Sometimes, I scratch my head at my fellow Americans (mostly men), with their obsession towards violence and movies and stories that glamorize and glorify getting your way through coercion or greed or excess violence. Not knowing any limitations, and taking things into your own hands.
Yes, such movies are intriguing, and yes, I also enjoy many of them, including the Godfather series, Goodfellas, and quite a few others. So, I know on some level, I am contradicting myself, or perhaps even being hypocritical.
That said, the movies are getting more excessive with violence or raunchiness, and often lack class. Say what you want about the Godfather series, but they still managed to retain a measure of class, at least on a certain level.
Movies that currently play seem to gravitate towards a higher level of extremity, which too often means the lack class or intelligence, or both. Like almost everything else, the more extreme it is, the more likely it is to do well, and particularly, I am ashamed to say, with males around my age or younger. I am not the biggest fan or horror movies, but enjoy a good scary movie every now and then. But the horror movies they have these days are not so much scary, as filled with gore. People getting maimed, body parts cut up, horrific things happening. The focus is not on being frightening, but being gross or horrifying, and it just does not hold the same level of dignity that older movies (let's say, the original Halloween movie, for example) used to do.
Much the same with action movies. Not that they all had class, and many of them have always focused around some heroic and always impossible cool and calm, collected man, a stud, who fought off bad guys and always, without fail, got the girl. But the older movies showed men who actually were capable and could think beyond themselves. These days, the action heroes do not think or value life, and they more often than not kill people en masse, and without placing much value on individual lives. That says nothing about video games, where some kids (again, mostly males) will play endless hours of their favorite games, and often, this has everything to do with killing and destroying other people, the "bad guys".
I grew up on movies such as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies. These were enjoyable, and they also remained within the boundaries of good taste, I think. Some other series of movies began to go well past that, such as Rocky (in the later movies, with excessive Americentrism) and especially with Rambo. Yet, those look frankly tame, compared to what we have out there now. There are no limits these days. Indiana Jones was an intriguing character, because he was a learned man, a professor who happened to go on adventures. The modern day equivalent was the Mummy series, which was much more raunchy and, frankly, trashy. They tried to pass it off as classy on some level, but it just was not like the Indiana Jones movies that it tried so hard to rip off. They just were not nearly as good, just more extreme, in almost every way. But more extreme does not a good movie make. Yet, even this is pretty tame, compared to the mindless movies that focus on what we are supposed to believe are cool guys, model guys that young men should perhaps aspire to. I am not a big fan of Jason Statham, for example, and he seems the mindless muscle guy type that comes to mind first. The Fast & the Furious movies, full of fast cars and chicks, also falls into this category. Their probably are many more that I am not thinking of at the moment, but these types of movies go well beyond good taste, and delve into something that is more sinister in our society: this seeming need to be envied. Envy, of course, is what our society is all about. It often finds expression in the desire for money, and that is why we have an economy that revolved around shallow consumerism and corruption. It is also why we have men who want to take steroids to bulk up, or women who take endless pills or who harm their bodies to slim down. It caters to the worst of human instincts, and it reflects poorly on our nation, yet it increasingly is running rampant on almost every level, like a tsunami that is flooding what borders of moderation we might once have had.
We do not know any limits these days.
Then we wonder why we get the headlines that we get on the nightly news. We wonder why some kid goes nuts and shoots up a whole bunch of other kids in some school somewhere, as just happened a few days ago in Ohio
Funny enough, I remember the days when music was censored on the grounds that it geared kids up for violence. But often times, music actually illustrates that it is one of the relatively few outlets for creativity and thoughtfulness. It is an art, after all, and so it attracts people who think differently than most. I find a lot of inspiration and insight with musical lyrics, from popular artists and lesser known artists alike. Generally speaking, much of it tends to be more of a release and a break from the confines of our everyday life. At it's best, music, and art in general, allows you to escape the mundane world of routine, and to enter a different, and hopefully slightly more elevated, mindset. As such, it can often seem like a threat to those in power, who often seem themselves to be just fine with movies and video games that have excessively violent themes, but then get offended by bad words in music and books- including works by classic authors, such as Mark Twain.
Artists try and get us to think more critically about who we are, individually and as a society, and they question whether we are right, or whether we have lost sight of things. They tend to be our moral compass, far more than any elected, or unelected, political leaders. They sound the alarm bell when we seem to be going dangerously off course. Mostly, they try to get us to think. In an age when thinking is quite unpopular, is it any wonder that it tends to be artists that are often blamed for our problems, and get in the most trouble? Look at how Marilyn Manson was blamed for the Columbine shootings, and compare that with how intelligently he answered the critics who blindly criticized what they could never understand.
That's a double standard. I am not saying that it is time for censorship of movies or video games. Truth be told, I do not have any answers on the subject. But I recognize that there is a problem, and that people, other than acting shocked and indignant when the effects of this excess are thrown in their face (such as acting mad or sad when there is such a senseless mass shooting), usually do not tend to do much, or think much about it, once the headlines disappear for this or that particular shooting or incident. It makes me wonder what it will take to shake people out of their slumber. Again, I do not have an answer for that. What I do know is that it seems time for a more serious discussion, and bringing it up, talking about it, hardly seems wrong. I think the time to really think about these things is well past, already, long overdue. Until we get over our paranoia of actually talking openly and with intelligence and respect for other opinions than our own, the problems that we have are likely only to grow worse and worse, and grow more extreme, a reflection of the people who created these problems in the first place. That would be us, collectively.
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