I'm an old world girl, I'll admit it. I want intellectual discourse, not "bullets and balls," as my friend Farrah called the male counterpart movie types to my favored "chic flicks."
So, given that I don't like gratuitous sex OR explicit voyeuristic violence, you can see where I'm going to go with shows like Spartacus, Tudors, or Deadwood; but I think more needs to be said than "I don't like it." I think it is wrong to depict for consumer consumption every aspect of intercourse or harm for fundamental reasons of the promotion of civilized, not barbarian, behavior.
Our culture used to understand the evils of bloodsport, but we're quickly moving in the direction of sanctioning, even developing the taste for it again. In Spartacus, the gladiators are brought to us as they once were in reality, with slow motion exaggerations of the moments in which horrendous wounds are delivered and suffered.
We are a free nation. Does the right to freedom mean the promotion of even the most debased media like "Faces of Death," in which real footage of the moment of human death has been compiled for viewing?
There's something wrong in this. I want my freedom, but I want security as well. There is a balance. There are so many fronts on which the value of human life and wellbeing are assaulted.
If the answer is, "then just don't look," my respone is that it's getting harder to operate so that I'm not at each turn affronted by things the country that bore me never before subjected me to.
