This year's 85th
Annual Academy Awards held on February 24, 2013, revealed it all. There is no doubt
in the public mind that Oscar favorites depicting sex and violence is today cinema's
top gate-grosser cornering most if not all of the coveted trophies.
Tarantino's Django Unchained won him an Oscar award. I doubt if such award
merits the approval of the conservative viewing public. Critics including myself described this movie as
"incredibly violent"!
However, in Tarantino's mind, marketing
violence to movie audience is cathartic or morally purifying. He justifies the evil of his villains, glorifies
torture and human indignities inflicted on their victims, and then celebrates
the violent and gruesome death of their quarries as a cinematographic Art, even
as he literally tucked inside his pocket blood-money that he profited from the
psychologically embarrassed audience after he made them feel ashamed of
themselves. That's because in his kind
of cinematographic Art, humanity is a dirty word for human beings incapable of
redemption.
In this film Django Unchained, to Tarantino the pain and suffering of slaves are
"humor". He enjoyed it immensely. He also responded to his critics by saying
that "If you shoot sex like an artist, it's an
artistic representation. If you shoot sex like a pornographer, then it looks
like pornography." Tarantino.
What Tarantino is philosophically
alluding to is that the truth of what it is, is not really what it is but it is
HOW you make it appear it is. He is clever,
but certainly not to me because he runs aground against this wisdom of an old
proverb that says "the proof of the
pudding is in the eating." The
etymology of this truism is in the very nature of what Tarantino is trying to
make into what it is not. A brutal
murder perpetrated by a hardened criminal is murder, even though Tarantino's
camera shoots it sadistically as something else, like something lovable that
purifies the human spirit. That's
blindsiding the moviegoers to say the least, if not outright "cheating" in the
filming of sex and violence that never justifies dragging our society down to
the gate of hell.
The problem with this moral-revisionist
philosophy is that the difference between "entertainment
and exploitation" has become blurred.
To say that Django Unchained
is "entertainment" is viewing the movie light years away at the wrong end of
the telescope.
In the Academe where I spent a good
number of my halcyon days in the pursuit of literary excellence [I earned those
citations and literary awards through hard work], I have also reviewed motion
pictures and reviewed published novels and short stories in the study of Literary
Criticism, Victorian Literature, Journalism, and Philosophy and Letters. I have never come across any "artist" that
distorted the Doctrine of Art for Art Sake like how Tarantino pontificates on
the need for human suffering out of savagery and animalistic brutality, to
"purify" or exorcise evil, when he justifies the cinematographic trafficking of
murder, slavery, and pornography on the screen as his kind of excellent "Art"
reduced to nonentity like a commercial item that movie-shoppers can buy in
filmdom's wet market.
In Les Misirables, Anna Hathaway won the Supporting Actress award. That's a
reward for the corruption of the flesh and the weakness of the human spirit.
The film is not
suitable for children's viewing. It
portrays in a radical way the "abject of
poverty, prostitution, imprisonment, corruption, war and death."
So is the gun-smoke-filled battlefield
covered with wounded and maimed bodies of dead soldiers in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln starring Daniel Day-Lewis that was also rewarded with an
Oscar award for exhibiting a self-inflected genocide, and for polluting the air
with the stink of death rising from the blood-drenched killing field of the
Great Civil War that claimed the lives of at least 618,000 Americans although
experts estimated the toll had reached more than 700,000 [The Great Civil War].
In Lincoln, the scene showing the graphic
butchering of Americans by Americans was unnecessary; it would not have diminished
the greatness of the life of President Lincoln for Americans to accept him and
honor his legacy. The savagery of
head-cutting, gruesome bayonet thrusting of bodies in the art of blood-letting
of Americans by Americans as if the American thirst for blood is Lincoln's
excuse for being is a sadistic portrayal of American history -- it sends a wrong
signal to the world that Americans deserve to die for being the kind of people
that they are. I stomped my feet in
protest because that was exactly how Osama bin Laden justify the mass murder of
innocent Americans who deserved to die in such catastrophic events as 911.
The unnecessary violence and sexual
content of those two award-winning movies is psychologically mind-bending to
this nation's politically and sexually disturbed audience.
In 2010, FBI statistics reported
1.2 million violent crimes in the United States -- murder, rape, robbery, and
aggravated assault. In Nov 18, 2012, the
Media reported this startling development ... "The United States experiences epidemic levels of gun violence,
claiming over 30,000 lives annually ..." Statistics on Gun Deaths &
Injuries . The violent death
of 20 school children and 6 staff members in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, is still a fresh wound in
the heart of the nation that probably needs years to heal.
There is just
too much violence in the life of Americans.
This culture of violence has to end. I recommend that the campaign to
end it has to start from the media and the cinema where of all existing entities
and public information conveyances the great power of mass communication is
incomparable and unmatched.
Because of
those disturbing reports on gun violence, Martin Luther King, Jr., campaigned
nationwide against the proliferation of loose firearms. He was a strong supporter of gun-control.
This is what he said following JFK's assassination:
"By... our readiness to allow arms to be
purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movie and television
screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of
shooting and the technique of killing... we have created an atmosphere in which
violence and hatred have become popular pastimes." [ Martin Luther King, Jr. on gun violence ]
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