We were talking about this in the chat the other day, mostly about how silly it is to censor sex more than violence. Gladiator received the same rating as Notting Hill - a 15. Why? Because Notting Hill has lots of swearing and masturbatory references in it. Looking at my DVD collection, so is Love Actually (wtf?) and Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones and The L Word. Granted, the L Word is quite explicit. But still.

This came about because my friend had persuaded me to see a film called Severence, which scared the crap out of me. He told me it was a horror-comedy but emphasised the comedy. There were some funny bits but mostly it scared the crap out of me, with gruesome death scenes and the like. I can’t see what’s entertaining about it at all. I can’t see what’s entertaining about seeing a bunch of psychopaths kill a team of workers because they *enjoy* it. It’s sick.

I can cope with violence in films as long as it’s not violence for the sake of violence. In Fight Club, for example, it’s shocking but the film makes a comment on society and leaves your head spinning for reasons over and above the slap slap sound of knuckles hitting flesh. Severence doesn’t (although it weakly attempts to).

I am quite sensitive to violence over all. Blood and guts I don’t mind, I’ve seen operations on animals close up for work experience years ago and it didn’t bother me and I could probably see human operations or casualties. It’s more about the intent of the blood and gore. I find it wholly unnatural and… sick… to see or enjoy seeing one person killing or seriously hurting another person.

I’d rather not know what you saw, Kinders.

I totally agree that censoring sex is ridiculous; nudity even more so. Where on Earth did we get the idea that it’s somehow disgraceful or unacceptable for a child - someone even of thirteen or fourteen - to see a naked human? It’s absurd.

Fight Club is an interesting one. The trouble is that, while it does have a point to make and debate to stir, it’s still violence made entertaining and exciting. It does have two saving graces, I think: the first that the brutality is masochistic rather than sadistic, (though I wonder if the sort of people who are succeptible to being influenced by it are really capable or likely of making the distinction), and the second that it is generally made to be disgusting rather than titillating. So I don’t honestly know how to feel about it.

The only occasions that I can really stand up for violence in a film is when its presented as purely unpleasant and not at all tantalizing, which may sound a little paradoxical, I suppose, but I don’t think it is. I’ve heard Tarantino justifying the violence in Pulp Fiction with the notion that everybody gets their “just desserts” in the end (the chronological end of the story, that is). I think that’s bullshit. It’s still pain and gore and sadism made fun.

you know, kinders, when you say “whatever you do, don’t think of pink elephants…”

I do not know what dark impulse compels people to look at our most hideous acts, to investigate the horrific and the truly evil. I’ve been there, hating-loving the knowledge that I was seeking and demanding even though I could have walked away, satisfied that I would be happier without it. It’s not just violence that draws us like moths to the illusion of a flame; infidelity, deception, disaster, treachery… if it hurts, people love it.

Why do we watch blood spray through the air and make sounds of awe as though we were watching a light show or fireworks? Is it a means of childishly controlling our fears that makes us content to watch the images of horror on a flat screen and laugh that it is not happening to us? Perhaps an unconscious masochistic streak?

Perhaps it’s just as bad that those of us who witness evil, cruelty, or disaster actually take a kind of perverse pleasure-pride in the telling of our stories.

You have my admiration, for catching yourself before you spread the horror any further than it had spread already. I wish that more people could do the same.