This past Thursday night, I was at one of the local costume shops. I had put off composing my Halloween costume until the last minute, and I had promised people I would fulfill my destiny by becoming my look-a-like – Harry Potter. I was in line holding an overpriced Gryffindor scarf when I heard this crazy shriek. Everyone in the building looked at the front of the store. It seems a guy and a girl had looked up to see a product hanging from the ceiling. There was a gruesome-looking guy hanging from a rope that he was gripping. In his mouth, was a sign saying “Tap Me.” The guy, being a guy, had of course tapped it. This produced a great shriek as the man moved up and down the rope, simulating a hanging. The guy tried to blame the poor blonde girl, who looked as though she was ready to string up the guy to join the product. The story is funny enough, but I was really disturbed by that hanging man. It’s one thing to have these vague depictions of death. No one is really bothered by tombstones or the Grim Reaper. It’s quite another thing to have a product depicting a man being killed for the enjoyment of Halloween revelers. We as a culture seem to have lost sense that there is a line of taste we should not cross. Halloween involves spooky stuff and creepy costumes, and when it remains at that level, it’s simply holiday fun. Who doesn’t like dressing up? Scary things can certainly be fun. However, there seems to be a trend in which we have started to define “scary” as “torture” and have started to enjoy watching other people in pain. This is seen best in the “Saw” movie series. The fourth movie came out this weekend and took top honors at the box office, earning about $32.1 million, according to the Internet Movie Database. I’ve only seen the first one. If you’re not one of those who saw “Saw,” or planning to see “Saw,” then I hope you’ll see that what you would have seen wasn’t worth seeing. The “Saw” movies feature people trapped in twisted mind games. Usually, one person has to kill the other person and extract a key from their dead body in order to survive. In the first one, a woman had to carve into another living person’s stomach to extract the key to free herself. In the latest, that’s not enough. The makers of “Saw IV” decided to step it up a notch. According to a summary on IMDB, this movie has the same basic setup in the opening. This time, however, a man with his eyes sewn shut has to fight a man with his mouth sewn shut for a key. The “mute” man wins and rips the key from out of the other man’s neck. He then proceeds to scream, ripping his sewn mouth open, causing more blood. I’m sorry. That’s not scary. That’s just perverted. If you enjoy that, you need to take a long, hard look at yourself. While I don’t think watching these movies is somehow going to make you want to tie people in sick games, I think there’s something dangerous about indulging a desire to watch people in pain. It certainly dulls us to be able to empathize with those who suffer. One also has to consider people who are dangerous and society’s glorification of this type of violence. How can it not cause them to commit real-life murders? For instance, this week in Russia the “Chess Killer” was sentenced to life in prison, according to CNN. He killed 48 people in his quest to kill a person for every square on a chessboard. He wasn’t inspired by a movie, but movies have contributed to a culture of death. We are so bombarded with images of death and dying, and we revel in them. Yet we’re shocked when we read in TIME magazine that more than a quarter of medical students surveyed would be willing to perform acts that under the Geneva convention constitute mental torture. The solution has to start with our entertainment. We need to become sensitive to unnecessary depictions of suffering meant for popcorn entertainment. We can watch the scary movies and dress up in weird things. As long as we remember that our fun in the realm of fiction has consequences in the real world, then we can prevent becoming what we’re pretending to be.
—-Contact Michael Denton at [email protected]