Just wanted to comment on your idea that we put ourselves in the place of others, in art, so we can hurt with them. Not me. Not anymore. It actually does hurt too much. Life has enough of that :)
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Just wanted to comment on your idea that we put ourselves in the place of others, in art, so we can hurt with them. Not me. Not anymore. It actually does hurt too much. Life has enough of that :)
Yeah it's precisely because I know people who feel like you in real life, which is why I asked. It's interesting to study this both psychologically and historically; historically, since tragedies always existed and were popular (were, in fact, perhaps the earliest form of play), and people back then had much more troubles that we today do, objectively, I guess. Are we becoming more Eloi? Were they more Morlock?
I thought about classic Greek tragedy as I wrote that response--even looked up (you know me, I look stuff up) catharsis. Perhaps we're not becoming more effete--perhaps the use of tragedy is becoming more graphic, more exploitative. Instead of asking us to use our imaginations to identify with a protagonist, modern film makers don't trust our imaginations. They lay the gore before us. They disembowel, literally. Their approach to tragedy is not poetic--it's brutal. Just a few thoughts your comment generated :)
Edit: Perhaps I should add that there was significant tragedy in my childhood. So I think I had my fill early on. I got through it OK, but it was all around me and others suffered. Kind of made a difference in my psyche, I think.
I don't know. Back in the day, they accused Tarantino of being graphic. To this day, I don't know why he didn't simply reply "Shakespeare". Or any of his works, like "Titus Andronicus". Slaughtering an enemy's children and baking them into a pie and feeding them to him? Check! And they teach these stuff to kids at school. (Well, I don't know about Titus specifically, but they do teach the Bible and that's worse even than Shakespeare.)
I agree and disagree depending on the movie. Many will think Oldboy (the Asian version; but the American isn't bad either) is brutal and gory. I think it's a classic, and I think there's poetry in the gore and the story. So it's hard to say.
Sorry to hear about your personal experience. That might of course have played a role. In essence, we are most of us pretty disengaged from real physical suffering akin to the things portrayed in movies, it's all like a videogame to us now, so people are perhaps having the wrong reaction to them. I can imagine what the Nazi Zombie movie would look like to people who've gone through the real deal. But to the rest of the world now, it's mere entertainment.