the act itself. Even when the suffering isn't portrayed onscreen it doesn't matter. In fact it often makes it that much worse, that must more frightening. Because as much as I laughed and thrilled to such cartoonish splatter-fests as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Nightmare On Elm Street, it was Errol Morris' The Fog Of War that really kept me up at night with all the house lights turned up bright. Hands down the most truly frightening horror movie that I've seen in years.
But what I'm talking about here isn't really so much fear. It's sorrow, I suppose. Distress over the suffering of others. Of the realism of true horror and it's consequences.
I also mentioned back in my original post that I was beginning to believe that a lot of this distress and sorrow came along shortly after the events of 9/11. Watching it all unfold on television as it was happening, and even watching it again (I have the entire day's events on NBC recorded on three VHS tapes) didn't really affect me. It was shocking, alarming, yet at the same time not precisely real to me. Like watching one of my many beloved horror movies, I felt disconnected from the actual event itself, with its suspenseful, timely toppling of the World Trade Centers like some outlandish effect from a Michael Bay summer blockbuster. As much as I was aware that it was really happening, I still felt distant from it -- the same sort of distance I always got from any other violent movie where I didn't have anything reality-based invested in it.
But it was a few weeks later when my father showed me a computer screen saver that somebody gave him of the events of 9/11, like a macabre slide-show starting with the planes crashing into the building all the way to the images of firefighters picking through debris for survivors as well as fallen comrades. And yet the image that struck me the fiercest was of the people jumping from the tower windows. These people who were so desperate for escape from death, even if their escape meant inevitable death by other means, were what horrified me to the core. A close-up of one jumper, a faceless balding man in a white shirt and tie who strongly resembled my father, brought immediate tears to my eyes. The realization hit me then that this was somebody's father, someone whose daughter loved as dearly as I love mine. And soon the man jumping from the window did become my father in my mind, and all I could picture was my dad, a kind, gentle and phenomenally generous man who has dedicated so much of his life to community service and philanthropy, being put into such a desperate situation due to violence as to having to make that kind of snap decision on how end his own life, finally put everything into sharp perspective to me. And not just in relation to the events of 9/11, but to all violence and suffering in general.
Gosh... I dunno why I am becoming the way that I am. Who really knows how it all started or why. But it's starting to concern me a little. I'm not usually this much of a wimp about these things. And yet here I am, wimping out in the most wimpy of ways. I used to think it was just a post-9/11 trauma phase, but now I'm just not so certain anymore.
Does anybody else out there feel like the events of 9/11 made them more sensitive to watching violence in movies or television? Or even less sensitive? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
posted by Melissa at 1:36 PM
5 Comments:
This may not be altogether a bad thing for you…it may mean you’ve been RE-sensitized to violence rather than DE-sensitized like so many are today. You processed 9-11 like it means that violence is a real possibility with chaotic and painful consequences, and it reminded you of how grotesquely detached from the real world the masturbatory nature of TV/movie/video violence usually is.
You may be right, Greg. Only problem is that I feel like I might be temporarily(?) hyper-resensitized since the little things that most people can endure in a so-called violent movie have had me cowering behind the couch. I mean I couldn even watch something as ridiculously goofy as the movie Final Destination without it bothering me for weeks over how all the kids were dying. I mean that's just a little too sensitive!
I've been royally fucked up for months after Hurricane Katrina, preoccupied with all the suffering down there in the south. Probably even more than should be considered normal, although maybe being that senstive to the situation should be considered normal, I guess.
Needless to say I haven't been able to tune in to the news in Iraq in ages. Or at least nothing containing pictures.
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I started to get "re-sensitized" to violence on tv and in books when I was stuck at home for a year in 2002-2003. On days where I didn't have anywhere to go, or I couldn't go anywhere I'd just get all these fears in my head. So I can't watch violent stuff 'cause the whole time I'm thinking, "what if that happens to me?!"
You know the funny thing is that I never think about these things happening to me. I always worry about them happening to someone else. I think I have a harder time dealing with watching someone else suffer than suffering myself.
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