By Douglas Murray
Friday, March 02, 2018
Since the mass shooting in Parkland, lala., a
considerable amount of energy has understandably been expended on the matter of
which guns should be available to whom and when. But it is striking that the
president’s comments on Thursday about film and video-game violence have been
either derided or glossed over. They are worth lingering on.
Most of us probably inhabit a kind of bubble when it
comes to violence on screen. We choose to watch the sorts of films we think
we’ll like and, unless we are film critics, get to avoid the sorts of films we
think will bore or repel us. Until we become parents, most of us probably pay
no particular attention to the drip-feed of blood and gore that now forms the
basis of almost all popular entertainment.
As it happens, I’ve had to be on a lot of planes
recently, and have used some of the time to watch movies I would never
otherwise seek out. Apart from concluding that the Oscars shouldn’t award
anyone for anything this year (can’t the whole thing just be called off?), I
have mainly been repulsed at the extreme violence (often mixed with the most
crass “sexiness”) that seems now to be the cinematic norm.
I could describe the sheer awfulness of Charlize Theron
in Atomic Blonde, a long-legged
female spy dispatching her male foes in gruesome fashion between coolly pouring
herself drinks, but I didn’t make it to the end. Far worse was a film I did
slog all the way through, Kingsman 2.
I won’t bother to explain the risible plot, but it is presented as a sort of
cooler, wryer, modern take on James Bond. Certainly all the advertising for it,
the cast, and the buttons it presses make it clear that it is not aimed at an
adult audience. I was surprised at the opening to see that it had an R rating,
not least because I had heard people (including an air-stewardess) talking
about having taken their children to see it.
Of course the thing was filled with swearing and drugs —
but it was the violence that amazed me. The unending, cartoonish brutality.
Because the film starred wholesome-seeming actors such as Colin Firth, I had
assumed that the limits of any fight scenes would be some stupid martial arts.
But the whole thing was in fact an almost endless parade of gore. Several
characters, at various stages, get shot in the head through an eye. This is
presented – among other things – as something that can be healed. For plot
reasons too preposterous to go into, one of the agencies in the film has
developed a flat-pack that you can press around the head of someone who has
received such a shot and then not only save their life but later help them get
back their memory and come back to normal life.
I must say that all this left the ugliest possible taste
behind. You don’t need to have seen the effects of a bullet wound entering
(and, worse, exiting) a human skull to consider what horrific, dull-witted, and
crass people the director and producers of Kingsman
2 must be. But people should realize that these Hollywood entrepreneurs
wish only to make money and possibly entertain people, and that one of the ways
they have decided they can do this is to make being shot through an eye into a
relatively minor and mendable matter. I suppose a lot of audiences would have
thought this particular detail cool. But it was just one of the things in an
ultra-violent fantasy that made me think something very sick indeed had been
planted at the heart of popular entertainment.
Of course it is unlikely that any single movie or video
game would make anyone carry out an act of evil and wickedness like the school
shooting in Florida last month. Easy access to certain types of guns seems to
some of us one obvious part of the problem. But equally obvious is that a
culture that encourages enjoyment of horrific violence alongside a sort of
flippant approach to its consequences cannot be helping matters.
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