Mark Morford: I Am Done With Violence

[Briar]

I Am Done With Violence
Enough scenes of horrid brutality, bloodied faces, tire irons to the knee. Can you purge?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2006/03/15/notes031

It's happened. I have reached saturation, the threshold, my absolute limit.

I cannot watch another gruesome fight scene, another wanton massacre, another thuggish gangsta beat-down, another head-butt, skull-crush, pickax face-rip, crazed stabbing, fistfight, leg-smash, finger-chop, nose-crack, throat slash or another gruesome scene featuring a grisly one-eyed mutant hacking off a woman's arms and tearing off her face with a chainsaw and laughing maniacally.

I am, I realize, a broken American. Defective. Problematic. I know that ultraviolence is the American way. It makes us feel righteous and strong. Violence is how we stay, ahem, "free." Without violence, says everyone from the NRA to the U.S. military to the president, we would be overrun by, well, violence. It is in our blood and in our cells and deep in our gun-sucking culture and America without its violence is like a South Dakota Republican without his misogyny. I know.

But I do not care. Something has happened. Something has switched over in the past few years of my life, some sort of awareness has been raised and a threshold has been lowered and I now cannot help but see stark displays of brutish violence -- in movies, on TV, in real life -- as exactly what they are: Dark, dank, base energy, cancerous and poisonous, and I do not care where it is or if it's couched in the context of "raw" moviemaking or gritty urban inner-city tale. I am done.

...

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2006/03/15/notes031506.DTL&nl=fix

[Warpy]

1. When I saw "Gangs of New York," I realized it was a poorly

researched, historically inaccurate paean to blood spatter.

The same goes for much of Hollywood's non chick-flick fare.

Enough, already.

[Dudley_DUright]

8. I rented that movie last year and turned it off after about 10 min

I just could not stand the over the top violence.

[reality based]

2. Amen

[Blue_Tires]

3. great piece...

[kenny blankenship]

4. You may be done with violence,

but it ain't done with you.

[sinkingfeeling]

5. I love Mark Morford. I will never see him in print in my little red state.

[bloom]

6. good for him

:applause:

[JitterbugPerfume]

7. amen

amen

[Love Bug]

9. "Natural Born Killers" did it for me for violent movies

"Schindler's List" pretty much put me over the top for genocide movies, too.

I don't care how good a movie is or how critically acclaimed it is, if it is too violent, I don't need to see it.

[long_green]

10. You know what did it for me? "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

there were things to like in that show but the humongous body count in every episode, faceless people wandering through the frame to get their throats cut or necks broken just set something off inside of me.