Agreed. They were the single most evil phenomena to ever happen in this world. (at least the single most evil that I know of) and, it’s important to keep them in an appropriate light.
It is so easy for that to happen again today. People have already come close to that. I recall pictures of people starving to death in a camp and shame on me … I can’t even remember the country in which that happened. That really is shameful.
Good for you Bijou. It’s very important to keep reminding ourselves of this part of our history.
There is something about people that enables us to behave in that way. Sad but true. It starts when we allow our children to gang up on other children in a school yard. We really must not allow that to happen. More importantly, we need to keep it in mind what can result from that.
One noteworthy example is the TV version of “Diamonds are Forever.” In one scene, the character Plenty O’Toole is shown from behind but obviously topless as she canoodles with 007. When TNN began showing Bond movie marathons, the scene was digitally altered to include bra straps, so that the character was not topless. Even though that scene had been broadcast on TV fairly regularly for decades, unaltered, and the republic did not crumble from the shock of it all.
Making them the butt of all jokes is an effective way to do that, though. The more you laugh at them, the faster they lose influence.
One of the hallmarks of dictators is a lack of a sense of humor. Nazis hate it when you laugh at them, and making them ridiculous is a far better tactic than verbally attacking them: when you attack, it can create sympathy (hell, the easiest way to create sympathy for a character in fiction is to have others badmouth him when he’s not there).
Back to topic:
You actually can do this (in theory), but no one does: showing a married couple in separate beds.
In the 1976 edition of the Bad News Bears movie, there’s a scene near the end (before the big game) when Walter Matthau shoves a kid to the ground while berating him.
Contrast that with the 2005 version with Billy Bob Thornton: in the exact same scene, Billy Bob starts to berate the kid, but then the parents step in and shame him for acting like a dick. He is forced/expected to apologize later.
In the '76 version, nobody said a word to Matthau’s character about being too harsh or abusive toward the kid. I laughed when I saw that scene, not because it was funny, but because that would never happen nowadays. Parents would lose their damn minds and Matthau’s coach character would be driven out of the Little League and probably never allowed around children again.
If you feel so inclined, watch both these movies back to back for comparison’s sake. All I can say is, I am SO glad I grew up in the 70s and not in the 90s.
NBC reran SNL’s first episode over the weekend, and it featured several bits that probably wouldn’t pass muster in today’s TV environment.
Among them was a George Carlin bit about airport security where he joked about trying to slash a stewardess’s throat with sheets of paper. For obvious reasons, I can’t imagine that joke going over very well nowadays.
There was also a fake news bit about how the age of consent had been lowered to 7, and they showed an adult man on a date with a 7-year-old. That would probably cause a few heads to explode if it were produced now.
I’d never seen that cartoon before and found it to be very interesting. It looked like a standard Bugs Bunny cartoon, with a stereotypical drawn black man in the hunter Elmer Fudd role, until near the end when Bugs won all the black guy’s clothing in a craps game.
There’s a lot of drug humor that is almost cringeworthy to watch now, especially in light of what happened to John Belushi.
Then there’s the “Uncle Roy” sketches, which came about as close to child molestation as you’d ever see on network television. What was really creepy was Buck Henry’s answer (as Uncle Roy) to Jane Curtin (as the clueless mom thanking him for babysitting the girls) saying he was one in a million: “Oh, there’s more of me than you might think.” :eek:
Except for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, ALL the Jewish holidays are about someone trying to kill us, but Yay, he didn’t succeed! let’s party! Some day in the future, first of all, every Jew will be descended from at least one camp survivor, and there won’t be anyone alive who is a survivor, or even knew a survivor personally, and instead of the scary-somber Holocaust Remembrance Days that we have now, that sometimes make children cry, we will probably have one more “Yay! someone tried to kill us but he didn’t succeed!” holiday, where we party. I mean, Haman wanted to do exactly what Hitler tried to do, but he’s just a buffoon we make fun of on Purim, which is one of the happiest, silliest holidays of all.
On another topic: there was one of those teenage shows in the late 80s or early 90s called TV 101 (the main characters were in an AV class) where a character had an abortion. I tuned in just to watch this particular two-part episode. This is the last time I remember an abortion on TV involving major character. The show didn’t last, but I don’t think it was because of this plotline. I think the market was just saturated with this type of show.
The reason you won’t see abortion again isn’t because it’s verboten, like racism or wife-beating, but because it’s divisive. The character can’t make a choice without it being politically loaded, and the TV producers don’t want the show to take a political stance.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t abortions on TV for one-off characters: they just have to be presented in a way that shows all sides of the debate as equally valid. When an abortion doctor was shot on a 20th season episode of Law & Order, the murder was condemned, while the two detectives took opposite sides on the abortion issue itself.
A character can have abortion in the past: Prentiss owned up to having had one as a teenager on Criminal Minds. It went without comment, but abortions long in a character’s past usually are. People can imagine a character’s views have changed if they need to, to resolve whatever cognitive dissonance they may be experiencing. And then, anti-abortionists know abortions have happened in the past. They’re more interested in the message of a present abortion. At least I assume, because it’s not the only time I can think of that a character has owned up to an abortion in the past, although I can’t think of another example off the top of my head. I do know that just last season on Switched at Birth, a character used the morning after pill, something most anti-abortionists object to, but it went without comment or debate, and seemed to show the character as reasonably responsible. So while a 20-week abortion may not be happening any time soon, Plan-B apparently can. Also, characters can state that they have made the decision a priori to have an abortion if they ever become intentionally. I can think of a few characters who have stated this. It’s not the same thing as actually having an abortion, but apparently it isn’t considered as divisive as the actual procedure.
Have you actually WATCHED a TV show in the past 10 years, or do you just spend your time clucking your tongue about the state of America?
Because if there’s one thing I’d say about shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, Hannibal and Game of Thrones it’s that they constantly do their best to put their viewers at ease. They pretty much just aim for the comfort zone.
And a character on Friday Night Lights (albeit not a main character) had an abortion in 2010.
One of the things I find fascinating with much European TV, especially Scandinavian, is the considerably different style and language used by the director and cinematographer. (True also of films.) Where an American or US-sensibilities maker will get all quick, artsy and delicate, showing brief images and quick cutaways and inference, a French or Swedish director will use an absolutely unblinking continuous cut. Of nudity, of violence, of gore, of all kinds of things that can practically run on family-time TV with all the fandancing but will make you squirm when the camera never blinks.
I think TV today permits a lot of implied, inferred and blink-of-an-eye stuff S&P would have nixed in prior eras, while it has moved away from or censors unblinking, honest looks at things that might have been acceptable before. That is, we can kind of talk around and imply that a woman chooses an abortion on House, but we can’t just have a main character have one as an openly-discussed life decision.
