I went with my fella this week, to see the new Diane Lane movie, Untraceable. It was very disturbing. It had a lot of those “gruesome” types of death the horror movies are so fond of these days. He just can’t be squished by an elevator anymore, oh no, now he has to be squished and we must see his eyeballs pop out of their sockets as it is happening. And, we must also see giant cockroaches scurry out of their hiding places to feed on them. Do we really? Must we? Apparently, we must.
The interesting part of the film was the moral question. If you put it on the internet, will they come? Eric and I got in to a discussion about this after the film. Which, in my opinion, means that the film did its job, you actually had something to think about after 2 hours of your life that could potentially lead to you questioning a held belief or behavior. That is good film-making.
The filmmaker seemed to be reprimanding the internet user. Users were basically ambulance chasers, constantly looking for that new footage on the World Wide Web, which would be a great shot of some type of personal catastrophe. You know, the car chase where they run into some police officer giving a ticket on the side of the road. Or a shot of police brutality. Or a bomb being dropped on a village. Why do we need to see this? Isn’t reading it enough?
I have always been confused by this...quick to write it off as a hobby for bored teenage boys, but did any of you go and watch that poor man get be-headed? Did you turn away from 9-11 footage?
Was I just as bad, when I looked at all of the pictures of that poor “octopus” girl? I heard it was out on the web, so I went and looked. Out of curiosity or disbelief, does this make it better? Superior to the guys who want to see the bullet going through the kids scull, cause they think it would be cool?
Who benefits? Who pockets the money for our morbid curiosity?
I got very angry thinking about these things. It angers me that learning right from wrong seems passé these days. Isn’t it wrong to be a jackass?
