Tag Archives: Violence in the media

Lovecraftian Loathing Lullaby

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Lovecraftian Loathing Lullaby

Eldritch horrors ain’t my thing.
I dread the nightmares that they bring.
Monsters, killing—all that stuff?
Years ago, I’d had enough.

Inflation, nuclear arms, pollution?
Fantasy is no solution.
I’m tired of the razzmatazz—
computer games and all that jazz.

Horror’s not just a game, you know.
Lately, it’s the status-quo.
Game violence a pretext for
prompting violence galore.

No wonder guns and bombs and knives
have complicated modern lives.
We keep getting dumb and dumber.
Modern life is such a bummer!!!!

 

 

Prompt words today are Eldritch, (oh, come on, now!) jazz, pretext, inflation. The other prompt word hasn’t been posted. Image by Robert Coelho on Unsplash. 

 

Eldritch is an English word used to describe something otherworldly, weird, ghostly, or uncanny. In contemporary culture, the term is closely associated with Lovecraftian horror.

An Antidote to Violence

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An Antidote to Violence

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One thing that has increasingly contributed to my depression over the past few years is my fear that the world population is becoming addicted to violence. Movies, TV and video games become more and more barbaric in their depiction of cruelty. It is as though mere shootings and stabbings are no longer enough. Writers think up unspeakable types of torture and infuse our favorite movies and TV shows with them. I don’t dare describe the cruelties, the memories of which literally keep me up at night. I can mention some of the shows, though, and if you’ve seen them, you will know the scenes of which I speak.

Homeland, The Bridge, Scandal, Revenge, The Blacklist–all of these are programs that, as excellent as they are, I had to stop watching. The horrors just escalated and escalated to a point where it was torture even hearing the sound effects. (I have always had to close my eyes during scenes of violence. Now I have to plug my ears and hum as well.) Yet there must be many who watch, eyes wide, and wait to see how much more horrible the next torture will be. If this were not true, they wouldn’t be some of the most popular shows on television. And, like their parents, our children have become voyeurs of violence. No wonder they bully and bring guns to school to mow down their own friends.

Recently I saw a training film shown to military personnel who were sent to Japan following WWII. Written by the man whose real name you would not recognize but whom everyone knows as Dr. Seuss (yes, that Dr. Seuss) it showed how the Japanese were schooled and brainwashed in the years leading up to the war to train them to accept violence as a patriotic (and religious) duty. How often has religion been used in this way? The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem (and many other) witch trials and now ISIS are examples that trip easily from my memory, but I’m sure each person reading this could provide more examples.

If hate can be taught, why can we not devise an antidote to it? Art, writing, dance, volunteer activities, choir, music and some sports are all activities that fill minds and hopefully push out the fascination with (and time for) violence. (Unfortunately, wildly popular sports such as football and boxing contribute to the world’s obsession with violence.)

Kids need to be afforded a substitute for what now fills their minds. Is this being furnished? Is anyone creating non-violent video games that can engage young minds as completely as the violent ones do? Are books being written that are as alluring as series of books about werewolves and vampires and zombies where love and sex and romance are bonded to death and violence?

And kids are not the only ones. The 50 Shades of Gray series? What was it about those books (Oh my!) that appealed so universally that they outsold every other book in the history of the written language in Great Britain and are second only to a Harry Potter book world-wide? Is violence so much a part of every one of us that we cannot help but devour these books? What element of them other than the sadism and masochism created the draw?

Jung acquainted us with the different archetypes within us all and world-class villains such as Hitler, General Tojo, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot certainly brought out the dark sides of their legions of followers, but after all of these horrific periods of history, balance was restored. Whether this will be possible now that the weapons have become more cataclysmic in scope, it remains to be seen.

A few years ago, I was astonished to see one of the questions used to measure and define the personalities of members of the social introduction site OkCupid was, “In one respect, wouldn’t a nuclear war be kind of exciting?”. I don’t know the numbers of answerers who answered anything other than “No,” but I guess the very fact that the question was accepted (members were allowed and encouraged to submit their own questions) indicates that there are people in the world who would answer “Yes,” and brings up a further possibility that makes me shudder—that there is a possibility that such a person might someday (if not already) be in possession of the means by which to start such a war.

Impossible?   How possible was it that a good portion of a nation would follow Hitler or Pol Pot or General Tojo? Idi Amin? Saddam Hussein? The fact is that fear drives us to do much that might be against our natural instincts—or at least the natural instincts we choose to follow.

The fact is that we are human, and as humans we do have a complicated goulash of emotions, needs, impulses, compulsions, fears, dreads and instincts. Events and necessity trigger these contrasting sides of us and one very strong instinct in the masses is mob mentality. It may be hard for most who have read this far in this post to believe that they would ever be so led, and it may be true that they would not; but history shows that time and time again, it has happened. The acts of a charismatic leader, supported by henchmen in sufficient numbers, backed up by fear, fueled by prejudices efficiently stirred up, have stained most societies on earth at some time or other.

All of the villains I have named share many common traits, including one you might have noticed. None of them are American! If someone from another country (or a Native American) were to make up a similar list, who from America might be included? Would it be Joseph McCarthy? J. Edgar Hoover? Charles Manson? Custer? Some high mucky muck of the K.K.K? It is harder to see one’s own mob instinct and in the U.S., the examples might be more limited in numbers or occult in practice, but it may be that in our blood lust for vampires, zombies, werewolves and violent computer games–added to our insistence that the right to own any kind of gun from a purse pistol to an assault rifle is a patriotic right if not an obligation—are all components of our own mob instinct.

How is it that ISIS can reach out and recruit followers from our midst? Could it possibly be because we have prepared a path for them? Schooled our young people so thoroughly in the appeal and glamour and blood lust of violence that we have made them easy targets for those who might appeal to such stirred-up instincts?

It is easy to blame every other country in the world for harboring violence, but when will we start to take responsibility for our own? How many countries are viewing the movies and TV shows we produce that spew out violence? How many buy our computer games and books and comic books that all send the same message? Have we, perhaps not knowingly and with no clear-cut agenda, somehow become the world’s instructors in war games and violence? And even if we have the niggling sense that this could perhaps have some gram of truth in it, would we have the bravery to admit it, let alone the intelligence to somehow stem the tide?

In the past few weeks, I have felt such a huge change in mood. I feel energized, excited about planned activities and more rounded out. It think it came about in a larger part from working with kids and young adults in Camp Estrella. That excitement in seeing their enthusiasm and growth has not waned. I am enthusiastic about ongoing and upcoming plans–the dance classes and sugar skull decorating coming up–but I think, also, that people I’ve met in the blogging world have given me such reassurance that there are good people everywhere who want to do right and want positive things for everyone–not just those of their own country or race or religion or sex. The hope for the world lies within people such as you who take the responsibility to foster in your own children and the children of others interests that will lead them away from the violence that is coming at them from so many directions.

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Railroaded and Blended: Thirstless in a Bloodthirsty World, Sober in a Laughless One

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Railroaded and Blended: Thirstless in a Bloodthirsty World, Sober in a Laughless One

Every day, our children are mesmerized by computer games where they hunt down and kill. TV shows go from violent to horrific—all echoing a world made increasingly more warlike as the war games of children grown into the war games of politicians and financiers who seek political and financial gain by first vilifying and then “going after” their enemies.

It is not my dreams, but rather my waking world that’s tortured by the bloodthirst of our world. At night, in my bed before sleeping, I fear for my own breathing and have to go outside for the comfort of cool night moving air. That scene from “The Bridge” where a child is buried alive with water slowly filling his crypt—will not go away. I am stuffed to strangling with earth’s cruelty.

My dreams remain my own, so it is not sleep I fear, but rather that time before sleep when I release hold of my consciousness and let my mind drift into worlds I am half-conscious of. That’s when I give way to thoughts of my own death, jerking myself back from fears of what comes next.

I don’t share the world’s appetite for torture, violence, killing and revenge. I want to scream “Please! Stop!” and run in the opposite direction, for I can’t follow where the world’s mania leads us. And this is why, when a friend asked me to go to a movie with her and suggested “The Railway Man” with Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, I pleaded for a chic flick instead. My uncle died in the death march on Bataan. I saw the “Bridge on the River Kwai,” “A Town Like Alice” and have read about how the real life and death of women prisoners of war was minimized by “Paradise Road.” I’ve read of the horrors of those Australian nurses marched into the sea and shot, the rapes, deprivation, starving and executions.

This is why I said, “No more!!!” when my friend asked me to see that particular movie, wherein former POW Colin Firth goes in search of one of his Japanese captors. This year I have read two books dealing with the tortures of the slave trade and two more about the Spanish inquisition. I simply cannot take any more tales of torture and man’s inhumanity to man, and so it was that I chose the movie “Blended” starring Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler and my friend agreed to attend this “light comedy” with me.

This is how we came to be sitting in a theater in Ajijic, Mexico, with approximately ten other viewers similarly misinformed as to the utter dross and simplistic humorlessness of this movie!!!!! (Suffice it to say that all tortures are not physical in this world.) This was the singularly worst movie I have ever seen in my life. I love Drew Barrymore and most of Adam Sandler, but the script and acting in this movie were horrible! Add to that the ridiculous slapstick of the sterotyped African Disneyland that passed as an African adventure. I would add “offended” to the other adjectives that describe my reaction to this movie: namely, “unamused, bored, sickened and amazed.” The children were obnoxious, the plot implausible, the African characters one-dimensional stereotyped farces. What was that African singing group that showed up at any given moment furnishing a (not-funny) Greek chorus effect during various mini-climaxes during the movie?  Not since the black-faced minstrel has such an offensive stereotype been presented.

I must admit that my friend loved the movie. She laughed throughout, and must have wondered why I sat unsmiling and laughless throughout the entire movie. There is a certain amount of insult in finding fault with a book or movie or TV show that someone else loves, and I felt like a Scrooge when I was asked how I liked the movie and had to admit I HATED IT! Fed up to the eyebrows with the violence and torture that seems to be increasingly necessary to hold our interest in both our media and games, it was I who had suggested we go to this movie instead, and perhaps I was forced to pay for my need to bury my head in the sand for a few hours.

Not wanting to be influenced by what I read, I have deliberately not gone to IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes to see whether the critics agree with my review of this horrible movie, but as I draw toward the end of my diatribe, I will now do so and be right back with some of their thoughts:

Rotten Tomatoes Review: “Lurching between slapstick and schmaltz without showing much of a commitment to either, Blended commits the rare Sandler sin of provoking little more than boredom.”

Washington Post, Stephanie Merry: Each sweet moment is inevitably punctuated by some in-your-face joke that’s at least as stupid as the preceding moments were heartfelt. Blended has other problems, too, including some faulty editing and a typically predictable finale.

Reel Views, James Berardinelli: “What’s missing from Blended? Two key ingredients: it doesn’t touch the heart and it doesn’t tickle the funny bone (at least not often enough). “

Entertainment Weekly, Jeff Labrecque: “In Blended, his (Sandler) comic flab has never felt as thick, and this hackneyed “family-friendly” entertainment feels less like a movie than a bad sit-com re-run.”

Portland Oregonian, Stephen Whitty: “He(Adam Sandler) plays it so low-key there’s nothing much for him to do, apart from the clueless-dad shtick and some awkward comedy.”

NY Times, A.O. Scott: “Most of Blended has the look and pacing of a three-camera sitcom filmed by a bunch of eighth graders and conceived by their less bright classmates. Shots don’t match. Jokes misfire. Gags that are visible from a mile away fail to deliver. “

Meta critic, B. Jackson: “I loved earlier comedies by this duo but this looks like they were here just for the paycheck. Also, based on the screenplay, the writers must have been working on a tight deadline for their high-school drama class.”

USA Today, Caludia Puig: “You have to work hard to make an African vacation seem unpleasant. And Adam Sandler nearly pulls it off in Blended.”

Not all critics hated this movie and some fans, including my friend, loved it. Having lived and traveled in Africa for years, I perhaps found the Africa scenes more insulting and deprecating than most. But this movie lost me long before it got to Africa!

The Prompt: When was the last time a movie, a book, or a television show left you cold despite all your friends (and/or all the critics) raving about it? What was it that made you go against the critical consensus?