Monkey existentialism by Yawp Barbarian.
Thoughts on the genuinely troubling taboo issue here. Now for the fun part, which is mocking people who go out of their way to preserve extremely stupid taboos that reinforce ignorance. D at Lawyers, Guns and Money points to a professor at the University of Idaho that is asking his students to sign a waiver before starting his course on film to indicate that they understand that some films have “potentially offensive or repugnant content”. Reading between the lines, it’s clear that his students are largely coming from conservative homes and are having knee-jerk reactions based on being spoonfed wingnuttery their whole lives until now.
“I guess I started to get more freshmen who would come to me and say, ‘Well gee, I can’t look at any film that has violence in it or nudity. So I developed a statement of understanding so people know ahead of time certain issues will be intellectually examined in some of these films, such as poverty, slavery, sexual themes, punishment and murder,� said West.
“Film is an extraordinarily powerful medium,� continued West, who counts among his visual texts Night and Fog, a documentary on the Holocaust that depicts the liberation of a concentration camp, and A Clockwork Orange, which features a rape sequence choreographed to “Singin’ in the Rain.�
“If you can’t bear to look at footage of the opening up of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that shows bulldozers pushing human corpses, then maybe this course is not for you.�
Mostly he’s referencing some powerfully upsetting stuff, at least in theory. I think there’s not many of us who can see the footage of Bergen-Belsen without being powerfully affected, but I will admit this upfront, I have never understood why the rape scene in A Clockwork Orange is so often held up as one of the most upsetting things ever filmed. I get sucked into movies and can be easily disturbed by a scene, at least in the moment, but that is one scene that didn’t freak me out very much. Go figure. But his reference to showing films with poverty and slavery on top of sex and violence made my wingnut meter go off. I suspect that West has a real problem with having sheltered, religious, conservative kids in his class lose their shit when presented not just with nudity and violence, but with materials the undermine sexism, homophobia, and white supremacy. Holocaust footage also has a very disturbing effect that I almost hesitate to mention, except that I know from experience that in some more rural parts of the country, people can still have a very abstract negative attitude towards Jews due to a combination of not knowing any and being told in church that the Jews killed Jesus. Witnessing in a very blunt manner what evils those teachings can lead to might be quite the shock to the system.
Regardless of specific political issues, the truth of the matter is—and god knows this is a cliched observation, but it’s still true—the rote conservative injunctions against violence and especially nudity serve mainly to reinforce power structures. In a very basic way, the existence of censorship is about who gets to see what—censors get to see everything and so the rest of us are just wee nobodies. With the adult-child hierarchy, this power structure makes sense, because it’s one power structure that by definition is meant to change and so doesn’t have the veneer of abuse it does when, for instance, certain words and jokes and images are considered suitable for men and not for women. It gets ridiculous, like an incident in high school where the teacher was showing the 60s film version of “Romeo and Juliet” and forgetting that there was a bit of nude male butt in it, lept up and covered the TV with a folder when the butt was shown, in front of an audience of teenagers who were all Romeo’s age or older.
Of course, when that incident happened, it immediately became legend in our high school and a shining example of How Stupid Adults Are. What I find interesting is the if college professors like West really are seeing an uptick in the number of students who are complaining that they have to view forbidden things is that this means that these kids have really absorbed the message that they are to be submissive to a standard, that there are knowledges that they shouldn’t know. Colonized minds and all that, and worse, they are being aggressive about upholding their own oppression. Which to me is a real shame. But more importantly, I have to wonder if there really is an increase in these kinds of problems with kids being willfully ignorant, what’s the cause? Is it just an uptick in brainless wingnuttery? Is it demographic?
More food for thought, in the anecdotal department is this post from Aspazia called “Existentialism is Wasted on the Youth“. It strikes me as relevant because of the issue of absurdity and the recognition of it. She has a frustrating experience with her students because she gives them this passage by Albert Camus to read and only gets back Stepford-esque denials.
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Mondy Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm–this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
Like Aspazia, I find it impossible to believe that there are many Americans alive who don’t relate to that passage. But her students adamantly deny any relationship and instead swear that their every waking moments are just so damn meaningful. Bully for them, I guess. I can’t for the life of me remember anyone I knew in my youth actually swearing life had some intrinsic meaning, besides the handful of True Believers, and they were just brainlessly reciting religious pablum. We had fun, mostly. Existentialism made a lot of sense to me, in fact, and still does—there is no meaning, make up your own. But it wasn’t just me, in that the story of the teacher trying to preserve the “innocence” of teenagers, who are clearly past the age of innocence, made the rounds of my high school in minutes because it was the absurdity that resonated with us.
It’s hard for me to tie these two strings of thought together except that I know in a way they are linked with the taboo. The professor in Idaho has enough students who have internalized the censor that he has to warn them ahead of time that they will have to view forbidden images in class. Aspazia has students that have internalized the taboo against questioning platitudes about god-given meaning in life to an alarming degree, to the point where they won’t even admit that they find the daily alarm clock to be somewhat oppressive. The pressure to pretend the dark things aren’t even there seems a bit strong lately, I suppose.
102 Responses to “The big huge whiny babies version of the taboo discussion”
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I think there’s not many of us who can see the footage of Bergen-Belsen without being powerfully effected,
I think most of us can - we just sit in our seats.
Hint hint - AFFECT, not EFFECT.
It isn’t just the wingnuts - there are a substantial number of home schooled or Waldorfian children who are equally as sheltered by equally misguided parents for completely different reasons.
Leftnuts? Dunno - but I have met and personally interacted with multiple families whose reaction to the cornucopia of excess that is modern society is to completely withdraw from it entirely and denounce it as evil and valueless. People who wouldn’t hesitate to support NARAL or most far-left causes mind you. But peopel with the same isolationist and judgemental attitude all the same, who feel they can save their children by never allowing them to encounter the larger realities of American life. Not just until they are old enough - NEVER.
I’ve seen Night and Fog exactly once. Every other time it has come up in a film class, I’ve explained to the teacher that I’ve already seen it and they always excuse me from seeing it again.
I still have nightmares about it. I actually got physically ill during the sequence in Schindler’s List where Spielberg visually quotes from it.
I have completely lost my mind, I guess. Not a post goes by that the first comment isn’t a typo. *sigh* And effect/affect is a big mistake for me.
What I find troubling is the belief that seeing a nipple will lead to damnation.
Or as Milton would say, suck it up whiny ass coward babies. Except he said it with a bit more style. His words…
“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644.
Oh for the days that the religious were slightly better educated and had access to more flowery phrases than “The Gays! The Homos! The Godless! The Brown People! The Evolution!” etc, etc.
And yet, Mnem, people actually *did* it. That’s what makes me look at that stuff, I think. I can’t, for the life of me, understand how people stomach doing it when I can’t stomach looking at it.
It’s hard for me to tie these two strings of thought together except that I know in a way they are linked with the taboo. The professor in Idaho has enough students who have internalized the censor that he has to warn them ahead of time that they will have to view forbidden images in class. Aspazia has students that have internalized the taboo against questioning platitudes about god-given meaning in life to an alarming degree, to the point where they won’t even admit that they find the daily alarm clock to be somewhat oppressive. The pressure to pretend the dark things aren’t even there seems a bit strong lately, I suppose.
One simple answer does spring to mind, at least for Aspazia. Let her bring a big handgun to a lecture, conspiciously load it and place it in frpnt of her where everyone can see it, and then proceed with her lecture as if nothing at all was wrong. I suspect it might prod them into considering what they consider to be the normal state of affairs, and why.
And yet, Mnem, people actually *did* it. That’s what makes me look at that stuff, I think. I can’t, for the life of me, understand how people stomach doing it when I can’t stomach looking at it.
Oddly enough, I can fathom how they could do it. Baby steps, boiling frog, etc. There’s a great book co-written by Christopher Browning and Lawrence Rees called The Nazis: A Warning from History (companion book to the BBC series of the same name) that’s a very good general-audience explanation of how the German people were slowly moved down the path to the death camps.
And even then, many Nazi soldiers did find the work too terrible to be borne, especially when they had to deal with German-speaking Jews. That’s why a lot of the worst stuff was farmed out to various Eastern European countries and why a lot of the former concentration camp guards they find are from places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, not Germany.
The scene that still haunts me is the row of headless bodies laying on tables, with the severed heads neatly stacked in a basket off to the side. Because, of course, it all had to be neat and orderly and tidy and oh-so-rational.
I don’t think there would be a problem with the fundie students seeing the movies if for example Night and Fog was about or had a sub-plot about a Christian bravely persevering the camp all the while professing their belief in Jeeezuz. Nor would there be a problem if Clockwork Orange had a follow up scene where the raped woman was pregnant and once again bravely displayed her faith by carrying the child to term all the while facing the onslaught of the dreaded abortionists.
In other words it ain’t the sex or the violence, its the fact that fundie propaganda is lacking.
Oh, and Phoenician it wouldn’t have to be a gun, just bring a Bible in to class and start ripping out the pages.
Nah, you’re not doing it to piss them off, you’re doing it to jolt them out of their rut.
They should be thankful you don’t escalate to grandmotherly kindness.
LMAO. I had an English teacher literally leap over two rows of desks to protect us from Romeo’s ass in the 11th grade…
My mother is a Theater professor. She implemented a (snarky) disclaimer that she puts on her course syllabi after she had a student demand an alternate assignment in a class because the original play had swearing in it.
You’re talking about the Zafirelli version of Romeo and Juliet? That doesn’t just have a male butt shot in it. If you look closely, there’s also about .7 seconds of nipple too, the post-coital oh-shit-you-better-get-out-of-here-fast,-Romeo scene.
I remember in 8th grade when I saw that movie, the teacher stopped the tape of Romeo & Juliet and had us vote on whether or not we’d see it. If I recall correctly, he’s the same teacher who wore pink shirts everyday because he wanted to take it back and make it manly to wear pink.
Taking a blind guess here - not knowing the individual teachers mentioned here - that public schools are (sadly) all to familiar with the situation of that ONE overprotective or religious parent who gets wind of the Romeo ass-shot and makes a complaint against the teacher. Just saying, in my experience, it was about the teacher’s covering their own ass against wingnuttery, even though they thought the kids could more than handle it.
I remember a girl in my Grade 12 English class (obedient Baptist girl, with some damn wingnutty parents) who made a stink about how she was going to be forced to read a homosexual rape scene in Timothy Findlay’s The Wars. I’m happy to report that my English teacher put a serious bug in their ear about literature, realities, and the fact that their daughter was old enough to vote, so she ought to be able to handle some of the nastier aspects of human nature without scarring her eternally.
“Colonized minds and all that, and worse, they are being aggressive about upholding their own oppression. ”
Good goddamn, Amanda. I love reading you. You cut so incisively to the heart of things, it just astonishes me.
I think the conservative fear of looking at this stuff is actually pretty complicated. Their standard line is that looking at pictures of atrocities, rapes, butts, and nipples will violate their virgin eyes/ears/mind’s anuses. But since that’s *their* standard line, I think we should be suspicious of it. I suspect they’re afraid to witness the effects of atrocity partly because they’re afraid of where their sympathies will lie. And partly because if they’re made to bear witness, they can’t be comfortable spinning lines about Jews not having it all that bad in concentration camps (if they’re inclined to believe in concentration camps in the first place); or about how women who claim to be raped are making shit up; or about how African-Americans don’t have legitamite gripes or claims to reparations (and certainly not affirmative action!) since slavery was a victimless institution. I think you’re right to say that disavowal and refusal to look is about preserving a power structure, but I think it goes beyond the guardian-of-culture/authorized viewer dichotomy. I think in some cases it extends all the way to the tyrant/fascist subject dichotomy.
Phoenician, you’re advocating the Jonathan Crane approach, are you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarecrow_(comics)
At my high school viewing of R&J, it was shown on the big screen in the main auditorium — ain’t no file folder big enough to cover that butt. We managed to survive the male butt, and the female nipple, too.
Mnemosyne, the whole death-camp project has always staggered me with its faux rationality. If all they wanted was to exterminate their enemies, they couold have done it Rwanda-style. Not only would it have been cheaper, it would have been faster — over and done with long before D-Day. But that wouldn’t have been properly systematic, properly scientific, properly industrial…. Madness.
I’m suddenly thinking of two anecdotes from my stint teaching community college. In the first, I was trying to explain to my students the difference between connotation and denotation, and how something that was literally the same as something else could have a different (figurative) meaning.
I stood in front of my class, dressed in a pair of black jeans and a black turtleneck knitted sweater with multicoloured flecks in it. I said, “See what I’m wearing now? I look pretty normal, right? Just like how I always look, right? Professor Interrobang?” Nodded heads and a few perplexed looks. Then I took off my sweater. Underneath, I had a black t-shirt with a printed logo on it. I said, “Now what does my outfit say?” My students sat there in stunned silence for a few seconds, then one of the guys put up his hand and said, very timidly, “I…love…rock and roll?” I don’t think anyone in the class except me was more surprised than he when I said, “Yes! Good! Exactly! Right! That’s exactly what I’m talking about. See, I’m still wearing clothes, but…” and so on. He actually asked me, “Is that a band t-shirt?” I said, “No, but it doesn’t matter what it is, because what matters here is how you see it, what your interpretation is.”
Somehow, the idea of even venturing an opinion that didn’t have an Approved Right Answer™ really freaked the lot of them out. On the other hand, that guy’s marks improved dramatically for the rest of the year.
The second anecdote was teaching a unit on business ethics to my other class and having one of my students ask me, “Why are we studying this? Isn’t the only ‘business ethics’ that count whether you make a lot of money? I mean, it’s all about the money, right?” and having almost all the other student in the class murmur and nod assent.
If I can tie these two things to the taboo issue at all, it’s that I sort of wonder what happened to these kids, that they’ve had the rebellion stamped out of them so badly that they not only won’t even express an opinion for fear of being “wrong,” but where they’ve swallowed the conventional wisdom whole, without even a glass of water, to the point where they need to attack opposing points of view.
This culture has really gotten away from the idea that it’s important for people to get out of their comfort zones once in a while, hasn’t it?
Amanda,
I wanted to thank you for bringing your strong, clear voice over to fdl during the “language debate”. I was a regular there and no longer feel comfortable, not because of language but rather, the invective directed at anyone who disagrees. I had only been here once or twice before, and was moved to come again by your commentary tonight. I never mind smashmouthing but I do not respect others who stick up for bullies. Tonight I have replaced fdl on my blogroll with your site and I thank you for your work.
Though it is not because I am a tender wingnut, I would personally appreciate a warning if a class is going to include films with a lot of violence, especially sexual violence. I still, after freakin’ years of therapy, struggle with PTSD issues, and I can easily be triggered by such things. I have never been able to watch that scene in “A Clockwork Orange”, and I don’t think I ever will. I have watched such things as the “Frontline” episode on the cleaning up of the concentration camps, because it felt important to me to not turn away from, and because it was aftermath - nothing was happening to living people right then. Highly disturbing, upsetting, and terrifying, but not triggering. CSI though, can set me off. An episode of “The Wire” my husband was watching last night drove me out of the house until it was over. I really look forward to the mythical day in the future when rape and violence aren’t prime-time entertainment anymore. I know, keep dreaming. And I’m not even going to get started on the frelling video games. Argh.
I have a hard time sometimes getting friends (and a spouse) to understand that my avoidance of violence isn’t mere distaste, but protection from potentially having a panic attack, or even just being tormented by nightmares for a night or two. Anyway, warnings would be welcome for me, even when delivered with the tone of condescension that people seem to have about those of us who can’t tolerate violence. Does anyone know why people seem to others avoiding violent movies and such personally? I have met many who seem affronted by my refusal to watch, or leaving a movie night if there is something on I know will fuck me up. If anyone has ideas on that to share, I’d be really interested to hear them (without derailing Amanda’s thread).
Imagining a classroom situation, I would chalk the strange reaction of Azpazia’s students up to peer pressure. No one wants to admit that they understand, because it would make them look weak or wasteful. I also could imagine that many people have the ability to admit their understanding of futility trained out of them, if for no other reason that authority tends to take it personally and get miffed if ‘negative’ feelings are expressed too openly.
Of course, the line between being wary to admit a reaction, being unable to do so, and not even reconizing it anymore is wavery…
Burt, I think you underestimate how organized the Rwandan genocide actually was. There’s a popular notion that one day these savage Hutus just picked up their machettes and went at it, which is utter bullshit. You don’t kill a million people in a hundred days without some serious organization and planning. Extremist Hutu leadership organized, trained and armed milita groups throut the country; they worked to identify Tutsis beforehand; they identified leaders who could help stop the violence and assassinated them in the early stages; Most famously they used radio stations to direct the genocide once it had begun. The reason the Rwandan genocide was so quick was that the extremists were ‘racing the clock’ where the Nazi’s had complete control. Other than that, just because the Nazis had more technology and infrastructure to play with doesn’t mean that they were operating on a different level of insanity as any other group that sets about exterminating another, it just means that their lunacy was shaped by society and circumstance.
Phoenician, you’re advocating the Jonathan Crane approach, are you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarecrow_(comics)
I was actually thinking more along the lines of Checkov’s command that dictum that if a character brings a loaded revolver onto the stage in Act 1, it had better go off by the end of the play. Everybody has absorbed this in the TV and movies they see - and they’re going to be wondering all through the lecture when it’s going to go off…
Oh, and there’s also Mode training in the “War Against the Chtorr” series.
I have a hard time sometimes getting friends (and a spouse) to understand that my avoidance of violence isn’t mere distaste, but protection from potentially having a panic attack, or even just being tormented by nightmares for a night or two. Anyway, warnings would be welcome for me, even when delivered with the tone of condescension that people seem to have about those of us who can’t tolerate violence.
When I was a little kid, my school used to show us educational films about what would happen if you were careless crossing the road. I can’t imagine they were really that horrific, but the first one they showed made me cry - and I mean, cry. I was taken out of the auditorium by a bewildered teacher, who wanted to know what was wrong, and I couldn’t tell her. I still don’t get it now, come to that, over thirty years ago. But after that, I got to escape these films by sitting with a book somewhere else: the one time they made me go back, I started to cry again.
The other film that I could not bear and would have walked out of if I’d had a clear understanding that I could do that was almost the end of the 1970s version of A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge believes he’s died and gone to hell: I suppose I was 10, and I (and another child in the same class) cried unstoppably, though by that time I had learned to do it silently.
Some things really are unbearable to watch. My only solution is to get up and leave, and if challenged on that, just say: “I can’t bear to watch it, and I don’t want to discuss it. Let’s talk about something else.”
In the Christian world the taboo was absolute.
Transgression would have made clear what Christianity concealed, that the sacred and the forbidden are one, that the sacred can be reached through the violence of a broken taboo.
George Bataille, Eroticism, Death & Sensuality
Ditto that. Mine was a fifth grade movie about how horrible fire can be to a field full of baby ducklings. I am not exaggerating.
AM: I have completely lost my mind, I guess. Not a post goes by that the first comment isn’t a type
should be “typo”.
ajay, that’s cruelly rubbing it in.
My local chapter of the Pedants’ Society needs a Snide Overlord - you got anything else on this month?
Thanks, Hope. I wanted to stay out of it, but Jane really, really should know better and I suspect she does.
Fixed, ajay. Seriously, my brain is shot or something. I think I just had a stressful day for some reason.
Phoenician you have a point. I was thinking if these kids are fundie conservative types from Idaho, well pulling out a 9mm, slapping in a clip and pulling the slide is not going to get them out of their rut, they will just wonder whether their theater professor has the safety “on” the thing and knows what the hell she is doing. There are conservatives that don’t like guns but if these are mostly rurals kids they have seen and loaded guns since they were 13 or 14.
Interrobang, I went to a lecture once about the generation after the Xers, what they call the Millennials—think everyone born ‘82 on. And while these sort of things have a tendency towards generalization that make people say, “But I know the exception to the rule!”, I think there were some valid observations made about that generation. The biggie is that, at least with the middle class kids, there was a tendency in their upbringing towards lots and lots of group activities from babyhood on and as such, they tend to fall very easily into groupthink. The lecturer contrasted this with the Xers, many of whom were latchkey kids and weren’t nearly as encouraged to do anything in groups, and subsequently are hyper-individualistic. Again, generalizations, but it really echoed with the group I saw it with, who were mostly Xers. At least, the descriptions of our lives did; most everyone I talked to afterwards who was an Xer confirmed the general lonerness of our generation.
I’d just like to offer what I think is a semantic adjustment, but an important one. Most of the men who carried out the butchery during the European holocaust were not members of the Nazi party, though they were mostly German. In retrospect we tend to label all the main actors in that horrid episode “Nazis,” but the actual percentage of participants who were members of the Party was actually significantly less than half (I’m forgetting the particulars of my Daniel Jonah Goldhagen; forgive me). In fact, roughly half of the eliminationist activity was organized and carried out not by the SS or even by the Wehrmacht, but by paramilitary German “police” units (whose participation in the mass murder was, on an individual basis, virtually voluntary)
My point is that we give ‘ordinary’ Germans of the time a free moral pass by semantically and psychically removing them from the massive atrocity in which they willingly participated. If it is true that we as a nation are raising another generation of unquestioning, right-wing dupes, then our future is in deep doo-doo. We are turning over our political future to another fine batch of “ordinary Germans.”
I think some of it may also be that many kids with fundie upbringing have very little experience with film or TV in general. I had a friend in college who was raised in a Mormon missionary family. She had never had a TV or gone to a non-G movie. Needless to say, she spent a fair amount of time glued to the dorm TV. Really hokey TV movies about mothers dying young would leave her sobbing. I really can’t imagine what A Clockwork Orange would do to her. (That said, she had an amazing empathy for real people’s pain and emotional tumults, and her willingness to so openly offer love and caring to others really did amaze and shame me. I’m very glad to know her because it let’s me see how corrupted the fundie world is, and how far from what it could/should be.)
My English teacher stood at the back of the classroom on Romeo and Juliet day. She told us to “close your eyes” and then said it was OK to open them. Of course no one did.
I actually think part of this is the head in the sand thing; if one never has to see unpleasantness, then unpleasantness doesn’t exist and doesn’t ever happen.
This lasts generally until something unpleasant (losing a child, a spouse, a leg, getting cancer, etc) happens to them. Then there is nothing to help get them through it within themselves — and all their friends will simply say, “It’s God’s will, accept it and be happy”…and then turn away because they don’t want to accept the unpleasant reality that person is dealing with.
I’ve seen it way too many times. I’m still bewildered by the person who told my mother (the day after the death of her 14-year-old son, my brother), “Be glad! He’s in heaven now!” How are you supposed to be glad the day after your son is smushed by a truck? That same thoughtless woman later cried bitterly when her daughter moved to Seattle because she wouldn’t see her as often.
You have to think about the bad stuff in life. It’s there. You can’t hide, it’s going to happen. You have to be prepared to muster your inner strength when you need it.
About the films, though — I am also very sensitive to viewing things; the baby duck film referenced above would have given me nightmares for years. I choose to do my thinking through books and real life (I work in oncology and psychiatry). My imagination is plenty vivid enough without someone else’s imagination making it worse. I can’t watch things like Jaws or Jurassic Park or Wait Until Dark or The Twilight Zone or Bambi or Old Yeller.
Then again, Schindler’s List was an extraordinary film; I had to see it after reading the book. Once was plenty, though.
Yes, my English teacher also almost gave himself a hernia leaping to the VCR to save us from Romeo’s butt. Which was funny to me, at least, because I’d seen the film about 3 times already, butt and all.
In another incident our fourth grade teacher (at a Baptist school) took us to the ballet. Aterwards he apologized profusely because he hadn’t realized that the men’s costumes (standard leotards) would be “so revealing”. I didn’t canvass the class, but I certainly was bewildered, having no idea what he meant. I guess at 9 years old I wasn’t as into staring at men’s packages as he thought I might be? Go figure.
Oh, and to add to the traumatizing films meme, for me it was the driver’s ed video that showed two kids hiding in a cardboard box in the middle of the street, and then showed a car running over the box. I have never had the occasion to avoid running over a huge box in the middle of the street, but if I ever see one I will certainly drive around it, as that image has never left my head.
Well, I’m a *atheist* fer cryin’ out loud, with a liberal upbringing (NOT fundie AT ALL), and when I saw “A Clockwork Orange”, the rape scene nearly sent me out of the theater, physically ill. It wasn’t the sex that was disturbing, it was the violence, the violation. My opinion: the movie was great (as art) and I’m glad I saw it, but I never want to see it again.
I haven’t seen “Night and Fog”, nor “Schindler’s List”. I read the book (Schindler’s List) when it came out. Much the same, I’m glad I read it; but I won’t be rereading it, nor watching the movie. “Life is Beautiful” was hard enough, thanks.
There is, however, one film that I’m going to have to see, although I suspect that it will be very, very disturbing: Original Child Bomb. In its case, you can’t say things like “oh, that was the Germans; we’re different”.
When I taught fifth grade, I showed a tv clip which looked like it might lead up to nudity, but didn’t - the editors cut away or went to commercial or something, I forget. I was surprised at the reaction of the students during the lead-up scene, though - they kept looking at me, and saying, “Um, Wren…” like they wanted me to notice and save them from it. Granted, fifth grade is actually pretty young for something like that, but it was the internalization and self-imposed censorship that surprised me.
Re: Amanda’s comment about the Millenials, in my experience with classmates and coworkers, it’s a reasonable observation. One of the most frustrating experiences of my life was walking around my college campus in 2000 for a freshman poli-sci class, asking anyone who would respond who they voted for, and why.
This was in a purple corner of a very red state, so a little over half the respondents voted for Bush, and the most common reasons were “because that’s who my friends voted for” or “because my parents told me to”.
I wonder a lot about the motivation for decisions like that. I think part of it is laziness; we grew up during a decade where dot-coms were pushing an economic bubble that allowed middle-class parents to fulfill their kids’ every wish. Another part, at least at my red-state college, was that a large proportion of kids came from very conservative households, where Dad tried as hard as possible to be Ward Cleaver.
Any thoughts on this from other people that were born in the early 80s?
Well said…
“….the rote conservative injunctions against violence.” or vengeance.
The religious power structure (Catholicism in the day and for a thousand years)
proscribed both -covering both- their own and the secular asses.
[also invented Heaven..so the oppressed had a kinda end-days-out relief valve]
And “Violence”, that is unless somebody…either religious or secular called a crusade or war or jihad or like that.
Then it was ok. Still is , pretty much.
But maybe not so much….I hope.
I haven’t seen ‘Night and Fog’ or ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (I’ll probably have to see them both one day, just because I most likely should), but ‘Schindler’s List’ and ‘Life is Beautiful’ are very difficult to watch. Both are amazing movies, and I think everyone should see them at least once, but once is definitely enough. Funnily enough, though, ‘Schindler’s List’ doesn’t upset me nearly as much as ‘Life is Beautiful.’ I think it’s the transition from the comedy at the beginning of the film to the absolute tragedy that does it to me, more than the graphicness of ‘Schindler’s List’, which is still pretty horrifying.
But SLR, that’s the genius of the scene. There’s no sex at all; it’s 100% humiliation. And yet, film critics universally recognize it as “rape,” demonstrating that they really do understand that it’s a crime of power, not of sex.
I don’t understand why people focus so much on that scene, though, and not on the later crime for which Alex gets caught and incarcerated, a scene which also conveys a brilliant image of the brutality and violence of rape.
The one thing I remember from the 2000 election, during which I was 18, was that everyone I knew really bought into the Green party’s message of “there’s no difference between Gore and Bush”. I think most of the people I knew latched onto this message as a convenient way to excuse their disinclination to vote or care. To be fair, I also knew a lot of hippy kids who believed this nonsense because they were actually Greens.
I think mostly we’re just like the stereotype. We don’t care about politics because we think it has nothing to do with our lives. Of course global warming won’t affect me. Of course I can always get a good enough job. Of course I won’t get pregnant until I’m financially and emotionally ready. Sweatshops? Well, I need clothes and they have to come from somewhere.
I think I was shown both movies when I was too young; honestly, does a 12-year-old ever need to see rows of human heads? Soap made from people? Probably not, and the fact that I can still conjure up exact frames of “Night and Fog,” even though I haven’t seen it in 13 years, is a testament to how affected I was. But I’m eternally grateful to my teacher at the time, who (while she certainly excused those of us who were weeping and vomiting) tried to emphasize the importance of “these are real. These happened. You need to understand that humanity CAN go here.”
I credit her with most of the important things I’ve learned, now that I think about it.
In my high school, my English teacher showed us Excalibur when we were studying a piece on the stories of King Arthur. She told us that it was cut for television, so we all thought that we were about to see a tame version of the ’80’s classic.
Au contraire.
The film got to the scene where Uther (disguised as Igrayne’s husband), has sex with her in full plate armor - a memorable scene, if you’ve never seen the movie - and we thought that any second now, there would be a jump to ol’ Merlin saying “It is done.”
Any-second-now.
Well, needless to say, this entire class of seniors - all 17-18 years old and most of us having seen the movie in the theater, anyway (this was only about a year after it came out) - loved this. There was much hooping and hollering, and when the scene was done, the English teacher said, “My, it’s warm in here.” We all got a huge laugh out of it.
Nobody complained, and the teacher didn’t get in trouble over it. It was a genuine accident and we all understood that.
I would hope that this kind of thing happens all the time in America, and we only hear about the very rare incidents where people make a big deal out of things like this simply because it is so rare.
I remember reading R+J in 7th grade. At that time (early 80s) quite a few kids were getting the abridged version of the play–they don’t discover that Romeo and Juliet are married much less that they consumate that union.
Heaven forbid kids think that other teens might marry and have sex.
As for the Zefferelli, I believe in the public school we were censored and not allowed to watch the whole movie (easy enough to hide as class was only 45 mins.) It was my Jesuit high school that showed the whole thing and didn’t think it was a big deal.
That’s interesting, because I was just reading an article yesterday written by a dude who wrote for one of the 80’s saturday morning cartoon shows that I loved. He was talking about why they included a particularly whiney, obnoxious character who was such a drag on the show. His point was that he had to — in the 80’s, Parent’s Associations were putting heavy pressure on the cartoon industry to get the right “message” across to children, and one of the most popular themes was that trying to break away from whatever the flock was doing was bad and would only lead to trouble. So, every episode of the cartoon involved a particular task that this one guy didn’t want to do; and he’d dig his heels in and whine and act like a dick about it, and then he’d wind up in trouble and have to go running to the group. (Bonus points to anyone who can identify the show/character).
From what you described, it appears that the message got across just great.
Just a footnote — the teachers, in situations like those described here, may simply be protecting themselves. I’ve known school administrations, and even a college administration, in which a single complaint from a parent (or student, in the college) that contained the words “inappropriate content of a sexual nature” would certainly lead to the teacher sitting through a long, long interrogation, and could easily lead to the teacher being summarily dismissed.
So the teachers, not being the complete fools they’re often thought to be, take steps to cover their own butts — sometimes by, ridiculously, covering Romeo’s.
I can’t find it in me to blame a teacher for not wanting to be fired over a decades-old (or centuries old — remember the Horrible Naked Statue controversy?) one-second view of a buttcheek. Sometimes the laughter (I would have hoped) is also at the administration.
With kind regards,
Dog, etc.
searching for home
“Colonized minds and all that, and worse, they are being aggressive about upholding their own oppression. �
Possibly for the same reason that footbinding lasted for 1,000 years in China - the women themselves saw the bound foot as beautiful. It was socially reinforced by the fact that as long as a woman had 3-inch long bound feet (”golden lotuses”), she was considered beautiful and extremely marriageble, regardless of any other flaws (physical, monetary, or class) she might have.
Thus, because these students have (for the most part) been surrounded by those who advocate the “beauty” of censorship, etc., and have been rewarded for buying into it with a sense of community and “specialness”, it is really no wonder that they work so hard to both defend it to outsiders and to protect it for themselves. They want to be “beautiful.”
(shrug)
It’s a thought, anyway.
Cellar Door, you’ve got company with me. Not alone.
Mighty Ponygirl: I was born in 1977 and the date inscribed in a book of bedtime stories that was given me is 1978. I can only assume it was new or near-new when it was given to me. There was a story about a train engine who liked going through fields and smelling buttercups and chasing butterflies, but in train engine school, the most important lesson that ALL the trains had to learn was “staying on the rails no matter what.” They also learned to stop when they saw a man waving a red flag, and go when they saw a man waving a green flag. So, in order to teach the little train engine a lesson, they caught him in a field and placed men in every direction waving red flags. No matter which way he tried to go he saw a stop signal. Until finally he looked back over to the train tracks and saw a man waving a green flag. After that he stayed on the rails all the time and grew up happily ever after just like the big important trains that went really fast from point A to point B without ever stopping to look at the buttercups.
I loved this story as a kid, maybe because I loved the picture of the train with a flower chain hanging around his smokestack. Then I found that book again when I was in college and I was horrified.
I was shown Romeo & Juliet several times in public school and there was never any issue or attempt to shelter us from the nudity. Thank the Disco Ball I grew up in San Francisco.
I don’t understand why people focus so much on that scene, though, and not on the later crime for which Alex gets caught and incarcerated, a scene which also conveys a brilliant image of the brutality and violence of rape.
I think the reason most people focus on that scene is that choreographing a rape to Singing In The Rain is, at its heart, ridiculous. It creates a tension in the viewer, who is tempted to laugh at the absurdity of, “Singing in the rain (kick), Just singing in the rain (kick, kick)”, and at the same time horrified at that temptation.
Human — that sounds absolutely horrifying. It sounds like they were half a step from giving the train electric shocks unless it got back on the rails.
I’m your age — my favorite book was always Pickles the Fire Cat. It was definitely sympathetic to different-ness.
I realized recently that the reason why closing my eyes wasn’t enough during a disturbing movie scene, aside from still hearing the sound, was that deep down I was afraid that I would open my eyes and look anyway. I have an overwhelming urge to run from the room when there’s violence involved and I think it’s for this reason. Once I figured this out, I can sit with my eyes closed and say, “I don’t want to look, so I won’t.” Now I can sit through a movie that I would otherwise avoid completely because of one disturbing scene that’s 60 seconds out of the 2 hour film.
I relate this in my mind to the fundies and their desire to exise the common culture of things that are forbidden to their particular enclave - the deep seated fear that they might be tempted to look.
As far as tramatic educational materials, did anyone else have to watch The Train Video in driver’s ed? It gave me a powerful fear of train tracks for years.
I was surprised and disappointed when I got to college in 2000, and in one of my first courses — a really fantastic course about religion and the arts — the professor had to explain on the first day that we would be reading a play with homosexual themes (Angels in America), and if anyone had a problem with that, they were invited to drop the class.
I also took a New Testament course with that prof, which included the first-day disclaimer that this was not Sunday school or Bible study, that we would be studying the books of the Bible as historical documents, that our papers were to be historical analyses and not sermons, and — again — anyone who had a problem with that was invited to drop the class.
I was actually glad he did that. My boyfriend later took the same course with a different professor, who let it turn into Sunday school. In fact, most of the class formed a “Bible study” to meet after the class and talk about how horrible it was to study the Bible in any kind of secular, historical way, and why the professor must be wrong about the scholarly consensus that the Gospels were not simulaneous eyewitness accounts.
To me, that was one of the most shocking examples of the internalized censor. A professor presenting information that challenged their literal interpretation of the Bible was such a threat that it required the formation of a protest Sunday school group.
Denise: I was 18 in 2000 as well, and I actually view our cohort’s support of Nader as a last, albeit misguided, gasp of nonconformity and idealism. I didn’t see a lot of people using the “Bush and Gore are the same” argument as an excuse not to care. I saw tons of us organizing for what we saw as an alternative. YMMV.
Um.. the point of footage from death camps and scenes like the rape in Clockwork Orange is that they are supposed to disturb you. You should be horrified by the inhumanity of it. It’s supposed to make you think about your feelings. If you avoid such things then you’re denying yourself an opportunity. Conservatism is just another name for willful ignorance.
I’ve never seen Schindler’s List or Night and Fog, but when I was in high school, my orchestra travelled to Austria, and we went to Mauthausen, which they described as the “mother” camp for that area.
I remember a lot of fragments from the visit. The eagle over the gate. The tour group I was in huddling around our conductor, who was holding the tape recorder describing the housing, if you can use that word, for the prisoners. The pile of preserved shoes in the museum. The room with the ovens, which I would swear were still covered in a fine grey ash. Hundreds, maybe thousands of photographs and candles and testimonials covered the walls. I left a piece of rose quartz I’d been carrying with me. There were survivors visiting too, which boggled me at the time. Now I suppose it might help to see that old fearsome place as a relic, without the power to hurt you any more.
There are two more things I remember about the visit. One is the film they showed before you went into the buildings where most of the people were killed. Outside of the rooms where people were executed were a couple of closets where you waited your turn. Many people had carved in prayers or curses, the most vivid one being, “If there is a God, He will have to beg for my forgiveness.” The girl I was rooming with couldn’t fathom being reduced to that kind of bitterness. I couldn’t imagine otherwise.
The last thing is me in the bathroom afterwards, huddled against the sink, sobbing. One of the chaperones approached me and asked me if I was all right. And honestly, at the time, I didn’t think I’d ever be all right again.
As shattering as I found it at the time, I’m very glad I witnessed the whole thing. They say, “Never forget,” and that is precisely what I cannot do. And that’s why, sometimes, even if you cry and vomit… you still have to watch.
cellar door…I don’t have PTSD, but I’ve always been super sensitive to violent imagery. Sadly, having kids just makes it worse. I can’t stand any brutality on screen anymore. Even SVU is becoming too much.
My Romeo and Juliet experience (since we’re sharing) just had our cynical, verging-on-misanthropic teacher standing at the front of the class, holding a folder across Romeo’s bare bum and saying, “We’re all adults here, but I know that if I let you see - oh, my God! - a bare behind, someone’s mother is going to complain.” And we all knew that “someone” was Lori, and we all knew he was right, even Lori, and we all got a laugh out of it.
As far as my own childhood indoctrination, something I’ve only recently come to appreciate is the fact that my parents loaded my brother and me up with all kinds of books emphasizing creativity and adventure. Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Phantom Tollbooth, just about anything that would spur our imaginations and make us think about things differently. We’re both writers now (and our parents were both in medical fields, so it’s not like they were crazy flower children themselves), and I think that contributed to it a great deal.
And pablo - thanks so much for the advice on building character. I had no idea that none of us are responsible enough to judge for ourselves what we need to experience to gain understanding and empathy. My eyes have been opened.
I agree with Dog etc. about the teachers having to be hypervigilant about what goes on in the classroom. It really depends on the community and on the administration how much leeway a teacher has, and sometimes one teacher can get away with stuff that another one can’t, because of classroom style or reputation within the school.
I think the lung cancer movie in 5th grade was my first gross-out movie (not gross for me, exactly - I thought it was pretty cool), but the teacher tried to talk me out of watching it because my grandfather had passed away from lung cancer the previous year and she was afraid I would be traumatized or something. (For those of you who haven’t seen it, it followed the story of Joe, who had lung cancer because he smoked, and who had to have surgery to remove the entire lung that had the tumor in it, and they showed THE ENTIRE SURGERY, including the bit where they cracked his sternum.)
My high school was actually kinda progressive for a red state school. We saw a fair number of really good movies that perhaps would not be shown in many high schools today (including one that creeped me out for weeks - a black-and-white version of “Premature Burial”). Plus, in driver’s ed we got the infamous Indiana State Highway Patrol 4th of July movie, where they recreated the circumstances of fatal crashes during holiday weekends and then showed the actual crash scenes WITH BODIES in detail. The only people excused from that one were people who had actually lost family in car crashes. If you fainted, they brought you to the back of the room until the movie was over. I also remember the street safety movie with the two kids playing in a box in the middle of the road. That still gives me a little shiver when I think about it.
For me, I think the hardest movies to watch are the ones where the violation is more psychological than physical, where the ones in power pick,pick,pick at the weaker ones’ soft spots. Clockwork Orange is another one that I found hard to sit through, maybe because the emotion was more naked.
Most of the men who carried out the butchery during the European holocaust were not members of the Nazi party, though they were mostly German.
I wouldn’t take Goldhagen’s stuff at face value; unfortunately, well-meaning as it is, his book is filled with inaccuracies. I’m not quite sure where he got the “most people weren’t party members” thing — you couldn’t get a job in Nazi Germany without being a party member. Membership was at something like 90% by the end of the war. However, the vast majority of those people weren’t involved in the party’s politics at all — it was just something to put on your resume, so to speak.
Christopher Browning is probably still the pre-eminent Nazi scholar who knows a huge amount about how the Nazi state worked. Take a look at his great book Ordinary Men. It comes to a very different conclusion than what Goldhagen claims it does.
Um.. the point of footage from death camps and scenes like the rape in Clockwork Orange is that they are supposed to disturb you. You should be horrified by the inhumanity of it. It’s supposed to make you think about your feelings. If you avoid such things then you’re denying yourself an opportunity. Conservatism is just another name for willful ignorance.
Wow. Just… f you. I don’t watch rape scenes. I already know how I feel about rape, thanks. Denying myself an opportunity! That’s a good one.
Everstar, I agree with you that sometimes you need the trauma to make sure you never forget. I think we are shielding our kids too much when we try to protect them from all trauma.
We used to have Holocaust survivors come to school on Veteran’s Day and tell their stories. I can still remember a few of them, and I try to pass them on as best I can, but obviously it lacks the impact because it wasn’t me this stuff happened to. We went to the Holocaust Museum shortly after it opened, and the one thing I know I will remember to the end of my days is the smell. It is amazing to me that in brand-new building, the smell of death was everywhere, and the sensory memory permeates everything I learned on that visit. One of the reasons I have never been able to finish reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” is because I start tripping the sensory memory after I read a page or two.
Pablo said:
“Um.. the point of footage from death camps and scenes like the rape in Clockwork Orange is that they are supposed to disturb you. You should be horrified by the inhumanity of it. It’s supposed to make you think about your feelings. If you avoid such things then you’re denying yourself an opportunity. Conservatism is just another name for willful ignorance.”
And that is probably true for many people. However, what you need to realize is that some of us (me included) are the emotional equivalent of supertasters. I feel far too much. It makes me a comforting nurse for dying cancer patients and their families, and makes it easy for me to gain the trust of psychotic patients in my other job, but it makes it almost impossible for me to witness the evil that people do to each other. I can’t fathom it. It hurts my heart.
I can read about those things, because I can put down a first person account of the Holocaust and come back to it when I am calmer, but the visual makes it too visceral.
Our English teacher in 10th grade waited at the front of the room, turned off the TV and timed the nudity on her watch and then turned the TV back on. So 1) she was prepared, and 2) we were extremely curious about what we had missed. And of course the video store in our tiny town didn’t have a copy of the movie.
But in all this talk about sex and violence, you forgot the other bad thing - language. Those dirty words that they can’t stand to hear. I had a Mormon friend who wouldn’t watch anything over PG-13 because he wanted to have limits, not just for sex, nudity, and violence, but for bad words too. He was over 30 at the time. And honestly he was one of the most sex obsessed people I have ever met. I think if he would have just watched some porn occasionally, his mind could have moved on to other topics. Sheesh!
One thing that I suspect sets me apart from most Christians my age in this country is that there’s a whole body of children’s and young-adult literature about the Holocaust, and Jewish kids start reading it at a pretty early age. Not that there’s anything stopping a non-Jewish kid from picking up Number the Stars– in fact, I know of elementary schools that make it required reading– but that’s one book. The library at my synagogue had a children’s section that was *mostly* Holocaust narratives; when I was 12, they showed us Schindler’s List and Life Is Beautiful, and took us to the Holocaust Museum.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a degree of sheltering, even then. Most of those books were about resistance efforts, or Jews in hiding, or the Kindertransport, not the camps, because some kinds of stories can have a happy ending, and some just can’t. I didn’t read Night until high school. But I knew, at eight or nine, who Anne Frank was and what happened to her. In Hebrew school we spent a fair bit of time coming to the understanding that humans are capable of terrible things, and that pretending horrible things don’t exist won’t protect you. No matter how sheltered an upbringing I might have had, I still knew that, and it seems like some equally sheltered Christian kids don’t get that lesson.
Mighty Ponygirl: I think the show you were referring to is “Dungeons and Dragons” and the character is Eric. Mark Evanier worked on that show and I read something similar (probably the same article) from him. I remember him being pretty harsh on “The Shirt Tales” for the same reason.
Sakurai for the win!
This is exactly how I feel. There’s absolutely no reason to force yourself to see or experience these kinds of horrors if you already sympathize with the victims.
My Romeo and Juliet moment–reading it in 10th grade English class, we read the line where Sampson says “Ay, the heads of maids, or their maidenheads…”, and I started to chuckle a bit. The teacher had to suppress a smile–it seemed that I was one of the only ones who got the joke.
As for Idaho, I did my graduate work at the U of I, and I can confirm how sheltered some of the students are. Some of these are kids who grew up on a ranch, where the nearest town–25 miles away–had maybe a few hundred residents, and their parents sent them to the U of I because Moscow wasn’t a scary “big city” like Boise or Spokane. It doesn’t surprise me at all that some students (or parents, or legislators) would throw a fit if a professor exposed them to naughtiness without sufficient warning.
Sad, really. These are nice kids who could do with a little exposure to the real world, but I’m afraid that if you plopped them down in the middle of Times Square, their heads would explode.
Part of the reason the the Nazis used all of that machinery for their death camps (sometimes even to the detriment of their war effort) was, I think, the level of denial it allowed. Only the people who worked at the camps (who were strongly propagandized about the importance of what they were doing and the need to overcome any qualms they might have) absolutely had to face the fact that they were killing people en masse. Everyone else was just moving people around, or employing prisoners in factories, or failing to protest when their neighbors were arrested and taken away… Doesn’t make them any less culpable.
In a way, I think that the Hutu may have used a similar capacity for denial: get people focused on killing the hated interlopers right next to them, don’t think about the tens of thousands of your neighbors and compatriots doing the same thing around the country.
Mnemosyne:
Thanks for the tip. There does seem to be a running academic dispute between Browning and Goldhagen. I don’t see any point in taking sides, because they both appear to agree on what was my central point (which obviously got lost in the fuzzy data references): the people who carried out the mass extermination didn’t act from fear or coercion. They acted willingly.
Human: on a similar theory, I’ve never seen Schindler’s List and probably shan’t. My Jewish upbringing having been, I think, adequate culturally if not theologically, I feel there’s little more I can learn about the Holocaust except details; I don’t need to have the enormity of it drilled into me.
I had nightmares every night for months after seeing Schindler’s List. After seeing Hitchcock’s The Birds in college, I couldn’t sit in a park with pigeons in it for years. And I blame Apocolypse Now for my helicopter phobia.
I think the idea that watching violence and death and crime is an “opportunity” is total idiocy–it’s an opportunity to get desensitized. And believing the only people who might object to it for any reason are sheltered fundies who are shallow and need exposure to the world just offends me. I choose not to watch violence because it makes me sick and I’m quite capable of empathy without visuals. Compassion wasn’t invented at the same time as film. I think for a lot of people movie violence is actually distancing; they care less about Darfur, because they’ve already seen Hotel Rwanda, etc.
I remember being shown footage of the camps (including the huge piles of bodies) in fourth form social studies (14 & 15 year olds), it made a lasting impression.
Everyone else was just moving people around, or employing prisoners in factories, or failing to protest when their neighbors were arrested and taken away… Doesn’t make them any less culpable.
There’s a fascinating moment in the The Nazis: A Warning from History book (it’s in the documentary as well) where they confront a woman who turned one of her neighbors in who completely, 100% denies that she ever did such a thing, even when she’s shown her own handwritten statement.
There are a lot of tricks that people use to convince themselves that they’re not responsible for their actions, or that what they did wasn’t really a big deal. That was why one of the first actions of the US Army after they liberated the concentration and death camps was to march all of the surrounding villagers in there and force them to look at what they “didn’t know” was going on.
I think for a lot of people movie violence is actually distancing; they care less about Darfur, because they’ve already seen Hotel Rwanda, etc.
I think it’s a slightly different problem than you think — I think that when fictional violence is shown, even when presented as a true story, it may sometimes make it easier for people to discount or downplay real violence. It’s like a short video that was going around on the internet of a suspect in police custody who shot himself. People were convinced it was fake because it didn’t look the way it does in the movies or on TV. Unfortunately, it was an unedited video of a real event.
As far as no one needing to see these things … my friend’s husband is the son of German immigrants. He literally did not know a single thing about the Nazis and the Holocaust, because his parents sheltered him from it. Schindler’s List was a major, major revelation to him and was disturbing on many levels. That’s why even fictional portrayals of real events can be valuable.
And there’s a big difference between a person who doesn’t want to have their complacency disturbed and a person who becomes physically ill.
ACG and Human- Skip all the art you think might offend you. It’s your loss.
Mnemosyne, thanks for making that distinction. Pablo, read Mnemosyne’s last two lines and then go experience some art that will teach you a little more empathy.
you know, i can read all kinds of things, but for some reason, visuals just really fuck me up.
starship troopers gave me nightmares for a week.
i skipped out on hostel and saw because i KNEW they would give me horrific nightmares, and i didn’t think the story was likely to offer me something to offset that.
i also skipped on saving private ryan b/c i don’t have to see a movie to get the horrors of war. and hearing people rave about the first 20mins and how it felt to be there…i have a pretty good grasp on that already, and again, it would probably give me panic attacks and night terrors.
but i know alot of people that that movie was very eye opening for them, so i’m really happy it was available for them to watch.
but i don’t think i’m wierd for knowing when something is too much for me.
Ditto what Hestia and others said re: rape scenes. Of course I have little sympathy for the wignut position that we shouldn’t see anything disturbing, but there’s something really simplistically smug in the position that anything violent is automatically disturbing and therefore profound.
And, I hate how these discussions end up equating gay themes with rape and the holocaust as “troubling themes.” One of these things is not like the other. ..
When I saw “A Clockwork Orange�, the rape scene nearly sent me out of the theater, physically ill. It wasn’t the sex that was disturbing, it was the violence, the violation. My opinion: the movie was great (as art) and I’m glad I saw it, but I never want to see it again.
Ditto.
When Alex casually cut the woman’s sweater off her breasts, that was unbelievably hard for me to watch — the humiliation and violation of her, the humiliation of her husband, the brutality. It is brilliant in that, yes, it shows that it’s 100% about power — but that doesn’t mean I’m going to watch it again.
“I suspect that West has a real problem with having sheltered, religious, conservative kids in his class lose their shit when presented not just with nudity and violence, but with materials the undermine sexism, homophobia, and white supremacy.”
I think there’s also a large category of people who censor what they watch simply because they find it too painful to watch. A very good friend of mine was unable to watch Thirteen all the way through, because the movie reminded her too much of some of the painful stuff she went through when she was 13. Likewise, I’ve another friend who was unable to watch The Secretary, because any suggestion of sexualized violence makes her feel sick for days afterwards. Another friend misunderstood the synopsis of the recent Iraqi movie, Turtles Can Fly, and she wanted to turn it off half way through because of the violence. My friend suffers from depression and prefers to watch happy movies. Horrorific anti-war movies only deepen her depression. I’ve heard several of my friends say something to the effect “If I know this movie will make me feel sick for days, why should I watch it?”
I’m not sure of the answer to that question. I am sympathetic to the people who feel they suffer actual damage from certain films, and so they don’t want to watch those films. I guess they are closing themselves off from material that could team them new ideas, but I also guess some messages are put in a way that is too brutal for them.
“Jodie said:
Pablo said:
“Um.. the point of footage from death camps and scenes like the rape in Clockwork Orange is that they are supposed to disturb you. You should be horrified by the inhumanity of it. It’s supposed to make you think about your feelings. If you avoid such things then you’re denying yourself an opportunity. Conservatism is just another name for willful ignorance.�
And that is probably true for many people. However, what you need to realize is that some of us (me included) are the emotional equivalent of supertasters. I feel far too much. It makes me a comforting nurse for dying cancer patients and their families, and makes it easy for me to gain the trust of psychotic patients in my other job, but it makes it almost impossible for me to witness the evil that people do to each other. I can’t fathom it. It hurts my heart.”
I agree with both of you. I, personally, have a problem with watching rape scenes, or even reading them in books. They just leave me very disturbed. I know this, so I avoid them. I watch footage from concentration camps, and wonder how one person can do this to another. It reminds me to be tolerant and accepting of other peoples ideas and opinions. I see some of what is going on in the world today, and wonder if we are doomed to repeat something like the Holocaust, because people forget or even deny that it happened.
However, there are people out there who really have no idea how inhumane one person can be to another. For them, there is footage of the concentration camps, and rape scenes, should they want to discover what has happened and will continue to happen if they just sit around with their thumbs up their butts denying that humans have the capacity to be so cruel and ignorant. Some already know this, and don’t need to see anymore evidence to understand this.
Having said that, I am currently attending the University of Idaho, and am even taking a film course from Professor West. At the very beginning of the class, he handed out the waiver. It was something akin to what you see before many investigative shows with the disclaimer along the lines of “some of the footage is of a graphic nature and may disturb some viewers.” He obviously went more in depth. He wants a record that says that you understand that you may be viewing some graphic content. He even discusses some of what you’ll see before he shows the film. For example, before we screened Bunuel’s “Un chien andalou,” he warned us that the first scene was that of an eye being cut open. I’d seen it before, and still had to close my eyes. Even though I rarely have a problem with most content, there were a few things in this course that made me go “ew!” At this university, as someone above mentioned, there are a number of students with a very, VERY conservative upbringing, from the backwoods of many states. I believe that his waiver is a necessary evil in our sue-happy society.
Dennis is an amazing lecturer, and has served on film juries at major festivals all over the world. He wants you to leave his class with more than just a basic understanding of the reoccuring motifs of Bunuel or Almodovar; he wants you to leave with the understanding that there are so many other ways to potray life, not just what we see in Hollywood. He wants you to think. His exams are incredibly difficult, and his grading is severe. Yet, he is still very approachable and wants you to do well.
It’s all a matter of personal choice. In this case, perhaps it is better to be safe than sorry.
“I relate this in my mind to the fundies and their desire to exise the common culture of things that are forbidden to their particular enclave - the deep seated fear that they might be tempted to look.”
I agree. The temptation to look scares people. Supposedly when the soldiers came to arrest Galileo (who’d argued that the Earth revolved around the Sun in his book of 1615), he asked the Bishop who was leading them to first look through his telescope. Supposedly the bishop replied “I refuse to look through your telescope on the grounds that what I see there may threaten my faith.”
Damn you, sakurai! I was going to say the exact same thing. I actually remember reading the same story that human did when I was a kid, the one about the carriage and thinking back, she’s probably right, even if I didn’t think about it at the time.
One thing that did come to mind when I was reading this was one of my social/religious classes when I was 16 and we had a debate about abortion. We had a debate about abortion that involved (optional) film footage of one being performed, which caused more than one girl in the class to get up and leave. I don’t want to open up a huge kettle of fish here, I just think it’s in an interesting parallel to the debate about education and censorship. I can’t imagine me, or most of the other members of the class would have seen it otherwise.
As for our generation, it probably has a lot do with coming after everyone else. We were told as we were brought up that the hippies, the punks, the socialists, everyone that tried to take on the establishment had failed, and what we had now was what we were stuck with. You can try and make small gains in the social/cultural side of things but the political system, the status quo is here to stay. You can see that fairly vividly in the outlook of the New Labour/right-wing Democrats. So I suppose many of us ended up opting for a quite life, particularly in the post-9/11 (yeah I know it’s hackneyed, sorry to bring it up) atmosphere.
Oh, and being Jewish myself, I went to various holocaust museums, read the diary of Anne Frank, saw the footage of emaciated bodies being bulldozed, etc. but what really brought the full horror home to me, funnily enough, was reading that comic book, MAUS a few years later. Because it was only then that I realised that it was ordinary people, peole who’d been neighbours, customers, friends for years, who’d turned Jews in.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, is that it’s all very well to show people something that’s viscerally shocking but true understanding, ie. a new way of thinking that runs contrary to whatever hegemony they’ve adopted, and that they’re capable of empathising with, will always have a greater effect in the end, and a deeper one.
I’m applying for teaching positions at university and stories like this make me REALLY nervous.
No movie has made me ill, but the Holocaust Museum did….
Troopah, I agree that many people do need to be challenged. So many of us don’t learn empathy, or can only apply it in a few situations; only by being exposed to other people’s horrible events, sadnesses, or crises can they really get it. I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is Pablo’s holier-than-thou tone, that somehow ALL people must be exposed to ALL these lesson-bearing artistic endeavors or they are “missing out”.
People who have too much empathy in general need to learn other lessons (for me it was boundaries, one of which was knowing what I could tolerate and what I had to avoid to continue to effectively use the empathy I have, instead of being paralyzed by what others are feeling).
Mother Avenger didn’t enjoy visiting Mexico with Dad because she hated to see all the poverty that was apparent even in towns catering to tourists.
As a ‘guest’ along with the rest of her family of the Japanese Army during the last 18 months of WWII, she went through deprivation and the horror of seeing a Chinese guerilla fighter being buried alive by the soldiers who’d captured him.
I once told my German teacher in high school, who’d grown up in post-war Germany, how when she got here in America after the war, a treat for her would be bacon fat spread over a slice of bread. He replied that he used to do the same thing as well.
I sometimes wonder if part of the drive she had for acting at the community college and the local community theater was the attraction of make-believe where you can forget yourself to be someone else or to be a Claire Zachanassian, which was one rold of hers I remember well from holding book for her, as we say in theatrical circles.
they won’t even admit that they find the daily alarm clock to be somewhat oppressive.
How many of them come from a working-class background, or forgotten that’s their background?
I’m reminded of Lewis Mumford’s remark about the American attitude towards work in the phrase, ‘take it easy’.
And there’s a big difference between a person who doesn’t want to have their complacency disturbed and a person who becomes physically ill.
I think it is important to highlight this distinction. I watch a lot of violent movies, but I am always very disturbed by rape scenes, so I tend to skip them. I thought the rape scene in A clockwork orange was tolerable, but the one in Irreversible haunted me for days. However, I think it was a great scene because it showed the naked horror of rape, in a blunt and non-titillating way. Sometimes, sheltered or prejudiced people need to be brutally brought back to reality. I think this particular scene has the potential to shake up some of the arseholes who believe that “some women have it coming”. So I fully understand people who can’t bear to watch torture, rape or extremely violent scenes, but how anyone can assimilate rude language and gay themes to that kind of graphic content is beyond me. People who get bent out of shape whenever they hear someone say “fuck” mustn’t go out very often. It’s not like their ears are going to melt or anything.
I haven’t read all the posts in this thread, so maybe this subject has already been brought up, but I also think it’s important to distinguish between fictional violence and footage of real life violent events. Besides, I am personally more affected by films illustrating true events, such as the Holocaust, than by completely fictional ones. The whole concept of “graphic content” is a bit vague…
Elinor, it was hard for Burgess to write, too, since German soldiers actually did that to his wife — he had to get drunk.
I have a photograpy book by James Nacthway called Inferno. It’s photos from Rwanda, Kossovo, Sudan, Romanian orphanages, and so on. It’s not an easy book to flip through but i bought it and make myself look through it every now and then to remind me of what the world is really like outside of my own privliged, tiny part of it.
Pablo, why does your enjoment of/ability to look at highly disturbing material make you feel superior to those who do not?
Human - I remember that book! I hadn’t thought about it in YEARS, and you’re right, it IS creepy!
Re: clockwork orange - a friend in college once came home to find his roommate watching the “beating with a phallic statue” scene, and…um…pleasuring himself to it. Needless to say, he got a new roomie in short order.
I think the hardest thing I ever had to watch was a documentary shot in Japan shortly after the war, documenting the effects of blast exposure, burns, and radiation poisoning on the nuclear bomb victims.
The fingernail-pulling scene in Syriana was pretty bad, but a) it was over fast, b) it wasn’t real (although real things like that do happen) and c) I just happen to get extra squicked-out by fingernail torture.
Cellar door- first ask me when i stopped beating my wife.
Um, Pablo,
It’s pretty clear from the comments above you do think exactly what cellar door said.
You know, some people actually have suffered and don’t need fancy art books to tell them suffering exists. Some people even try to relieve suffering without first flaggelating themselves over having insufficiently suffered.
Wow! Trying to relieve suffering. That’s never occurred to me. Not even when was volunteer EMT on an ambulance, or when i was a Red Cross volunteer, or when i was a literacy volunteer, or the three years i spent in the Peace Corps, or when i worked in famine reiief for AID, or in my current field-working with cancer patients after having been one myself. So why don’t you enlighten me with your extensive knowledge of suffering, and what people do to try and relieve it?
For crying out loud, Pablo, put your e-peen away. Two human beings expressed personal discomfort (not a desire to censor) specific types of violence in art, because they they have either directly or indirectly experienced trauma caused by the very sort of violence they avoid in art and you turn on your “I’ve saved the world on soooo many levels, I’m the Big E-Peen of knowing suffering, and I can tell you how you should feel” act. When you questioned their right to feel a certain way about certain art, they had every right to be angry and to respond angrily to you. You were way out of line.
Someone very wise once told me that the difference between a progressive and a liberal is that a liberal will tell an oppressed person, “I’m here to help you — if you do things my way, your life will get better”, whereas a progressive will say “I’m here to help you, if you want help. How do you define the issues you face, and what help (if any) do you want from me”. Based on this criteria and the lack of empathy you have displayed in this thread, you are definitely a liberal and not a progressive.
When people rush into difficult situations, ostensibly to help, but actually to glorify themselves and fulfill their own need to suffer vicariously through the suffering of others, they generally do more harm than good. Certainly the people they “help” see through them, resent and distrust them, and generally seek services elsewhere if available.
If you are serious about a desire to help others in traumatic situations, you are a long way from a good understanding of the expression and effects of trauma as displayed across a life time, and you certainly appear to have not yet learned the lesson of following the lead of those in need, not assuming you know what they need.
odanu-I’ll put my e-peen away just as soon as you tell me what an e-peen is.
Hey i was commenting on the original post(remember that?) about COLLEGE students who refuse to watch any film that might offend their delicate sensibilties. Now i unfairly characterized them as conservative because that’s how i intrepreted the post, and let’s face it the people who generally complain about nudity in Schindler’s List are usually of the wingnut variety. The point i was making is that some art is meant to disturb you, and that’s a good thing, because it shakes you out of your complacency. I would think that it’s fairly obvious that this is part of what the college experience should be about. I can’t believe i even have to explain this again.
By any chance that very wise person didn’t also tell you to avoid psycho-analyzing people through blog posts did he? If not, he should have.
The things in Iraq took yet another wrong turn when Bush forced Maliki to meet him in Jordan. The meeting did not help Republicans in the elections, but broke the Iraqi coalition. The faction of Shiite cleric al-Sadr walked out of the government coalition, as promised, because of the meeting.
No one in Iraq has a slightest doubt that Maliki is an American quisling. That’s ok with the people. In Muslims countries, rulers are not expected to represent population; the US and the Qaeda each tries to change that. Muslims are very extroversive and value fac,ade and rituals. Maliki could be a puppet, but he should behave like a tiger – Iraqi tiger. At least, Maliki managed to skip social meeting with Bush and Jordanian King Abdullah (Olmert ignored Arab mentality and met Abdullah several times, a PR disaster).
If that attention to rituals looks silly to rational Americans, it probably is. But that’s how it works in the region. To reach an agreement with Iraqis – rather than simply punish the Baathist state – the US negotiators would have to sit hours and days with various Iraqis, both bureaucrats and radicals, drinking super-sweet Iranian tea, chain-smoking on par with their opponents and talking, talking, and talking. That might or might not bring the desired results, but no other approach could deliver a stable, moderate, US-friendly Iraq.
To please his American masters, Maliki brought together fictitious coalition. Its Shiite faction does not include al-Sadr’s group, the main Shiite organization. It includes only a minor Sunni party, also non-representative. The coalition is advertised as moderate, but listen to the names: Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party (sectarians), the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution (sic) in Iraq, and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (separatist organization, as the name makes clear).
The coalition is meant to squeeze Sadr out of politics. He would indeed go – into the urban battlefields. Sadr could show himself a good Muslim, promise to step down the fighting – and use the truce to train his forces. He needs time to grow the Mahdi gang into an army.
Sistani’s approval won’t cement the coalition. He is merely a religious authority. Religious power in Islam is very dispersed because every cleric and theoretically every Muslim could pronounce fatwas. People go along with famous clerics insofar as they opportunistically serve the mob’s wishes. Sistani cannot afford to condemn fighting the Sunnis, thus his blessing of the coalition could only be half-hearted. Moreover, Shiite militia includes few fundamentalists who would blindly obey Sistani. They are common guerrillas who only superficially subscribe to religion or ideology. They fight for the sake of killing. Their loyalty is with Sadr. Iran – al-Sadr’s sponsor – does not care about Iraqi Shiite bosses such as Sistani. Civil war in Iraq suits Iranian national interest: strong and hostile neighbor turns into protectorate.
Iran, not Sadr is the problem, but Sadr handsomely contributes to the situation. Oddly, the US loses its soldiers, kills Iraqis and allows still larger numbers to die in the conflict while al-Sadr, who orchestrates much of the violence, lives in safety. Why not assassinate him?
The White House PR people offended the common sense when they staged Robert Gates’ meeting with a dozen of handpicked soldiers who assured him that the army is on the right track.