tell-a-vision
It's not a very nice vision really is it?
Do you think in a few years time the only shows on tv will be endless crime shows - of all the different genres, plodding pint drinking English and Scottish types that sit along the spectrum of quaint to hard boiled, and the American ones with fast talking people in blow dried hair, snazzy suits or lab coats, light hearted office banter in between autopsies and mass shootings. It's so obvious it barely warrants saying, but maybe for that reason is worth saying - tv is so violent these days. Do you think it's disturbing just how many serialkillers-aggreivedexes-abusedchildren-drivebyshootings-detailedforensics we watch? And not so much that we watch, but that we don't feel anything, as all this brutal violence runs past our eyes, we eat our dinners and iron our work shirts, as more violently ended lives are uncoverted in alleys and pools of blood. I mean, I feel conflicted myself, I like to read a good detective novel every now and then, and have sampled and at times enjoyed, the full array of crime-porn on teve myself. But really.
Oh, that and 'make me famous please' reality tv shows with or without winning recorddeals-farmerhusbands-suitcases of money. I swear, if things keep going the way they are, all you'll be able to watch are 17 year old emo popstar wannabes singing intight jeans, or 6 year olds being brutally murdered and blow dried barbie women drinking takeaway coffee and flirting with their dark eyed brooding gun toting FBI partner as they hunt down the killer.
Interspersed every few minutes with manically happy cereal eating, car driving, clothes washing, mobile phone using, striped shirt wearing families who are neither aspiring to be popstars nor in danger of becoming brutalised corpses. Strange world.
3 Comments:
Not to mention the "half-grapefruit" boobs, to quote a phrase I read from Margaret Atwood last night!
"half grapefruit boobs" - tee hee!
Do you think this is why people think the world is a more dangerous place than it used to be?
Why - because they are worried they might get poked in the eye with a half grapefruit boob??
Nah, honestly, I don't know. I don't think it can help - every night everyone sits down to reflect on the worst of what happened to people in the day from all around the world - the worst the better, the more horrible, the more 'newsworthy'. I don't think it creates more violence per say, but maybe just normalises it, makes it so common as to be unremarkable. All that Michael Moore reflection on fear mongering as a precursor to ongoing consumption does ring true - but I wouldn't neccessarily agree that it is a deeply cynical mechanistic pushing of buttons, rather that the two go hand in hand and are maybe both expressions of an underlying anxiety, rather than one 'causing' the other. Personally I think maybe it stems from a much deeper view of the world that springs from our first days and years alive - was the world a friendly place that looked after us, or was it terrifying and were we left scared, alone, or with parents who were primarily anxious or angry, were we left hungry, upset, to fend for ourselves? I think attachment theory can account for a lot of what is fearful and needy in our culture. It was only a generation ago that babies were (almost universally in anglo middle class Australia) being left to scream when hungry, and not held, because it was seen as more virtuous and aligned with a 'scientific' view of the world, where babies just needed to be treated like clockwork, and not pandered to or they'd be 'spoilt'. Research I've read into seperation anxiety/lack of touch/abandonment in infant animals suggests that such treatment of infants will result in more anti-social or aggressive adults, who are unable to self-soothe. Who in turn are unable to care empathetically for infants, who in turn grow up anxious and aggressive. And hey, we are monkeys too, I don't see why that couldn't be a big part of the shit we're in. My two cents worth.
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