My roommates are both older and half-deaf; and they both watch a lot of cable TV, really loud. I can’t see it, but I have to hear it.
Right now, one of them is watching some movie that sounds like it’s about My Lai or something – buncha guys with guns in a village in Asia somewhere and a little kid wailing because some relative has just been murdered with about a million gunshots right in front of him, & they’re talking about wasting the whole village. It’s so loud, & I can’t make it go away. I literally canNOT bear to listen to this kind of thing, especially when there’s children involved. It seems like every night on cable movie channels, there’s nothing but women screaming and children crying and shooting and words of hatred and cruelty.
Listen, I’m a punk rocker from way back. I am not a wuss, I am not into censorship “for our own good”, I am not a Christian. I am not offended by sex or cuss words or dope fiends or politics on television. I believe what Noam Chomsky said, that if we don’t believe in free speech for people we hate, we don’t believe in it at all.
About the only thing thing that offends my sense of “decency”, for lack of a better word, is the depiction of inconceivable human cruelty and utter despair, night after night. Does this bother anyone else? I don’t even want to say that I think they shouldn’t show it…I just wonder whether this stuff actually produces good feelings in anyone?
I had a friend, who, whenever we’d get high together, he’d pull out his little wireless-internet PDA thing and read the news. I’d be sitting there totally stoned and he’d be like, “Hmmm…100 people were just killed in a bomb in Iraq…2,000 people just died in an earthquake in Pakistan…um…” and I would just be like, “dude, STOP! I don’t want to hear this negative shit right now when I’m high!”
It’s a total buzzkill to have to hear that shit. I mean, getting stoned and watching Terminator or playing Mortal Kombat or Resident Evil and gleefully tearing guy’s heads off and splattering their brains everywhere in over-the-top comic violence is one thing. But having to hear about actual, real-life, brutality and violence? It’s just not fun, at all. I have NO IDEA how this guy could get stoned and then just recite this deadpan litany of death and destruction in the news.
Okay, maybe I deserved that. My Lai was an unutterably brutal event in human history that must never, ever be forgotten; I picked a really bad example. It’s just that this particular depiction (I have no idea if it was about Vietnam at all – as far as I know, it may have been just gratuitous butchery and in fact, that’s more likely) – this particular depiction was just unbelievably horrifying and emotionally disturbing to me. Bear in mind I had only the audio.
And it’s not just this one film, it’s what’s on practically every night. For the record, the channels they watch almost never show movies based on real events or true stories. I agree that the heinous massacres and atrocities that we as humans commit upon one another ought to be right before our eyes where we can’t look away, no matter how uncomfortable. But, what is the point of showing fictional characters beating children and shooting people in the head and torturing women and everybody screaming and begging for mercy – and at the same time allowing no photographs of military or civilian casualties of the war in Iraq to appear anywhere in our media?
And, I mentioned the stuff about my punk history because the PMRC was a big thing when I was coming up (I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember that) and I wanted to make it clear that I f***ing hate the idea of censorship. This is why I posted actually; it’s kind of a weird feeling for me because I am so strongly against censorship but I think a lot of (fictional) entertainment media content these days is contributing to an overall sense of alienation and despair, to a mood of fear and nihilism, to an attitude of solipsism and ruthlessness. And much as I love blasting creepy many-tentacled aliens in Halflife, I think the endless succession of war-based and gang-war-based games aren’t helping either.
This is not the Pit and, while I appreciate your sentiments in response to what you think I was saying, I think actually we’re probably on the same side.
No, you didn’t deserve it. If you don’t want to hear stuff that’s disturbing, you shouldn’t have to. If you believe that it’s important to remember atrocities from the past, then by all means remember them, but that doesn’t mean you should have to be reminded of them all the time.
If I were in your position, I’d be telling my roomates, “hey, I don’t want to hear this depressing buzz-kill shit all the time, okay? Turn it down, or watch something else. It’s pissing me off.” Closed captioning exists for a reason, you know.
I feel your pain, brujaja. The people I live with are addicted to “The First 48,” “Law & Order SVU” and a whole bunch of other shows that revolve around people getting murdered and/or sexually abused. I only go into the living room two or three times a day, yet every single time I do, there’s a big ol’ bullet-ridden corpse on the widescreen. Not what I want to see first thing after I stumble out of bed as I’m trying to make my way to the coffee pot. I guess I’m lucky because they don’t have the volume turned up that high, but still, it’s stuff I’d rather not have to see all the time.
I’m with you. I don’t understand the appeal of films that make you depressed for three hours and then end even worse. That whole “Kids”, “Traffic”,“Requiem for a dream” genre in general.