At the insistence of my sister, and with the malicious promise of forcing my roommate to pay to watch a movie he had decried as a contender for worst film of the year, I set out this weekend to watch the cinematic epic, “Sorority Row.”
As I sat through this marvelous conglomeration of bad acting, loose plot lines and stereotypical, cheesy one-liners, I was all but forced to drift off to my happy place, where I aimlessly pondered the future of the movie industry and the future of fiction in general.
I was concerned that, when I began to think about it, my premonitions were much more awful than the movie I had been trying to escape.
I foresee not a world filled with thought-provoking plots, deep characters and those subtle qualities which set the epics apart from their brethren works of fiction, but a world in which the “Saw” films demand not only a sequel, but an entire series of movies (with the newest, “Saw VII” planned for a 2010 release date).
Our generation’s America is a far cry from the America that our parents and grandparents grew up in, and thus it is natural that the types of stories and media being produced will change, but it has not been for better.
We are a society that has shifted from stories of relevance to ones of insignificance, from truth to ambiguity. On top of this, our stories have become much more graphic, and while some might call this progressive, we have gone too far with it.
We have become desensitized to the point where it is perfectly civilized to walk into a movie like “Friday the 13th” or “Saw,” and come out feeling, not horrified by violence, death and madness, but content at having just been entertained.
Gore and violence do have their places in movies. Both are a part of life, and thus they must be incorporated into our fiction. And they have been around since the first tales were spun by our ancestors.
Increasingly however, we are ignoring the fact that without a mythos to back them up, we are watching nothing but mindless carnage, like Romans at the gladiatorial matches.
As I said before, some people call this movement progress, but we have become so enthralled with the violent, the shallow and the gruesome that we are actually moving backward, the ultimate effect being that we will forget what makes a good story.
Stories are a pillar on which we as a race have built our understanding of the world, as well as a vessel for relaying our morals and values to the younger generations. If the next generation was to see the sort of movies and books we claim to enjoy, what would they think of us, of how we acted and felt?
It is like we have become a society of rubbernecking drivers - while we know we should not desire to look at the accident, we are compelled by our very nature to turn our heads, slow down and take as much of the scene in before zooming by, moving on with our fast paced lives.
And this is something that should be very troubling to all who realize it.
So before you buy a ticket to the next horror flick that claims to be the bloodiest and most horrific yet, so full of awful and unimaginable dreadfulness, I hope you are willing to accept the consequences of leaving that movie without having the slightest bit of emotion having been stirred.
It is up to our generation to save the story, before it is too late and we lose it forever.
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mustafa 2 years, 7 months ago
Excellent commentary, excellent points, you are a person with standards which, unfortunately, is also becoming rare.
Enlightened ones who defend Hollywood out of rote should ask themselves, where are the future audiences for the Fine Arts going to come from by the turn of the next generation.