I’m sorry, but I will be on my soap box for this post.
There is a trend, which I’m sure has been going on for much longer than I’ve been walking the earth, where our TV shows and films are getting a lot more graphic. Watch any prime time cop-style TV show at the moment and you’ll see more graphic scenes of human mutilation than ever made it into any R-rated film when I was a kid!
What I want to know is why do we need to see this gore? Why should we be made to be desensitised to violence? I think the only groups of people who should not be made highly emotional by the site of such violence are medical and police professionals, who need to function with a clear head in the face of these traumas, and psychopaths. The rest of us should get upset!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in denial about these things happening, and that they will always be a magnet for stories, we have and always will be morbidly drawn to these topics (and indeed I have written quite a few horror stories myself, so I know the fascination). But there is a difference between seeing the gore in detail and using the art of the implied. A spray of red across a wall, the bloodied knife dropped to the ground, or even the expression of pain moments after we hear a gunshot can all get across the fact that a dastardly event has taken place. Seeing it should not improve the story!
I don’t want to see the graphic violence. I want to be able to sit with my friends or family and watch an action, drama or thriller without having to feel horribly uncomfortable about what is happening on screen. I don’t want to have to tell a friend when they can look again at the screen. I just want to enjoy the show.
Probably a lot of you are thinking that I can just make the choice to not watch the show, but this is my point. I enjoy horror, thrillers, dramas and action stories and have done for years, but it is now getting to the point where I can’t watch any of those without risking losing my lunch. I’m not getting a choice any more. Game of Thrones was not released in an M-rated version, if it had been I would have got it. So as a fan of the books, if I want to watch the show I have to sit through horses getting their heads sliced off in front of me, people getting daggers stuck in their eyes, and dismembered bodies littering the ground.
I have an imagination, it is amazing how well my brain can fill in the missing pieces when all the TV show gives me is a groan –and that’s the way I like it. My imagination will provide me with as sanitised or graphic a version of what is going on as what it knows I can handle. The same cannot be said of the people who produce these TV shows.
It all just leaves me wondering why do people want to see this violence in all its gory detail?