Violent past

I learned something surprising about myself the last time I was home. I am no longer desensitized to violence on television, particularly violence that involves lots of blood and gore. While watching the Sweeney Todd movie, I actually had to look away when all the blood started spurting about, which is very strange when you consider that the blood and gore in this movie is highly stylized, making me think of the comical Black Knight (“It’s just a nick”) in Monty Python’s “Search for the Holy Grail.”

It wasn’t just Sweeney that made me wince and turn. Several movies did the same. And when I was back out on the road and finally decided to watch a DVD Hedon had picked up for me months and months ago, “The Brave One” with Jodi Foster, I couldn’t watch the dreadful scene where two characters are brutally assaulted by thugs.

I wonder when I lost my tolerance for violence. I didn’t even know it could happen. While violence has never been a draw for me, it’s not something I particularly avoid, either. I presume that my entertainment choices simply have been low on the violence scale — for a long time, long enough to make me squeamish. And being squeamish reminds me of my first experience with extreme violence in a movie.

I was a teenager, can’t remember exactly how old. My mother and I decided to go see a movie, and I picked one that I had heard was scary, “Friday the Thirteenth.” Neither of us had a clue what we were heading into. And I really just picked it because I could never find a movie that actually scared me, so I was curious about the movie.

I’ll never forget our horror when in one of the opening scenes of the movie, a girl has her throat slashed from behind. It was just god-awful in my memory. Mom and I sat through the movie in a bit of shock, I think, neither of us having enough wits to just get up and leave. Later, we conferred in the opinion that what we saw was not at all what we had been expecting. And we didn’t much like it. And we skipped dinner.

Remembering that experience makes me think of other particularly memorable moments of video violence.

A couple of years after “Friday the Thirteenth,” I saw “Alien.” I, along with most other people in the nation, was particularly shocked by the scene where the baby alien tears its way out of the crew member’s chest. Do you remember that? When I watched the movie again, more than a decade later, I didn’t even flinch during that scene.

Here’s another memorable moment: the rape scenes in “The Accused.” I was nauseous for hours after watching that movie, and the horror hung with me for weeks afterward. I had seen other rape scenes, of course, I mean I grew up in the 70′s and rape scenes were all the rage when I was growing up. “The Accused,” though, managed to capture the brutality in such a way … well, I’ve never watched that movie again.

I can’t remember exactly when the next one happened. Probably late 80s or early 90s. A reporter had captured on videotape the shooting and murder of a woman. This was real, not fiction. News stations around the country debated whether or not to air it. I had no clue what was going on, and was just innocently watching the news when the video of the murder was aired. There was nothing dramatic about it, really. A man walked up, shot the woman then ran away. The woman didn’t fly backwards 20 feet from the impact of the bullet; she just slumped to the ground. There was no explosion of flesh or geysers of blood. Just a cracking sound and a woman falling to the ground.

But there was horror in it. And the horror was that it was real. The very undramatic nature of it confirmed the reality. I just sat there, shocked, realizing I had, for the first time in my life, seen an actual murder. I had seen someone die before (a man had a heart attack and died in the cafe where I was a waitress in my teens), but this was something else altogether. A murder. There would be no forgetting it.

In my late 20s and early 30s I developed a fascination for serial killers, which I am sure was caused by “Silence of the Lambs,” the scariest movie I have ever seen. For a long time, I had considerable knowledge of scum like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer. I’ve forgotten most of it.

I believe that the most violent show I’ve ever watched was “Oz,” an HBO series set in a California penitentiary. I was in my 30s when I was a fan of this program. While it wasn’t the bloodthirsty nature of the series which drew me, I did enjoy the creative ways they found to maim and kill the inmates and staff of the prison. Some scenes were particularly disturbing, but in general I was pretty immune to the blood and gore.

And “Oz” brings me to the present, where I have apparently reverted to my pre-teens regarding violence. For my birthday, Hedon got me the first two seasons of “Oz” on DVD, and I’m wondering if I have the stomach to watch them now.

It has seemed that the older I get, the less able the world is to surprise me. When I was a child, death had this mystical quality to it, the mystery of something irrevocable, akin to the mystery of infinite space. Thinking about it too much made me dizzy from the wonder and fear. Experiencing death in real life and in fiction as I grew older, I lost that wonder and all the surface fear. I thought I was immune. But that is not so.

Maybe I have made the viewing and reading choices I have made in recent years because I haven’t actually lost anything, because I never was immune. Maybe my choices came from something inside me that said “enough, no more of this.” This life is too much tragedy, too much terror, too monstrous in reality to need a supplement of fictional atrocity.

It wouldn’t surprise me too much if that’s what happened. I made a conscious decision in my early 30s to stop watching shows about wildlife because it was too painful to watch the destruction. A few years back I broke down and watched the “Planet Earth” series on the Discovery Channel. The photography was breathtaking, but I couldn’t stop being depressed. I remember the days of “Wild Kingdom” in the 70s, when the herds were endless and oceans teaming. I couldn’t help but compare the two, in terms of numbers. It was even worse than I had imagined it would be when I turned aside in defeat all those years ago.

Now, if that was a conscious decision, whose to say what my subconscious decisions might be. And I have something to say about choices, but that’s for another post.

Meanwhile, I’d best get ready for some squeamish flinching and wincing, because there’s no way in hell I’m letting those “Oz” DVDs go to waste.