Tiger Woods apologized for being an alpha male on Friday. Tiger was obscenely wealthy, and women find that there is no such thing as an ugly millionaire, therefore he had the means to bag as many slutty bimbos as he felt like. So he did. And he won major after major. His job was to be a golfer, which is to say, that he had to be better than other privileged sissies at hitting a small ball into a gopher hole, and what he did off course matters not a single Goddamn. Once he stepped off the course he stopped being relevant to me, because he's a golfer not my life model. He isn't sorry, if he was he would have stopped doing what he did. And apologies are by their nature nothing more than an admission of guilt, rather than absolution for it. If Tiger didn't want to bang bitches, he wouldn't have. The only reason he has to pretend he did something wrong is because his wife will try to bleed him dry and he'll lose sponsorship. Don't be so dumb as to believe that what every millionaire sportsman, actor or rock star really wants is to settle down and live the boring life of the plebiscite. Fuck that sound. They regret nothing. The only reason they write memoirs that look back with regret on the wild time they had is because that's what idiots want to read, and also possibly because rich people are never happy, they just want want want.
Above all else, what Tiger Woods' apology really says is just how fucking stupid a country America is. Tiger's apology was a massive news story on Friday, a day that a man became so unhappy with the US taxation system that he flew a plane into his local inland revenue. Did you hear about that? That wasn't even a big story in America, I hear. Which is worse, do you think, consensual sex between two adults or America's tolerance of violence?
On Friday, Shaun White the snowboarder swore on TV. He issued an apology. During the regular season, Denver Broncos coach Jay McDaniels swore on TV. He was forced to apologize after initially brushing it off. Following Janet Jackson's nipple exposure a few years back, TV in America is rarely live, but on a delay, so that they won't get caught out by wardrobe malfunctions or swearing. Americans hate nudity and swearing. Hate it. Nudity is a driving factor of the infinity dollar pornography industry, which is homed in America. Swearing is limited to HBO and movies in America. But, here's the problem for me. Violence isn't limited in any capacity.
Did you see Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili die tragically in last week's warm-ups? I didn't but NBC, the same channel that apologized for Shaun White's swear, has shown it several times. Oddly, I am far less inclined to want to witness a man's life being extinguished before my eyes. Call me old fashioned. How old fashioned? Let's have a look.
I think that American cinema has played the key factor in lowering the tolerance level for violence in America and by extension, everywhere that allows the level of US cultural domination that Ireland does. Ireland, for example. In terms of narrative force, film hasn't moved on much from the famous Godard quote that all you need to create drama is a man, woman and a gun. When cinema began in the 1900s, the violence was non-existent. What film-makers used to create drama was "perilous situations", such as the scenario of a woman trapped in a burning house that inspired Edwin S Porter to invent editing. By the 1910s, you had the first instances of people handling other people, mostly wrestling, like in Tarzan or Justice of the Wild. By the 1920s, people were still more interested in musicals and comedy, but even expressionist German thrillers like M stuck to shadow and tension, with a few slaps thrown in. By the 1930s however, gangsters were in vogue, with films like Scarface or Public Enemy, but the strict censorship of the Hays Code largely left violence off-screen, although the odd person would indicate that they had been shot by clutching one hand to their chest, the other extended palm-up, their mouth open, their legs slowly lowering them safely to the floor where their mouth and eyes would shut to indicate death. This was all thanks to the religious right, which enforced a moral code decreeing that the good guys had to win with the bad guys either caught or killed in the end. Seriously. By the 1940s the whole world was a different place, and women had been emancipated by their efforts in the war, no longer limiting them to the kitchen. To counter this, the 40s gave us Film Noir, with its rather heavy-handed approach towards women. That is to say, it's fairly common to see them get smacked around a bit in the 40s, in films like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity or Big Sleep. The 1950s saw the rise of the war film. This is when large numbers of people began to be killed on screen, albeit mostly in the same manner as in the 30s. Blood was introduced, but only for special occasions, as was the explosion, like in Bridge on the River Kwai or Paths of Glory.
Then the 60s came and changed everything. Suddenly, you had the rise of the Western. The taming of the Western frontier was vicious and lawless, two things that Hollywood wasn't. So film-makers would go abroad to more liberal climes in Europe and make spaghetti westerns, usually in Spain. This gave us anti-heroes, no white-bread good guys and two big advances in visual effects: the squib and a new fake blood made of corn-syrup and red food dye. Films like Sam Peckinpath' or Sergio Leone's westerns were bloodbaths. Spartacus and Psycho came out, and weren't afraid of leaving a pool of bloody guts behind them. So the Hays Code was thrown out, and the more liberal(ish) MPAA rating scheme that's still used today was introduced. This basically said, fuck it, you decide if you want to watch that heathen shit on your own.
So in the 70s, they threw caution to the wind. Violence was used by intelligent directors to add a shockingly concussive exclamation mark on their work. Look at how Lumet builds the tension of Dog Day Afternoon at first threatening violence, before sucking you into an intimate tale of two rather pathetic, caring losers who haven't thought their actions through. By the end you've forgotten about the threat, making the final minutes heartbreakingly affecting. Taxi Driver is the same, threatening an explosive outburst from the beginning before finally delivering a messy technicolor orange bloodbath at the end. Films like Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, the Godfather trilogy, all showed how violence is a very bad thing, not a stylized form of entertainment, but a provocation to consider the consequences and realities.
Of course that led to the 80s, which had taken in the serious, high-conscience 70s films and come out the other side. This led to cartoonish levels of often inconsequential violence, like in Scarface, Terminator or A Nightmare on Elm Street. Looking back at Terminator, it's hard to think that Arnie popping his eye out was a massive deal at the time, because it looks so fake. Also, films like Nightmare on Elm Street suddenly had the special effects technology and ingenuity to move horror on from the scary shadows and insinuation of films like Jaws or the pioneering volatility of The Exorcist to where a character could be repeatedly stabbed in the chest and begin bleeding without needing to edit several shots together, cut away, or laugh at the rubber knife bending. This all carried into the 1990s, and for most of that decade, for the first time, violence was portrayed in comedic terms. Of course slapstick often used violence to generate laughs, but films like Lethal Weapon, Pulp Fiction and anything where Arnie quips invited us to see the humour in someone being killed. Die Hard kept it real, but most action films were indicative of the other trends of the decade, namely inventive, gory stabbings with whatever was lying around usually to the face; and big explosions. Big big big explosions.
Then Spielberg changed everything. He used the advances in effects and editing to recreate the Normandy landings on D-Day, and suddenly we had 70s style violence, raw, affecting, horrible. Disgusting bloody murder. Because that's what war is like, it's not stylized, it's brutal. The problem is that everyone saw that movie. The more people see something like that, the more people are going to have reset tolerance levels for violence. In the 2000s, Ridley Scott made the insanely good Gladiator, the Lord of the Rings films had huge body counts, and more people than you'd have thought paid money to see The Passion of The Christ. Now if you want to show someone being whipped you can. Before it would have been enough to hold a medium low-angled shot of the guy's face with the soft focused whipper in the background. Every time there's a whip-crack, the guy's face contorts in agony, badda-bing, a whipping. But now we have to see the paper-thin cut form and split and bleed. Welts have to form and burst before our eyes or we simply won't fully understand the relationship between whip and skin. The pain, the agony is gone, all that matters is the bloody guts.
And so it goes. The Saw and Hostel films feel compelled to show every splintered bone and gouged eye, without cutting away, without any feeling, without care. Films like Jaws or Don't Look Now let us use our minds to fill in the blanks. Now the horrors are visual, but they don't really affect us, because the victim is a cypher. They are nothing more than a vessel to inflict pain upon, they don't matter, their wounds are more important.
So with all tolerances raised, violence moved into American TV. The depressingly popular CSI shows and their ilk think nothing of showing heads smashed in, arteries spraying jets of blood all over the place, arms dismembered... it never ends. But at the same time, if you want to swear, you have to do it on HBO. If you want to show nudity, do it on HBO and keep it to boobs and the odd arse. In a world where a film in which a man's head is obliterated by a "Venus Fly Trap" or hands sheared by "The Razor Box" opens top of the US box office, showing a naked penis is still a massive taboo. The thing is that, for any film to be seen by people over 15, they will have likely had at least tried to have sex or will almost definitely have seen all manner of wacky shaved private areas, not least of all their own. So what's the big deal? I mean, I'm not saying that I want every love scene in a movie to be pornographic, I just mean that there's a huge disparity between acceptability of depictions of violence and romance. HBO has a show called Hung, about a guy who gets into male escorting because of his large package. Only they've never shown it. For all I know, I could be sitting on a comparative longboat. Diary of A Call Girl is about a lady escort and she barely shows her ankles. Look at it this way, I found unedited youtube links to Saw II traps and even one for the luger who died, while sexual material is strictly prohibited.
What I think is that America has invested in the dissociation of violence, effectively making it something that happens passively. I mean, look at the people on this bus, just sitting there as a fight breaks out, the driver doesn't even stop. Maybe if Hollywood had invested in depictions of love, America and its drones would be a more caring society. Think about it. Since the dawn of time, romantic films have depicted the most loserish wet-blanket winning the heart of the sexiest rocket scientist in all of Florida, or have focused on the woman who would have it all if she could just find a man to vindicate her. In either case, the credits roll within minutes of their wedding or union, leaving out what happens when you've tethered yourself legally to a single person. They haven't changed at all. But divorce increases every year. There should be a lot more Kramer Vs Kramers than Leap Years. Maybe if Hollywood had moved beyond the happily-married-ever-after stick like they did with the old shot-man-slowly-falls-over-backwards-shuts-eyes, horn dogs like Tiger would never have married in the first place, and then nobody would care and we wouldn't have to watch celebrities being dragged down or fatalities on the TV any more.
Above all else, what Tiger Woods' apology really says is just how fucking stupid a country America is. Tiger's apology was a massive news story on Friday, a day that a man became so unhappy with the US taxation system that he flew a plane into his local inland revenue. Did you hear about that? That wasn't even a big story in America, I hear. Which is worse, do you think, consensual sex between two adults or America's tolerance of violence?
On Friday, Shaun White the snowboarder swore on TV. He issued an apology. During the regular season, Denver Broncos coach Jay McDaniels swore on TV. He was forced to apologize after initially brushing it off. Following Janet Jackson's nipple exposure a few years back, TV in America is rarely live, but on a delay, so that they won't get caught out by wardrobe malfunctions or swearing. Americans hate nudity and swearing. Hate it. Nudity is a driving factor of the infinity dollar pornography industry, which is homed in America. Swearing is limited to HBO and movies in America. But, here's the problem for me. Violence isn't limited in any capacity.
Did you see Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili die tragically in last week's warm-ups? I didn't but NBC, the same channel that apologized for Shaun White's swear, has shown it several times. Oddly, I am far less inclined to want to witness a man's life being extinguished before my eyes. Call me old fashioned. How old fashioned? Let's have a look.
I think that American cinema has played the key factor in lowering the tolerance level for violence in America and by extension, everywhere that allows the level of US cultural domination that Ireland does. Ireland, for example. In terms of narrative force, film hasn't moved on much from the famous Godard quote that all you need to create drama is a man, woman and a gun. When cinema began in the 1900s, the violence was non-existent. What film-makers used to create drama was "perilous situations", such as the scenario of a woman trapped in a burning house that inspired Edwin S Porter to invent editing. By the 1910s, you had the first instances of people handling other people, mostly wrestling, like in Tarzan or Justice of the Wild. By the 1920s, people were still more interested in musicals and comedy, but even expressionist German thrillers like M stuck to shadow and tension, with a few slaps thrown in. By the 1930s however, gangsters were in vogue, with films like Scarface or Public Enemy, but the strict censorship of the Hays Code largely left violence off-screen, although the odd person would indicate that they had been shot by clutching one hand to their chest, the other extended palm-up, their mouth open, their legs slowly lowering them safely to the floor where their mouth and eyes would shut to indicate death. This was all thanks to the religious right, which enforced a moral code decreeing that the good guys had to win with the bad guys either caught or killed in the end. Seriously. By the 1940s the whole world was a different place, and women had been emancipated by their efforts in the war, no longer limiting them to the kitchen. To counter this, the 40s gave us Film Noir, with its rather heavy-handed approach towards women. That is to say, it's fairly common to see them get smacked around a bit in the 40s, in films like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity or Big Sleep. The 1950s saw the rise of the war film. This is when large numbers of people began to be killed on screen, albeit mostly in the same manner as in the 30s. Blood was introduced, but only for special occasions, as was the explosion, like in Bridge on the River Kwai or Paths of Glory.
Then the 60s came and changed everything. Suddenly, you had the rise of the Western. The taming of the Western frontier was vicious and lawless, two things that Hollywood wasn't. So film-makers would go abroad to more liberal climes in Europe and make spaghetti westerns, usually in Spain. This gave us anti-heroes, no white-bread good guys and two big advances in visual effects: the squib and a new fake blood made of corn-syrup and red food dye. Films like Sam Peckinpath' or Sergio Leone's westerns were bloodbaths. Spartacus and Psycho came out, and weren't afraid of leaving a pool of bloody guts behind them. So the Hays Code was thrown out, and the more liberal(ish) MPAA rating scheme that's still used today was introduced. This basically said, fuck it, you decide if you want to watch that heathen shit on your own.
So in the 70s, they threw caution to the wind. Violence was used by intelligent directors to add a shockingly concussive exclamation mark on their work. Look at how Lumet builds the tension of Dog Day Afternoon at first threatening violence, before sucking you into an intimate tale of two rather pathetic, caring losers who haven't thought their actions through. By the end you've forgotten about the threat, making the final minutes heartbreakingly affecting. Taxi Driver is the same, threatening an explosive outburst from the beginning before finally delivering a messy technicolor orange bloodbath at the end. Films like Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, the Godfather trilogy, all showed how violence is a very bad thing, not a stylized form of entertainment, but a provocation to consider the consequences and realities.
Of course that led to the 80s, which had taken in the serious, high-conscience 70s films and come out the other side. This led to cartoonish levels of often inconsequential violence, like in Scarface, Terminator or A Nightmare on Elm Street. Looking back at Terminator, it's hard to think that Arnie popping his eye out was a massive deal at the time, because it looks so fake. Also, films like Nightmare on Elm Street suddenly had the special effects technology and ingenuity to move horror on from the scary shadows and insinuation of films like Jaws or the pioneering volatility of The Exorcist to where a character could be repeatedly stabbed in the chest and begin bleeding without needing to edit several shots together, cut away, or laugh at the rubber knife bending. This all carried into the 1990s, and for most of that decade, for the first time, violence was portrayed in comedic terms. Of course slapstick often used violence to generate laughs, but films like Lethal Weapon, Pulp Fiction and anything where Arnie quips invited us to see the humour in someone being killed. Die Hard kept it real, but most action films were indicative of the other trends of the decade, namely inventive, gory stabbings with whatever was lying around usually to the face; and big explosions. Big big big explosions.
Then Spielberg changed everything. He used the advances in effects and editing to recreate the Normandy landings on D-Day, and suddenly we had 70s style violence, raw, affecting, horrible. Disgusting bloody murder. Because that's what war is like, it's not stylized, it's brutal. The problem is that everyone saw that movie. The more people see something like that, the more people are going to have reset tolerance levels for violence. In the 2000s, Ridley Scott made the insanely good Gladiator, the Lord of the Rings films had huge body counts, and more people than you'd have thought paid money to see The Passion of The Christ. Now if you want to show someone being whipped you can. Before it would have been enough to hold a medium low-angled shot of the guy's face with the soft focused whipper in the background. Every time there's a whip-crack, the guy's face contorts in agony, badda-bing, a whipping. But now we have to see the paper-thin cut form and split and bleed. Welts have to form and burst before our eyes or we simply won't fully understand the relationship between whip and skin. The pain, the agony is gone, all that matters is the bloody guts.
And so it goes. The Saw and Hostel films feel compelled to show every splintered bone and gouged eye, without cutting away, without any feeling, without care. Films like Jaws or Don't Look Now let us use our minds to fill in the blanks. Now the horrors are visual, but they don't really affect us, because the victim is a cypher. They are nothing more than a vessel to inflict pain upon, they don't matter, their wounds are more important.
So with all tolerances raised, violence moved into American TV. The depressingly popular CSI shows and their ilk think nothing of showing heads smashed in, arteries spraying jets of blood all over the place, arms dismembered... it never ends. But at the same time, if you want to swear, you have to do it on HBO. If you want to show nudity, do it on HBO and keep it to boobs and the odd arse. In a world where a film in which a man's head is obliterated by a "Venus Fly Trap" or hands sheared by "The Razor Box" opens top of the US box office, showing a naked penis is still a massive taboo. The thing is that, for any film to be seen by people over 15, they will have likely had at least tried to have sex or will almost definitely have seen all manner of wacky shaved private areas, not least of all their own. So what's the big deal? I mean, I'm not saying that I want every love scene in a movie to be pornographic, I just mean that there's a huge disparity between acceptability of depictions of violence and romance. HBO has a show called Hung, about a guy who gets into male escorting because of his large package. Only they've never shown it. For all I know, I could be sitting on a comparative longboat. Diary of A Call Girl is about a lady escort and she barely shows her ankles. Look at it this way, I found unedited youtube links to Saw II traps and even one for the luger who died, while sexual material is strictly prohibited.
What I think is that America has invested in the dissociation of violence, effectively making it something that happens passively. I mean, look at the people on this bus, just sitting there as a fight breaks out, the driver doesn't even stop. Maybe if Hollywood had invested in depictions of love, America and its drones would be a more caring society. Think about it. Since the dawn of time, romantic films have depicted the most loserish wet-blanket winning the heart of the sexiest rocket scientist in all of Florida, or have focused on the woman who would have it all if she could just find a man to vindicate her. In either case, the credits roll within minutes of their wedding or union, leaving out what happens when you've tethered yourself legally to a single person. They haven't changed at all. But divorce increases every year. There should be a lot more Kramer Vs Kramers than Leap Years. Maybe if Hollywood had moved beyond the happily-married-ever-after stick like they did with the old shot-man-slowly-falls-over-backwards-shuts-eyes, horn dogs like Tiger would never have married in the first place, and then nobody would care and we wouldn't have to watch celebrities being dragged down or fatalities on the TV any more.
Posts
3 comments:
Well written, Corm Corm. I would change-
"His job was to be a golfer, which is to say, that he had to be better than other privileged sissies at hitting a small ball into a gopher hole, and what he did off matter not a single Goddamn."
into
".... what he did off the course mattered not a single Goddamn"
_
I liked the decade by decade breakdown. No mention of Tarantino in the cartoonish violence section?
Pulp Fiction, dude. It's still his most popular and successful movie.
I forgot he did that one! Haha
Post a Comment