(Okay, I am exaggerating, a little). Once upon a time, I was a big fan of all those tacky low-budget movies they chucked out on the Sci Fi Channel. Now, though, even their basic science fiction movies are nothing but hatchet-fests with much dismemberment.
Where are the days when science fiction was about mind versus machine, space exploration, and an occasional dinosaur that wasn t dripping blood and when it did munch on a lawyer, we only saw just enough to cheer for the T. Rex? One shudders to think what would be required of a new or how explicit a new would need to be just to pull in an audience.
But, I don t want this stuff in my chick flicks. I don t want it on network television. Heck, I don t even want it in science fiction.
Why is it necessary? No, I think the important question is what is it doing to our society? What does it say about our society?
Is this one of the reasons people are so desensitized to violence and don t blink when some horrific crime is committed? I know the new reality includes Islamic beheadings, but if we don t draw the line at such things as part of our entertainment, such barbaric practices are going to lose their shock value, and then what? Are we going to start retaliating by doing the same thing?
Unfortunately, I am afraid that day has already arrived. A week or so ago, I was reading that, in Mexico, drug dealers are now beheading their competition, a practice copied from Islamic brutality. Where does it stop?
When does it stop? If our entertainment is a mirror of our society, we are truly in serious trouble and in decline toward barbarism. Once upon a time, psychologists were decrying all the gunplay on television.
Those days look like youthful exuberance compared to what is on it now. The thing is, do you actually hear, see, or read of anyone complaining or doing the necessary psychological studies about what this sort of thing is doing to our culture? Why aren t we trying to curtail the encroaching desensitization of our culture?
I am a big fan of murder mysteries and the entire cop/PI genre on television and in the movies. But, I rarely watch new programs on television. They are too violent, too detailed.
They make me too uncomfortable and I want a bath after it is over. I guess that s the way I felt when I watched that Lifetime movie the other night. They had the makings of a fantastic thriller but took the cheap way out and ignored plot development and simply went with a ketchup fest.
The premise of the story was excellent. Mother freaks out, ends up in a private sanitarium where she grooms men to come in and protect her family. Naturally nubile young girls begin to disappear and show up dismembered and so forth (oh, for the innocent days of (Okay, I am exaggerating, a little).
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