hearts of darkness

[ricardienne]

This afternoon, e-mailing to Natalie, I ended up explaining that I hide out in [comparatively distant] history and in literature at least partly because I can't deal with the real world. How presceient of me. N. persuaded me to go over to a friend's house tonight. It was horrible. My pathological social ineptness aside, we watched Earth, which, as more of you probably know than I did, is about the Partition of India in 1947, and the ensuing Muslim-Hindu violence.

"This is a movie even you will like, Lydia," they said. "It's not trashy; it's really good and Deep and deals with Serious Issues." But I don't actually like movies like that -- I don't know where this misconception comes from. I tend to only watch frivolous movies. This is because Good movies are too painful, and I am a wimp. Reading is one thing, and watching a play is one thing, but a movie plays out more like reality. Even if I can know intellectually that this particular person on the screen isn't really dying, or that one doesn't really have leprosy, or that child didn't really watch his mother raped and murdered in front of him, I still feel that these things are happening, really. And I cannot deal with them. I cannot cope with these things that are so horrible. I know that I can't. I've known since third grade, maybe earlier. Maybe I was sheltered too much, and still, at 19, am sheltered. I can only look at the statistics, and the figures, and the general picture. I don't know what to do when I see the individuals depicted.

I didn't even watch the worst parts of this movie: I looked away. But what am I supposed to do now? I can't go back to joking, obviously; I can't make light of it, or of anything, really, and I don't understand how everyone else was able to. There is clearly some sort of reflective response that would be required, but what? What does it serve to watch people burned alive and torn in half, or to see boxcars full of corpses and women being raped?

Is it so that this will not be forgotten and so will not happen again? But it has happened. And to say that one should watch the horrible consequences of intolerance to learn not to instigate it seems to me to be like the 17th and 18th century practice of taking one's children to public executions to teach them to obey the law.

Is it so that I will understand the more general lesson: that irrational ethnic or religious or cultural divisions, even when they seem benign and insignificant compared to shared values, are easily inflamed to atrocity? What am I to think now, then? That it could happen here. That humans are basically evil. That good people cannot prevent themselves from becoming monsters. And so what is there to do but slit my wrists tomorrow before I wake up one day to find my neighborhood burning and my friends being slaughtered?

I know there is reason to know these things, and to understand how horrible they are, but it is lost on me, I think. My reaction is to shrink away and try to forget it. Keeping a running chant of "don't think about it. don't think about it" in my head, if necessary. That isn't a good thing, is it? The more I am exposed to recent history and to current events, the more apathetic I become.

Comments

[st-egfroth.livejournal.com]

I am a huge wimp about this sort of stuff too - I've never been able to cope with watching violence in films or on tv (in high school I would hide in people's bedrooms at parties reading while everyone else watched violent films). I can't persuade myself that it's unhealthy to avoid watching things on screen that would severely traumatise you if you saw them happen in real life. (I don't think violent films shouldn't exist - I just don't think there's any reason to feel obliged to watch them on a regular basis).

I do feel I need to know about these things, and I think if I had *never* seen a violent death on screen, and only had an idea of what murder was like from reading Agatha Christie stories, I would be incapable of understanding a lot of important things about the world (not to mention understanding a lot of art and literature!) You say you can only think about the statistics and the overall picture; does that mean you can't cope with *reading* about individual experiences of horror, or is just watching that's the problem? I read a lot of politics and history, and hear terrible individual stories of violence and torture from refugee charities I support. I can be hugely affected just by reading or hearing stories -- I don't need to actually watch the violence and torture take place to be disgusted and horrified and want to do something about it (hmm, well there's a fairly convincing argument that one should be doing more about it, but I'm not sure that watching massacre after massacre would be the best way of persuading me to be more active; it's probably more likely to make me feel everything is completely futile and humanity is doomed, as you suggest)

[kaskait.livejournal.com]

I question the use of violence in movies as well.

In entertainment blockbusters, it mimics a safer version of the Roman Gladiator spectacles. But does it really make a difference knowing that its pretend?

In documentaries, I think the reality takes away that filter of pretend. So sometimes the violence is integral to the story. But how much? How much until it becomes exploitive?

Its hard to change things that are wrong in the world. Because a) it requires mass support and b) there must be one person who can spearhead the issue and direct the support.

David Mamet wrote that the world was ill served by romance motifs. We frame our history, our culture by the lone hero or heroine who saves the farm, state, country or world. That kind of thinking gives us Roosevelt but it also gives us Hitler as well. I think he may be right. All our problems must be solved by community effort. Instead we wait for the lone hero.

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

And then there's this gray area between entertainment and documentary, where the violence if fake, but it representing real violence For A Good Purpose. I guess it is important to know about these things, but sometimes it seems like the attitude becomes "I am a better and more virtuous person because I watched this," as if one can fulfill some sort of moral duty to change the things that are wrong with the world just by vicariously suffering.