No. 5 - Violencia
Some people would label playing video games as juvenile. I would as well, but I happen to love juvenile things with a flaming passion. Recently I had the opportunity to play the new title Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and wow oh wow oh buddy oh jeez, is that one violent game.
This is a game where you can randomly beat people in the street until their bodies disappear in a pool of blood. You can pick up whores and beat them. You can crash a helicopter in the middle of an intersection. You can start gang wars. Oh, and you can eat fast food while doing it.
This is a game conservatives will just (inject sarcasm here) love—everything wrong with our society is right there on the Playstation! That I do not protest.
What I do protest is pretending these occurrences in our society do not exist. Well, sure nobody flies helicopters into traffic on purpose, but whores certainly get beat up and murders happen every day. This is the stuff of drama. This is the stuff of confronting humanity’s dark side and owning it with a laugh and a shrug.
Not that having a family member beat up on the street is worthy of a laugh or a shrug. I just mean that perhaps this game is a way to turn the tables on darkness and make the best out of the sometimes ugly world we live in. As I said above, it is also at the heart of drama as a bitter truth of our existence. We don’t have to accept it, but we have to face it and acknowledge that it exists.
Violence and humanity go hand in hand. They always have, from Cain and Abel onward.
Drama has always been laced with violence dating all the way back to the Greeks. Tragedy especially involved violence, but comedy did as well. Roman drama (and their society in general) was heavy on violence, and this (the plays of Seneca especially) contributed to Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus. This was after his first comedy, The Comedy of Errors (based on Plautus) which also contains violence in smaller, more bearable doses. Whenever the Dromios get playfully beaten up, the audience will laugh (and so will I, most likely).
Jack Hrkach, one of my college mentors, said that tragedy must “ask basic questions about human existence.” I find this to be especially true of violent tragedy.
Actually, I am realizing just now that I cannot think of a tragedy that is not violent. Certainly all of Shakespeare’s tragedies are such….and most of the non-Shakespearean tragedies I can think of right now are also such. Do some of the basic questions about human existence involve the burden of possessing an inherently violent nature which as a result creates an inherently violent society?
I’m not saying that ALL tragedy is violent. You may perhaps think of one that isn’t. That being said, you cannot ignore its massive prevalence.
Rehearsing for Titus Andronicus with Gotham Shakespeare has placed the concept of violence very much in my mind in a theatrical context, as violent deeds are not just main themes in the play but a catalyst for most of the play’s action. The way our colleague Abe Goldfarb is staging it is without any blood at all, yet the play is incredibly visceral and disturbing as all hell to watch. Audiences will have the dark side of every human right in front of them, played out to the most extreme of extremes. This is a play, as you know, where hands are lopped, children killed, girls mutilated and raped, and dead trunks made pillow to lust. Throw in a few beat up whores in a pool of their own blood and you have Grand Theft Auto.
Titus Andronicus would make an interesting video game, now that I think about it.
With such other fare as the recent Kill Bill (which I adore) violence is constantly around us as a tool for evoking drama—be it comic or tragic. This drama keeps us aware, but could it also be dulling our senses and making us accept that which we should reject and try to correct? I really do not know.
This is a game where you can randomly beat people in the street until their bodies disappear in a pool of blood. You can pick up whores and beat them. You can crash a helicopter in the middle of an intersection. You can start gang wars. Oh, and you can eat fast food while doing it.
This is a game conservatives will just (inject sarcasm here) love—everything wrong with our society is right there on the Playstation! That I do not protest.
What I do protest is pretending these occurrences in our society do not exist. Well, sure nobody flies helicopters into traffic on purpose, but whores certainly get beat up and murders happen every day. This is the stuff of drama. This is the stuff of confronting humanity’s dark side and owning it with a laugh and a shrug.
Not that having a family member beat up on the street is worthy of a laugh or a shrug. I just mean that perhaps this game is a way to turn the tables on darkness and make the best out of the sometimes ugly world we live in. As I said above, it is also at the heart of drama as a bitter truth of our existence. We don’t have to accept it, but we have to face it and acknowledge that it exists.
Violence and humanity go hand in hand. They always have, from Cain and Abel onward.
Drama has always been laced with violence dating all the way back to the Greeks. Tragedy especially involved violence, but comedy did as well. Roman drama (and their society in general) was heavy on violence, and this (the plays of Seneca especially) contributed to Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus. This was after his first comedy, The Comedy of Errors (based on Plautus) which also contains violence in smaller, more bearable doses. Whenever the Dromios get playfully beaten up, the audience will laugh (and so will I, most likely).
Jack Hrkach, one of my college mentors, said that tragedy must “ask basic questions about human existence.” I find this to be especially true of violent tragedy.
Actually, I am realizing just now that I cannot think of a tragedy that is not violent. Certainly all of Shakespeare’s tragedies are such….and most of the non-Shakespearean tragedies I can think of right now are also such. Do some of the basic questions about human existence involve the burden of possessing an inherently violent nature which as a result creates an inherently violent society?
I’m not saying that ALL tragedy is violent. You may perhaps think of one that isn’t. That being said, you cannot ignore its massive prevalence.
Rehearsing for Titus Andronicus with Gotham Shakespeare has placed the concept of violence very much in my mind in a theatrical context, as violent deeds are not just main themes in the play but a catalyst for most of the play’s action. The way our colleague Abe Goldfarb is staging it is without any blood at all, yet the play is incredibly visceral and disturbing as all hell to watch. Audiences will have the dark side of every human right in front of them, played out to the most extreme of extremes. This is a play, as you know, where hands are lopped, children killed, girls mutilated and raped, and dead trunks made pillow to lust. Throw in a few beat up whores in a pool of their own blood and you have Grand Theft Auto.
Titus Andronicus would make an interesting video game, now that I think about it.
With such other fare as the recent Kill Bill (which I adore) violence is constantly around us as a tool for evoking drama—be it comic or tragic. This drama keeps us aware, but could it also be dulling our senses and making us accept that which we should reject and try to correct? I really do not know.
To the ends of the earth and back,
Brian
Brian
Poor Brian’s Almanac