Violent Delights, Real and Imagined
I've been a fan of horror films and literature since I was introduced to them. Things have changed in the last twenty years or so, and it's not treated as such a strange passion. It once was. When I was young, first beginning to write fiction, out of some combination of my own amusement, a desire to emulate my idols and what I now understand was a different kind of need or pull to make some contribution to storytelling because of what it was giving me, that I wrote horror was often vexing to adults. "What are you reading?" often got a cringe or "Do your parents know?" in response.
I've seen people express the sentiment or idea that "the nerds/geeks won," in respect to the fact that genre has come to dominate the landscape of storytelling in popular culture, in film especially, but not just in film. It's true. Horror, science fiction, the realms of storytelling which were the corners for the nerds to play in have gained mainstream acceptance, and they are economically dominating their respective industries. There isn't as much of a stigma to being a horror fan, a science fiction fan or a fantasy fan now. This is good. Some of the fandom out there needs to accept that the culture around them has changed, and they're no longer the underdogs they were when their passion was ignited, and at the same time, genre has always had a lot to offer the world.
Horror is often deeply ugly. If I had two cents for every time someone had said, "How can you enjoy that stuff? It's so violent and gory." I'd have been independently wealthy by the time I was eighteen. I wrote Saved By The Obscene as something of an answer to that question, and also as an aging, maturing person who believes it's important we have ways to engage with hard questions about hard subjects, that aren't always necessarily direct. It's one of the things storytelling does for us. We have these fantasy worlds and scenarios to work through ideas, fears, questions, whatever we might need to, and to see others are engaging with them, struggling with them, trying to find a way to best express what is often too complicated and complex to express in something direct like nonfiction.
For the forty-five years I've been alive, there have always been discussions about violence in media. They were most pitched in the 80's and early 90's as part of or offshoots of the Satanic Panic, which then helped spur the Parents Music Resource Center or PMRC into existence. The eponymous howl, "What about the children?" has always been the war cry. Conservative liberals got together with the totality of the right (meaning mainstream and far right religious extremists) to attempt to convince the country a slew of different things were corrupting the youth. Horror, and all things related, was one of their favorite targets, as was Dungeons and Dragons, heavy metal, then hip-hop, Prince, Madonna and so much more.
Anyone who lived through it will recognize the tactics being used to demonize trans and other LBGTQ+ people, because they are exactly the same now as they were then. "Dungeons and Dragons and horror films are turning our children into evil, violent predators" and "Satanic cults are sacrificing and molesting children during sex magic rituals in every town and city in the country" was as true as "LGBTQ+ people are trying to turn our kids gay and trans." It's Bigfoot shit. If you replaced Bigfoot with Dungeons and Dragons, horror films, Satanic cults or queer people, the statements and sentiments would be as factually accurate. It's Bigfoot shit. Always has been.
Some time later, there was a discussion about video games. It's ongoing, as far as I know. Violence in video games. Is there a difference between being a spectator, as one is with something like television and movies, as opposed to playing video games where one is a participant, and depending on the game, very much in control of how much violence is done and to whom? Grand Theft Auto was a flashpoint, and I'm not sure that conflagration has completely died yet. The arguments are all the same as they were back in the 80's.
Recently, I've started to come to understand, on a more profound level, why I've never trusted so much of this "discourse." This doesn't mean I don't think there are people engaging in it in good faith. There are. As much as there are charlatans and grifters trying to use it for some larger agenda or who are just plain old snake oil salespeople, trying to make a buck through engaging a controversial topic, there are people who are talking about these things because they genuinely worry about the effect violence in media has on society as a whole.
The one thing I've always struggled with in all of this is the clear line between fiction and reality. Fiction is, by definition, not real. Where fiction is concerned, film and literature are not real. They are creations of the imagination. Documentary and nonfiction exist, they are attempts to represent reality in their separate mediums. Fiction may attempt to reveal truths about being human, but it is not real. Jamie Lee Curtis is living her best life, in part because there was nothing real in the films which bestowed the Scream Queen crown on her decades ago.
A few weeks ago, a new piece of promotional material was released for the upcoming film Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. Click here if you want to see it. It documents the preparations and processes for a stunt which will be used during the film. The stunt involves Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle over a jump that is at the edge of a cliff, and then parachuting to safety. If you're not familiar, in the Mission Impossible series are action films, and Tom Cruise plays an agent for a secretive government agency. It's not so different from the James Bond franchise, but the Mission Impossible series has been characterized by an ever escalating series of stunts, many of which Cruise performs himself.
Watching this promotional video, I was of course struck by the technical acumen behind it all. Stunt work is a meticulous logistical undertaking, and it involves a level of understanding every single element, at each step. Things like fight choreography are as well choreographed and as dedicatedly, intensely practiced as ballet. A stunt like the one in this promotional video MI: Dead Reckoning involves so many moving parts, it's hard not to be impressed by the level of professionalism and know how that goes in to making it work.
Something else occurred to me though, as I watched Tom Cruise, a sixty year old man, repeatedly complete this completely insane task. Why do we want to see people genuinely risk their lives for our entertainment? This part of it, that a man is jumping a motorcycle off a cliff, hundreds of feet in the air, then parachuting down, is very real. As professional and as experienced as so many stunt teams are, mistakes happen. People get hurt on film sets, doing much less dangerous stunts. People sometimes die from small mistakes. There's a very long list of people who've been injured or died on film sets. This stunt worked. Had it not, Tom Cruise would be dead. Whatever your feelings about Tom Cruise and his top shelf quality weirdness with an interpersonal cult, it doesn't change the fact that what makes films like Mission Impossible incredibly successful is the fact that we're watching people risk their actual lives for our entertainment. The Mission Impossible franchise is a multibillion dollar draw, because we want to see people risk their well being and/or their lives.
I mentioned this, on Twitter, essentially saying we should ask ourselves why this is. I pointed out that at this point, CG is good enough. Maybe it's not going to look exactly real, but Tom Cruise isn't a real covert agent either. Also, the world of covert action doesn't involve people riding motorcycles off cliffs and such very often either. This could be simulated well enough on a soundstage, CG could be used to make it look good enough, and the threat to life and limb would be considerably. After all, none of this is actually real.
I got pushback from one individual in particular who was stuck on the degree to which CG doesn't look real, the professionalism and the degree of excellence in the stunt teams. They wouldn't address why it's necessary or why it's so important to watch someone risk their lives for our entertainment. That bit of it was something they just kept skipping over. At no point did I suggest this shouldn't be allowed or it should be outlawed or any of that, and of course, that's where they went with it, but they wouldn't answer why we don't find it strange that we are basically paying to watch people risk their lives for our entertainment.
Then, a few days ago, social media blew up with news that Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin had to be resuscitated on the field when he collapsed as a result of cardiac arrest. Again, I was asking, "Why are we so obsessed with watching people risk their lives for our entertainment?" and it occurred to me, this isn't a conversation I've ever seen had about sports as I've seen it related to film and video games.
Professional sports are a mess of contradictions, in general. It's obscene that players make what they make, when teachers, nurses, trash collectors and other people who are engaged in jobs which provide a direct social good are constantly economically undermined. It's no less obscene that team owners and leagues make what they do in comparison to the players, who people come to see, and without whom there would be no industry for sports. That's before we even get into the hypocrisy that is college sports, and those athletes brining in millions for their institutions, that they are restricted from ever seeing a penny of. These were the contradictions that drove me away from watching sports.
They are just baseline issues in all of professional and college sports. There are a few sports which have a whole other issue, and that issue very much is people risking their well being and their lives for our entertainment. American football and combat sports specifically.
In the early 2000's, the NFL was involved in an attempt to prevent research showing the link between the players and chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. That scandal was further exacerbated by the public revelations about the number of former players who had been diagnosed with CTE, and then revelations about racicism in treatment and compensation. The NFL settled a lawsuit for $765 million dollars, saving themselves from what would have been billions in damages had they been found negligent at trial, insuring the public would never know the extent to which the NFL knew this was a problem or the extent they went to in order to keep it covered up. Check out this video for the way the NFL handles what happens to their players if they're disabled.
Let's be clear... American football is a life altering, and life threatening undertaking. Deaths on the field may be rare, but the life altering after effects of playing the game, especially long enough to reach and then to play at the professional level are the rule and not the exception. It's not uncommon for players who don't play after college to have life long, chronic injuries. CTE may be among the worst, but it is far from the only serious, chronic injury that is possible or even likely following a football career. Chronic back, neck, knee and ankle injuries are the rule. When you're watching a football game, someone on that field is incurring chronic injuries that will last for the rest of their lives.
Then, there's boxing and mixed martial arts or MMA, as it's commonly called. Chronic brain injuries abound. In both boxing and in mixed martial arts, brain injury is literally the goal. It's hard to make the case for the existence of combat sports as much more than sadism.
This is why these sports are so popular though, isn't it? We watch because of the pain, the punishment, the beating it puts on the bodies and brains of the people who are engaged in them. We watch, because they are putting themselves at risk, for our entertainment. We talk about them in the terms of battle, war and we even constantly make references to gladiators, which is almost ironic, because we think ourselves so far advanced from the Romans blood thirst. We're not actually watching them kill each other, right? We make reference to it being a tribute to how indomitable the human spirit is, we shower them with compliments and accolades soaked in the vocabulary of glory. They probably deserve that much, at least.
It strikes me though, that given the number of different times in the last forty-five years there's been a significant public debate about violence in fictional media, what it says about the people who produce it, what it says about or does to the people who consume it, the only time I've ever seen a conversation related to football or combat sports has been at the revelation of the extent to which CTE was a problem among former NFL players and then when the discussion was extended to fighters. A few years on, it's disappeared.
This isn't fiction. These things are real. They are lasting, chronic injuries, and some of them are of the variety that the person who suffers them is going to experience a steady decline in quality of life as they age. Considering the length of a NFL or professional fighter's career, that means many are going to live a long time after, with significant injuries gained because there was what seemed like a big payday in risking their well being for our entertainment.
There's never been a significant conversation around what it says about us, that we want to be spectators to people risking their lives and well being for entertainment, and we want it so badly, the people who are able to do it at the highest level are paid amounts of money the majority of us can't even really imagine making. There are fortunes that have lasted and will last many lifetimes built on these sports industries, because we want to see people put through this punishment, even as we're absolutely aware of the injuries so many of them will be left with. We say, "It's their choice," and it's true, it is their choice. We don't ever really ask what it says about us that we want to watch people harmed for our entertainment. This is real violence, and the violence can't be separated from these sports. It's the entire point.
I'm not saying this as some kind of indictment that watching the NFL or watching combat sports makes anyone a bad person. That's not at all my intent here. My intent to point out that this isn't the kind of conversation that's ever been had at the same kind of national level that conversations about fictional portrayals of violence have. Anyone who publicly proclaimed they sat their six year old down to watch A Nightmare On Elm Street would be the subject of public backlash. I've had people question the parenting I received, boldly, because of the fiction I was allowed to engage with at a young age.
No one questions what it means that families will gather around the television by the millions to watch these sports though, and this is real violence. The injuries are real, and we know they are happening as we're watching.
How much of it is wrapped up with the fact that sports are the main source of socialization for men and boys? What does it mean that one of the most popular and important sources of a social life for men is so steeped in violence that is either implicit, in the case of football or explicit, in the case of combat sports, when we know this is how the athletes are treated by the sports industries and the result goes far beyond their days in the sport? Shouldn't that be worth asking questions about?
Isn't it odd how interested we are in watching men hurt each other? Does that seem healthy? What does it mean to our psychology, as men, when the world we live in puts such a premium on watching us hurt each other? What does that tell us our value is? What does it say to us that this is something we're introduced into as children, sometimes before we're fully old enough to even understand all the rules? We spend billions of dollars on this, every year.
It's time we start asking questions about the very real violence we choose for entertainment and why we find it so entertaining to watch people hurt themselves and each other. We should start asking what that says about us, as a culture.