Video nasties

= Port meadow short circuit: 29.15 =

Last week I watched Chopper. It depressed me rather. I had assumed that I was somehow wise because I saw that the glorification of violence was entirely tasteless. I didn't think he was funny like Esther and Andrew. That would make me a more sensitive person. Or so i thought. Actually when I asked Esther about it, she was actually rather horrified by the way Chopper believed he was a good bloke yet could in the same breath, do such horrid things. She couldn't quite imagine how someone could be like that. The film wasn't glorifying psychopathology at all. That was my assumption, or projection. Is it even possible to say it was my projection. I found it so depressing because part of me buys into Chopper. I accept his split personality. Because I accept my own. “Aah mate, now look what you've made me do...” Not dissimilar to some of the voices in my head.

John asked me why i watched it. Well, i think it was rather an accident. I did actually expect it to be funny and that Chopper would be presented as a loveable rogue. As the review says it was a good film in so far as perhaps it wasn't presented as either. He wasn't a loveable rogue, or someone to feel sorry for. But neither was it a moralistic exercise.

This brought me on to thinking about something else though... I do genuinely have a kind of fascination with some pretty awful films.

I'm not talking here about things like The Omen. The Exorcist. These are great movies, and fundamentally, quite safe. The menace is very much out there, fascinating but improbable. They have a creepy 70s atmosphere. And all very Catholic, hysterical, filled with supernatural and religious paranoia.

More things like The Hills Have Eyes. Hostel. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Evil Dead (although this is now more of a comedy... proof that you shouldn't always believe what you hear). Taboo films, films of notoriety. At one point I thought that if i could watch a snuff movie, somehow that would prove that I could take anything. Thank God my good sense kept me away from such terrible stuff.

Others I really don't want to watch. Saw. Pure squeamish gratuitousness. Joyless. No class. To think that somebody has spent their life dreaming up this fundamentally irresponsible poison.

But, I'm not going to watch any of these films. It seems perverse that films I have no intention of seeing on principle I get a thrill at the idea of watching. Is it the idea of watching something forbidden? For example the content of Hostel just seems depressing to me. Torture and violence. But the implied beheading on the advertisements is about something bad and unspeakable. Something you shouldn't do. And that's its attraction. An act of rebellion. By the same token, now that I know the Evil Dead isn't some kind of esoteric cult film where the people who have seen it are joined by some bond of initiation, I'm really not that fussed. I think I'd actually be very disappointed.

I guess snuff is a different matter entirely. If you share in the voyeurism of genuine rather than fantasy evil, you really do share in the act. What about Ken Bigley's beheading? That feels again in a different category. I think you might feel almost a sort of twisted 'duty' to watch something like that – almost to see with your own eyes what humans are capable of, but i think it would be a sore mistake. Again, perhaps you collude in a smaller way with pure evil. And again, the idea of seeing it - or even thinking about it – fills me with a deep sense of insecurity.

Going back to the roots
I think i know where some of this comes from too. It is the stuff of excitement, manhood, aspiration – the sort of things that my big brave hero of a brother watched alone at midnight in a darkened room when i was still in single figures. Only boys like Jonathon Munro watched video nasties (presumably because there parents provided no boundaries or care in the home... i wonder where he is now).

Even today I idealise what surely has to have been a very vulnerable little boy of 12 or 13, who was man enough to watch the films that terrified me, whose every word I hung on to with barely contained excitement. Who in my head is a strong, dependable and wise person. So much more a role model than what my brother has become. Yet this is just impossible. My brother, then the centre of my world, who later became such a crushing disappoint to me, was just a 12 year old version of the 38 year old alcoholic my brother now is. There was no more strength there than there is now, and surely less. Just a terribly weak good will.

Anyway, if ever there were a lesson to be learned about searching for porn on the internet, let this be it...