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Star Medical Examiner's Compassion a Lesson to Splatter Film Fans
By Russ Wellen (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Russ Wellen - Writer
Recently retired as chief medical examiner of her state, Dr. Marcella Fierro worked the Virginia Tech massacre. Yet she can't tolerate violent movies or TV shows.
"I cannot find a shooting or a stabbing entertaining. I simply can't," she says in an AP article by Kristen Gelineau. "My frame of reference -- absolutely wrong for gore."
Author Patricia Cornwell used her as the inspiration for Dr. Kay Scarpetta in a crime fiction series that may have spawned the whole crime scene investigation craze in films and TV.
Yet, writes Gelineau, Dr. Fierro is "indifferent toward the 'CSI' series."
While, of course, she learned to step outside of herself to survive in her gruesome work, Dr. Fierro says that her mission was "to take care of [her] patient -- who just happens to be dead."
Gelineau describes a play Cornwell and Fierro attended which included a rape scene. "Fierro bolted from the theater, and Cornwell found her in the parking lot, crying. 'People just don't understand,' she told Cornwell."
Dr. Fierro's compassion shines like a beacon. Especially at a time when we Americans expend a huge amount of psychic BTUs fueling the firewall between our psyches and the havoc our government is wreaking in our names.
But a question begs to be asked: If someone who's as used to seeing the effects of violence up close as Dr. Fierro is can't handle it in entertainment, what does the average viewer of violence, gore, and torture in today's TV shows, movies, and video games want with it?
In a June 2007 article for NPR, Neda Ulaby asks those in the business. Such as Tom Ortenberg, an executive at Lionsgate, the film company that released "Hostel" and "Hostel II," cutting edge films in the extreme horror genre. To him, one of these films is like "a thrill ride for its core audience of male (and increasingly female) 18- to 24-year-olds."
Musician Rob Zombie, who branched out into film directing to make horror films, such as the recent remake of "Halloween," seconds this. Audience members, he explains, "go to their job every day. . . they want an experience. . . . they just want to be affected by something."
English writer J.G. Ballard ("Crash," "Super-Cannes") made a career of modern psychic numbness. As he sees it, jaded tastes require escalating cycles of stimulation, which inevitably lead to the disintegration of the self.
But David Poland, editor of Movie City News, who watched "Hostel II" when it premiered in June, described it to Ulaby as "misogynistic, hateful, heartless, thoughtless, despicable." For good measure, he tacked on "soulless."
"I think," Poland summed up, "that we've crossed some sort of line."
But Eli Roth, who directed "Hostel" and "Hostel II," told Ulaby that he's "inspired by the real-life horrors on the evening news."
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Russ Wellen is the nuclear deproliferation editor for OpEdNews. He's also on the staffs of Freezerbox and Scholars & Rogues.
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