fatvegan

We were off to see Apocalypto at "The Broadway" last night. I thought it was brilliant, although I may have been one of the few in the cinema. When people tell you it's violent it would be unfair to say they are lying, but I don't feel like it detracts from the film. I get the feeling that for a lot of people their enjoyment equation goes a bit like this:

nasty sex/drugs/violence + great movie = slightly less great movie

I reckon we hope that directors will have a natural prejudice against nasty sorts of things because they make us uncomfortable. I didn't think the sex in Shortbus detracted from it at all. To me, making a movie that talked a lot about sex and actually had sex in it was a brave sort of thing to do. Talking about sex is easy. Clerks II talked a lot about it, and didn't have any. It was a good film, but it feels kind of fake. It feels like a film rather than a story. Films are concerned with the viewers response but stories are not. If the purpose of telling a story is to change things then perhaps a story should be more practical. But I don't think the purpose of stories always is to change things. If I was tortured in prison for 10 years I'd want the story of what happened told, not the story that would affect the most people.

I reckon that Mel Gibson is amazingly effective at giving some dimension to concepts that we talk about quite a lot but don't understand. People who saw his last film have a much better idea of what the rest of history understood crucifixion to be. And people who saw this film have a much better understanding of what ritual sacrifice means. Maybe our fresh understanding is simply that these things really suck arse. There are probably people who already understand these things pretty well, but I'm not one of them.

I also question whether it is possible to get desensitised to confronting violence. If we did then that might be a strong argument for having less of it. Although even if it was true I think art's best chance of changing the world and honouring its stories is by reflecting reality. If a film about an actual war desensitises people to violence, it's hard to blame the film. But I'm actually not sure that it does desensitise in the sense of caring or feeling less in the long-term. It can certainly make us feel numb, but I suspect that's closer to shell-shock than ambivalence. People who've experienced far worse violence in their lives than me watching a violent film have managed to maintain a sensitivity and distaste for violence.

Until I'd read All Quiet on the Western Front I'd been able to say that there are worse things in the world than war. For me, that had been the chink in the nonviolence philosophy. All I have left now is the idea that violence can sometimes create peace, but this is a far more fragile belief. On the balance, I would say that over the past few years my exposure to violence has dramatically sensitised me to it. And that is mostly thanks to the films and books that talk about the nasty parts, and definitely not the ones that glorify the fun side of violence and gloss over the nasty parts.