Maybe it's because I love watching and studying movies/TV and appreciate the creators' craft in portraying fantastic scenes, usually with lots of action and possibly injuries and death. I understand and know that the depictions are created; the beauty of this art form is that one can create on film a place that exists nowhere else, and may never have existed at all. I easily distinguish the portrayal from reality.
From her perspective she's worked in emergency rooms and done social work; graphic portrayals of those places in a show like ER or violence on crime shows make her queasy. She easily conflates the portrayal with reality.
I once tried to get her to watch HBO's Rome, but the graphic depiction of cavalier attitudes towards sex and violence, although only 4 minutes per 60 minute episode, marred the remaining 56 minutes of excellent drama. We do watch some shows with graphic violence, like Bones or Castle, where the main draw of the show are the relationships between the characters (mostly unresolved sexual tension), and the grisly stuff is just part of the 'case of the week.'
She also feels that the supersaturation of violence in pop culture correlates highly with violence in the real world. For years I've fought that notion, but as I grow older (and wiser?) I can't argue with it as much... especially in raising two children who are in their teens. It's one thing to watch a show with our son (12 years old) and strongly reinforce that the projected violence is just make-believe, there to entertain. It's another thing to discuss how in real life people would never do such things, and yet people actually do such things.
And then there's the death count. When I started this Lenten blog, it was about a friend's father's death and a discussion about death, dying and how to appreciate life more. With all the writing, I haven't watched as much TV or movies, so perhaps that helped reset my awareness and tolerance for depicted violence and death.
Last night I watched this week's episode of '24.' The show's premise, as groundbreaking as it was when it first burst onto the small screen years ago, is getting very long in the tooth and the series may end with this season. I was a late adapter, starting in the 5th season and watching previous seasons on DVD; I keep watching because I hope they can recapture greatness of seasons past, by adding just enough variation from previous seasons. And yet, for me the legacy of 24 was evident in Entertainment Weekly's 'body count' from a couple of years ago. Each week the magazine would update how many characters had died on the show during the emergencies that required 24 'real-time' hours of crisis management. What does it say about our culture when an entertainment magazine keeps a death toll? (I can't find a trace of 24's body count, but I did find a summer movie body count; equally disturbing.)
To grab and keep our attention, Hollywood creates bigger and deadlier menaces on screen, and death seems so trivial, and well, expected.
And even when death comes to major characters, they don't really stay dead very long, or they come back in some other form. It's not new to television or the movies -- literature and storytelling throughout the eons focus on cheating death -- and based on how much favorite actors garner big ratings or box office receipts, it totally makes sense.
But it really hit me when I took Noah to see Percy Jackson and the New Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Early in the movie, Percy and his mom are running away from a vaguely familiar (to those who studied Greek mythology) monster; how such a monster appears in the 'real world' of the movie up to that point is the first glimpse of the Olympians persisting in our world. (Or is it we who persist in their world?) Percy, who is later revealed as a demigod, vanquishes the monster -- a minotaur, but not before his mom is struck and disappears during the battle. I was actually shaken by that. I leaned over and asked Noah (who has read all the books), "did she die?" He paused, then whispered "well, I don't want to give it away."
MILD SPOILER ALERT... if you want to see the movie or read the book, stop reading this post...
His mom didn't die, or more accurately she went to Hades, and part of Percy's quest was to go there and bring her back. As in all juvenile fiction, there's a happy ending.
By the way, Noah hated the movie. He had waited anxiously for the first (and probably only) movie based on one of his favorite book series. He couldn't believe how much they changed the book to make the movie. I tried to be realistic and tell him to get used to it; movie adaptions of books will never please everybody. On his recommendation I read the first book and finished it last night. I'm just as mad as he is. The book is quite good, and the movie makes several inexplicable changes that neuter the clever updating of Olympians for our times.
But back to Noah's response: have we become so blase about death? That we automatically expect any fictional character to miraculously return to life, or somehow be able to communicate with us from the great beyond with such ease?
And how does that affect us when we're grieving over the loss of a loved one in real life? Do we compartmentalize that well? Does it ease our grieving or make an already difficult task even harder?
And at this point, I can't help thinking of one working definition of fear (from a Crossings class taken from my mentor Ed Schroeder):
Love and hate are not opposites; love and fear are opposites. The greatest fear stems from possibly losing what, or who, you love most.
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