Explain this to me.

[logansrogue]

How is a television show about a murderer that mortally wounds a pree-teen boy who is sitting in a pool, who then talks over the phone to a police-officer as he bleeds to death, and then tells the woman with fear that he doesn't want to die, then when the police officer gets to the blood-stained pool finds the boy dead, entertaining? Seriously. How is that entertaining?

I mean, entertainment is getting interested in something and getting some form of amusement out of it, right? HOW can anyone find that AMUSING?!
God, this society is so fucked. I really am going to enjoy the three month break from crime TV that I'll be getting when Mum and Dad go on holiday. I AM SICK OF THIS SHIT.

Comments

[crzydemona.livejournal.com]

Whoa... what show was this??

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Some UK crime drama. They're so fucking sordid.

[nevermore82.livejournal.com]

hahah i'm glad i'm not the only one who feels that way...

[angriest.livejournal.com]

I don't agree with that at all. I'd put your average UK drama above your average American drama, and very far above your average Australian one.

[asweetdownfall.livejournal.com]

Uh..say what?

Who comes up with that? Seriously.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

I don't think anyone's supposed to find it amusing. Horrific, certainly.

I think there's deep value in playing with dark and disturbing material in art - film, TV, literature, whatever - because it allows the audience to emotionally play in those areas safely. Aristotle called it catharsis - a purging of bad emotion - so you could go about your day and not think in dark ways any more.

Japan, for example, has extremely permissable forms of popular culture. Pretty much the most violent and horrific things I've seen in a movie have been while watching Japanese films. Yet Japan has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the developed world.

I do know that when Sonia is particularly angry or upset the first thing she does to calm down is reach for one of the Saw movies. (I'm the opposite - when we ate dinner in front of the TV last night I put on The Great Muppet Caper.)

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

I guess I just never get to see anything else and it gets overwhelming. I can't cope with it when murder and rape is all I ever see on TV thanks to my crimeTV buff parents.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

Crime TV is definitely in a downwards spiral into black horror territory - Seven worked in 1995 because it was so extreme, it seems to be a model for most of these shows now.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

They just seem to be racing to be darker and gorier and more sordid. There's something really disturbing about how much *suffering* is being portrayed almost pornographically. I can't bear it. And I'm not against the crime genre as such. I'm an Agatha Christie fan, for God's sakes! I read about old ladies that get hatchets to the head from their unscrupulous adopted sons!

[melalucci.livejournal.com]

I agree, Nancy. I can't handle it. I can watch stuff like the old-school Law & Order, original CSI, Without a Trace or Dr. G: Medical Examiner, but that's as dark as I can get. Even those bother me sometimes, but not too often. And I can't see most scary movies nowadays without ending up literally traumatized for days!

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

There has to be a balance, I think, and the balance is out of whack. I'm a bit of a laughter whore anyway, I like a good comedy.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I think Silence of the Lambs was a big factor, too. A plausible starting point for the twin trends of obsession with procedural stuff, especially psychological, and the serial killer as the lazy crime writers friend (complete with descriptions of horrible acts), which added together lead to a lot of explicitly portrayed nastiness.

I love Silence of the Lambs (and Red Dragon), but like Tolkien I can love the original while thinking they have been way too influential.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I love Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon too. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. Loved the movies too. But the last one with Clarice getting with Hannibal Lecter - that was just fucking stupid. Why do writers fuck up so bad at the end of their works? Even Tolkien phoned it in during the last chapter of Return of the King.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree. The first two were terrific, but Hannibal was so much worse it was hard to believe it was the same writer.

Not only is crime writing and tv filled with third rate Thomas Harris knock-offs, but Thomas Harris now writes third rate Thomas Harris knock-offs *sigh*

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can imagine that being exposed to so much crime drama when you don't like the genre would be pretty unpleasant.

Personally I dislike how much crime TV there is, but mostly because so much of it is US procedural dramas (ie all about the technical detail, not the characters eg Law and Order, CSI, NCIS), and they generally don't do much for me. It has just taken over drama.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

I don't dislike the Crime genre at all. Again, Agatha Christie fan! I also used to love watching Law&Order. It's just too much these days. I'm probably just being too sensitive again.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is not the genre itself, just how much of it there is, and how consistently it aims in a pretty dark direction.

I like dark crime drama, but not as a constant diet, and I think currently writers often use the nasty stuff to 'punch up' otherwise lacklustre stories (especially in the procedural genre where most stories involve pretty much no changes to the main characters or their relationships, so they need to grab the viewers interest some other way).

angriest and I both quite like gritty police drama shows, and the current crop have had some really nasty stuff in them, but the shows we tend to like are about the characters and what happens to them, so they don't have to linger on the crimes in the same way.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

I liked the Bill when it was about the crimes and stuff. A case by case tv show. It's shit these days, which is really sad.

And that's precisely why I like Agatha Christie's novels. There's a puzzle, there's the psychology and I love guessing who did it in the end. And they're quaintly old fashioned and barely mention any blood or anything. I hear the 20s swing as I read them.

If there's psychology, if there's the testing of the human spirit against horrible darkness and coming out of the other side, I can totally get behind it. If it's a repeated churning out of rape and child/woman murder to a formulaic structure that uses these horrible things like short skirts in a car commercial from the 70s, that's when I start getting cynical and angry.

It's one of those things I definitely need a break from, but I do enjoy them. Or I did, I hope to again when I've healed a bit more.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I was about to reply and say 'catharsis' too.

I like a lot of dark drama myself. I'd rather confront and explore those parts of human nature through drama, than simply try to put them out of my mind. But peoples tastes differ.

(and I quite like sordid UK crime dramas in particular, too)

[babalon-93.livejournal.com]

gah! I totally don't understand the obsession. my dad and step mother watch almost *every single one* of these cop dramas, and then they watch the ones they have recorded from other channels. luckily they live two states away so I don't have to put up with it often, but when I go and visit them they still spend the entire night watching cop dramas. I just have to excuse myself because I find watching woman after woman getting raped and murdered uncomfortable enough--but sharing that experience with my parents who seem unaffected is just waaay too disturbing for me.