"Oh God..."
"Oh no..."
"Oh why?"
"Oh God, no, why, my childhood!"
Pixar’s collective filmography is like an emotional theme
park; this is widely held as an inescapable fact. Their films are marketed to
kids, but they deal with all these deeply tragic subplots that, for some
reason, I never see coming. And yet,
every time I see a Pixar film, I’ve inevitably got two thick black streaks
running down my face by the end of it. So either Pixar knows how to strike just
the right balance between innocence and pathos to get its audience going, OR I
wear way too much eyeliner.
In any case, I know I’m not alone.
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| YouTube comments about the Toy Story 3 Furnace Scene |
So we’re not monsters, right? We can all empathise, even if
it’s with computer-animated fish. I remember this being a prevalent topic back
in primary school, when my peers and I were being urged to develop our
essay-writing skills; ‘desensitization in
the media’. Back then, I thought the idea was a load of bollocks. It’s just TV, I thought, it’s not real life why would anyone get
upset over this stuff? Clearly at the time I didn’t grasp how totally
intertwined our everyday lives are with our varying forms of entertainment. We
look up to characters from our favourite books and relate to characters from
our favourite films and shows. Entertainment can so easily influence our
perspectives and perpetuate cultural ideals – it’s both dangerous and
wonderful.
As I said, we talked about desensitization at length in
school, usually in the context of violence in the media. Amongst our teachers,
it was generally agreed that violence had become normalized in a very dangerous
way. They believed violent behaviour was so common in entertainment that we’d
begun to shrug and move on when it happened in everyday life.
Now, I’m not saying they’re wrong. As a society, we totally
have. But these violent films and shows are generally a case of art imitating
life, and the kind of gruesome violence we’ve been seeing is nothing new and
it’s not as a result of what we’re watching on a Friday night. The Romans had
all kinds of crazy torture methods; they used to tie up their victims, slather
them in honey and let them drift off to sea where they’d slowly rot and simultaneously
be eaten alive by all manner of insects.
And those guys didn’t even have TV.
But I digress. What I’m getting at is that yes, the majority
of us are totally desensitized to violence and emotional trauma in
entertainment. We don’t scream at horror movies the way Hitchcock’s audiences
might have, and we no longer groan and cover our eyes when Tarantino’s latest
anti-hero skins and hacks at his enemies.
Except... I do.
As soon as that red corn syrup starts spraying around, I
cringe and groan and bury my head into the nearest cushion. There’s a scene in Django Unchained where a man is ripped
limb from limb by ravenous dogs. At least I think that’s what happened; I
didn’t actually manage to watch that scene all the way through. Later on in the
movie, Dr. Schultz (played by the magnificent Christoph Waltz) has a traumatic
flashback to the incident, and he’s seen flinching and shaking - I can honestly
say that that was my reaction, too. It’s even worse when kids die on-screen – I
feel as heartbroken as if they were my own nieces or nephews. Looper totally took it out of me, as did
Changeling.
So, why do I keep going to see these terribly violent
movies? Well, because I appreciate that they don’t censor their stories. For
the most part, the films in question don’t just throw in horror or violence or
tragedy for the shock factor, they do it because otherwise the story would seem
to be set in a weird Earth-like realm where everyone is protected by a magic
anti-reality bubble. They do it because it’s a reflection of our world. I think
Cher Horowitz said it best; “Even if you
took out all the violent shows, you could still see the news. And so, until
mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news; there’s no point
taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value!”
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| Ha! A semi-serious post and I get to reference 'Clueless'! It's the little things... |
The idea for this piece originally came from a realization I
had about my significant other. He’s rather stoic, and pretty much unflappable.
He’d scoff at me for flinching at any horror movie, but when he watched Up for the first time, there was some
definite choking up.
To be honest, I’m glad he identified with Carl and Ellie,
and I’m really glad that I still can’t
stop myself from forming attachments to the ever-illogical stock characters in
gory slasher movies. Getting upset about a character’s misfortunes reminds me
that awful, terrible things really do happen every day, and it makes me so relieved to know that I’m in no way
desensitised.
So yeah, I cried a little when Marlin left Dory in Finding Nemo, and when Sully terrified
little Boo in Monster’s Inc, and when
Andy’s toys faced the furnace in Toy
Story 3 and when Carl and Ellie found out they couldn’t conceive a baby in Up.
Pixar movies make me cry – thank God.
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