Violence in Literature Essay -- Violence Blood Violent Movie Literatur

Violence in Literature â€Å"I’m taking you to the bank, Senator Trent. To the blood bank.† This line is spoken by a character played by Steven Segal in the movie Hard to Kill, a movie remarkably similar to every other motion picture Segal has ever touched, and depressingly reflective of a larger cultural trend. In Segal’s movies, characters with names like â€Å"Orin Boyd† and â€Å"Nico Toscani† boast body counts and a shared insatiable thirst for vengeance. Death becomes a prop employed to dispatch central characters, and a cycle of one-upmanship ensues – we saw Segal rip someone’s throat out in Under Siege, so the next movie has to be more ridiculous in its sheer level of violence to be marketable. In 1999, it came as no real shock to viewers when Segal’s character stabbed a Nazi sympathizer in the neck with a broken wine glass. The reality is that technology gives us the means to transmit images and messages of unparalleled intensity, and as we do that, reality is recursively recreated. As artists and media moguls say less, the y attempt to compensate through force, resulting in a constant barrage of deafening sound that amounts to nothing more than noise or visuals so gaudy and exaggerated that the thin shreds of meaning behind them are utterly lost. In this context, death is watered down until it becomes comfortably palpable. Theatres full of families cheer when the hero shoots the bad guy in an action movie, but it never crosses a single mind that a murder has taken place. Viewers wear expressions of smug satisfaction when a crooked lawyer is double-crossed, but the underlying web of lies fazes nobody. In this context, authors have to shout over the noise to communicate the true evils that float between humans. There is no longer ... ...organization in which individually is sacrificed for the sake of an ideal (Nazism, in this case), it’s easy for a smaller group to become victimized. That group is doubly under attack from without and within, and even after the battle is apparently over, they are still losing. The inherent threat in such organizational bodies has to be recognized by humanity and ingrained into the memories of future generations to ensure that these mistakes aren’t repeated. Bringing distressing images and situations the forefront of art isn’t gimmicky, and it isn’t entertaining. It’s indispensable. When punches are held the point is only half-made. Vividly bringing to life the tragedies of the world is the only way in which we can come to understand them with any validity, and understanding these heartrending circumstances is the only means through which we can learn from them.