Post by nana on Mar 15, 2006 5:30:16 GMT -5
I wasn't sure where to put this but here goes anyway. This happened to me years ago I just couldn't say it as well as Mark.
I Am Done With Violence
Enough scenes of horrid brutality, bloodied faces, tire irons to the knee. Can you purge?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
It's happened. I have reached saturation, the threshold, my absolute limit.
I cannot watch another gruesome fight scene, another wanton massacre, another thuggish gangsta beat-down, another head-butt, skull-crush, pickax face-rip, crazed stabbing, fistfight, leg-smash, finger-chop, nose-crack, throat slash or another gruesome scene featuring a grisly one-eyed mutant hacking off a woman's arms and tearing off her face with a chainsaw and laughing maniacally.
I am, I realize, a broken American. Defective. Problematic. I know that ultraviolence is the American way. It makes us feel righteous and strong. Violence is how we stay, ahem, "free." Without violence, says everyone from the NRA to the U.S. military to the president, we would be overrun by, well, violence. It is in our blood and in our cells and deep in our gun-sucking culture and America without its violence is like a South Dakota Republican without his misogyny. I know.
But I do not care. Something has happened. Something has switched over in the past few years of my life, some sort of awareness has been raised and a threshold has been lowered and I now cannot help but see stark displays of brutish violence -- in movies, on TV, in real life -- as exactly what they are: Dark, dank, base energy, cancerous and poisonous, and I do not care where it is or if it's couched in the context of "raw" moviemaking or gritty urban inner-city tale. I am done.
Violence no longer informs me. It no longer has the power to teach. It is a one-note song I've heard so many times it has lost its power to stun or impress or delve deep. It now merely tears at the fabric of the soul, punches holes in the anima, scrapes its knuckles on the pavement of hate, and you can shrug and roll your eyes and go watch "The Hills Have Eyes" or "Saw II" or even play some hi-res shockingly ultraviolent video game and enjoy the brutal escapism and wallow in the bloodshed while pretending it's not slowly, quietly blackening your world view like a smoker sucking down another carton of Marlboro Reds, but deep down, where the meanings are, I think maybe, just maybe, you might be seriously mistaken.
It has become involuntary. Every time I know a punch is coming or a gun is about to be blasted in someone's face or the soldier is gut-punching the prisoner or the boxer is about to slam the other guy to the mat in a flurry of spit and blood and disgust, I wince. My body recoils. I cannot help but turn away. I cannot watch. Not anymore.
Maybe I am weak. Maybe I am not man enough anymore. Maybe I am ignoring the context, have lost my perspective, am taking it all too seriously. This is possible. But I don't think so. I think you can actually reach a point in life where you decide to strive for things that (literally) vibrate and move and dance at a higher pitch and you can choose -- you can always, always choose -- to try and leave the rest behind, like a bad dream, like an abusive childhood, like a toxic skin you try to shed like an exhausted snake.
There are exceptions. I'm sure I'll still enjoy it almost as much as the next person when the bad guy gets his/her comeuppance, when Spider-Man takes down the villain in a mad rush of flying limbs and superhero leaps and dazzling special effects. Great epic battles scenes ("Lord of the Rings," et al.) can be truly exhilarating in their pain-free fantasy cartoon acrobatics. But there is a difference here: You are not watching violence, you are merely watching wonderful daydream choreography, computer-assisted fakery, with lots of dramatic falling.
But then again, even this sort of grand schlocky violence quickly becomes tiresome. James Bond-ish stunts and fight sequences can be thrilling and cute, but after a while, it's like watching Bush speak about peace: It's just numbing and laborious and totally artificial, and you begin to realize it all fits into the same tiny, rusty box, the lowest strata of life, the darkest corners of our hearts.
It did not use to be this way. I used to have no problem with violence, in small doses anyway, a good American male raised on roughly one billion scenes of utter brutality since the advent of television, and like pretty much everyone else, you see violence everywhere you look and accept it as just a part of the bloody human landscape, a sort of built-in hostility, just how we get through.
We are, after all, a destructive species, combative, warlike. Brute strength saturates our history. I know this. What's more, violence defines the male experience in America, from playground to soldier to family-smacking father figure. To be a man in America and not have a deep-seated fetish for violence means you must be missing an important gene. History, we are taught, is written by the conquerors. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it's no match for rabid overfed bloodlust.
This is not, by the way, some sort of move toward weak-kneed pacifism. It is not some liberal namby-pamby. I am not ignoring the necessity of violence, in rare cases, such as limited military action against those who would do us direct harm. I support fighting back when you are directly attacked, and of course if someone enacted violence upon those I love I'm sure my American aggro 'tude would spring back to life like a deranged pro wrestler and I'd wish to do this person serious harm involving hammers and shovels and much angry screaming.
But then again, maybe not. Maybe, deeper down, you can also choose to try and cultivate that seemingly impossible Buddha-blessed, Christlike ideal so completely forgotten by the rabid pseudo-Christians of this country: Forgiveness. Wisdom. Turning the other cheek. Rejecting the Bush-fed all-American kill-'em-all, eye-for-an-eye thug mentality in favor of actual ... I don't know what. Subtlety of mind? Nuance of intellect? Elevation of spirit? I know, it's completely crazy.
I have no idea if I can succeed. I have no idea if it's possible to reject, minimize, slough off the disgusting allure of violence in our culture, the delirious buffet of cruelty in the world. I have no idea if it will not eventually beat me down once again.
I only know, at this point, that few other things seem as worthy of trying.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.
As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.
URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/03/15/notes031506.DTL
I Am Done With Violence
Enough scenes of horrid brutality, bloodied faces, tire irons to the knee. Can you purge?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
It's happened. I have reached saturation, the threshold, my absolute limit.
I cannot watch another gruesome fight scene, another wanton massacre, another thuggish gangsta beat-down, another head-butt, skull-crush, pickax face-rip, crazed stabbing, fistfight, leg-smash, finger-chop, nose-crack, throat slash or another gruesome scene featuring a grisly one-eyed mutant hacking off a woman's arms and tearing off her face with a chainsaw and laughing maniacally.
I am, I realize, a broken American. Defective. Problematic. I know that ultraviolence is the American way. It makes us feel righteous and strong. Violence is how we stay, ahem, "free." Without violence, says everyone from the NRA to the U.S. military to the president, we would be overrun by, well, violence. It is in our blood and in our cells and deep in our gun-sucking culture and America without its violence is like a South Dakota Republican without his misogyny. I know.
But I do not care. Something has happened. Something has switched over in the past few years of my life, some sort of awareness has been raised and a threshold has been lowered and I now cannot help but see stark displays of brutish violence -- in movies, on TV, in real life -- as exactly what they are: Dark, dank, base energy, cancerous and poisonous, and I do not care where it is or if it's couched in the context of "raw" moviemaking or gritty urban inner-city tale. I am done.
Violence no longer informs me. It no longer has the power to teach. It is a one-note song I've heard so many times it has lost its power to stun or impress or delve deep. It now merely tears at the fabric of the soul, punches holes in the anima, scrapes its knuckles on the pavement of hate, and you can shrug and roll your eyes and go watch "The Hills Have Eyes" or "Saw II" or even play some hi-res shockingly ultraviolent video game and enjoy the brutal escapism and wallow in the bloodshed while pretending it's not slowly, quietly blackening your world view like a smoker sucking down another carton of Marlboro Reds, but deep down, where the meanings are, I think maybe, just maybe, you might be seriously mistaken.
It has become involuntary. Every time I know a punch is coming or a gun is about to be blasted in someone's face or the soldier is gut-punching the prisoner or the boxer is about to slam the other guy to the mat in a flurry of spit and blood and disgust, I wince. My body recoils. I cannot help but turn away. I cannot watch. Not anymore.
Maybe I am weak. Maybe I am not man enough anymore. Maybe I am ignoring the context, have lost my perspective, am taking it all too seriously. This is possible. But I don't think so. I think you can actually reach a point in life where you decide to strive for things that (literally) vibrate and move and dance at a higher pitch and you can choose -- you can always, always choose -- to try and leave the rest behind, like a bad dream, like an abusive childhood, like a toxic skin you try to shed like an exhausted snake.
There are exceptions. I'm sure I'll still enjoy it almost as much as the next person when the bad guy gets his/her comeuppance, when Spider-Man takes down the villain in a mad rush of flying limbs and superhero leaps and dazzling special effects. Great epic battles scenes ("Lord of the Rings," et al.) can be truly exhilarating in their pain-free fantasy cartoon acrobatics. But there is a difference here: You are not watching violence, you are merely watching wonderful daydream choreography, computer-assisted fakery, with lots of dramatic falling.
But then again, even this sort of grand schlocky violence quickly becomes tiresome. James Bond-ish stunts and fight sequences can be thrilling and cute, but after a while, it's like watching Bush speak about peace: It's just numbing and laborious and totally artificial, and you begin to realize it all fits into the same tiny, rusty box, the lowest strata of life, the darkest corners of our hearts.
It did not use to be this way. I used to have no problem with violence, in small doses anyway, a good American male raised on roughly one billion scenes of utter brutality since the advent of television, and like pretty much everyone else, you see violence everywhere you look and accept it as just a part of the bloody human landscape, a sort of built-in hostility, just how we get through.
We are, after all, a destructive species, combative, warlike. Brute strength saturates our history. I know this. What's more, violence defines the male experience in America, from playground to soldier to family-smacking father figure. To be a man in America and not have a deep-seated fetish for violence means you must be missing an important gene. History, we are taught, is written by the conquerors. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it's no match for rabid overfed bloodlust.
This is not, by the way, some sort of move toward weak-kneed pacifism. It is not some liberal namby-pamby. I am not ignoring the necessity of violence, in rare cases, such as limited military action against those who would do us direct harm. I support fighting back when you are directly attacked, and of course if someone enacted violence upon those I love I'm sure my American aggro 'tude would spring back to life like a deranged pro wrestler and I'd wish to do this person serious harm involving hammers and shovels and much angry screaming.
But then again, maybe not. Maybe, deeper down, you can also choose to try and cultivate that seemingly impossible Buddha-blessed, Christlike ideal so completely forgotten by the rabid pseudo-Christians of this country: Forgiveness. Wisdom. Turning the other cheek. Rejecting the Bush-fed all-American kill-'em-all, eye-for-an-eye thug mentality in favor of actual ... I don't know what. Subtlety of mind? Nuance of intellect? Elevation of spirit? I know, it's completely crazy.
I have no idea if I can succeed. I have no idea if it's possible to reject, minimize, slough off the disgusting allure of violence in our culture, the delirious buffet of cruelty in the world. I have no idea if it will not eventually beat me down once again.
I only know, at this point, that few other things seem as worthy of trying.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.
As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.
URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/03/15/notes031506.DTL