Somewhere in the 90s I got tired of violence in movies. It happened in a scene from the film Copycat, which shows the point of view of a victim through a plastic bag as she’s about to be slain. It was horrific, and too close to what I was hearing about in the news. And I found myself getting desensitized to both.

So last night we went to see the second Hobbit film, and made the mistake of choosing the 3-D version, because that showing was starting sooner.

I love the Tolkien stories, and read them all when I was about 15. I enjoyed the first animated one, then the creepy version that’s kind of animated, and the last run of them that seems to have gone on for many years, now. They’ve gone on so long that the actor who plays the elf-prince Legolas has noticeably changed…his face has filled out like Morrissey’s.

And so now, I’ve promised to take my 8 year-old to the film but realize it’s too violent, and I don’t want her to get desensitized that way, but I really don’t have much control over it anyway.

The close-quarter combat scenes are quite good, as far as fight scenes go: you have the elves firing arrows through Orc heads and slashing them with knives, and the truth is, they’re just Orcs, but it’s the brutality of it and the killing that is so video game like, so unreal and entertaining…not at all disturbing, less and less so over time.

And I’ll draw the correlation now even though it’s crude, about the people I ride my vanpool with to and from work, how we don’t react to the news about the shootings at the schools or the hospitals that just happen more and more, where it always ends the same way, and we think to ourselves we want to do something about it but decide we can’t, so we just sit there in the van and say nothing.

I haven’t known many mentally ill people, but one I did really responded to the film Men In Black, as if it tapped into the same reality he was living, about the aliens that had to be exposed through special glasses, and special guns. He would have been sick with or without that film…and the guy who shot John Lennon picked a pretty harmless source of inspiration, in JD Salinger. It’s not the art that can be blamed; it just reflects who we are and what we honor.

The violence bums me out. We don’t seem to change much as a species, and us Americans have this gun thing that likely won’t ever change, either. A trip to the movies, sitting through the trailers and previews, is always a reminder to me of the world I live in, that seems to be getting farther away.

Categories: technology

Tags: culture, Desolation of Smaug, Film, gun control, humanity, mental illness, parenting, The Hobbit, Tolkien, violence