I'm in a somewhat advanced state of chronological enhancement. I have no children (who don't have four feet and fur) much less grandchildren (the "children" mentioned above are all "fixed"). Also, I was never really a child, proceeding directly from infancy to adulthood, or so it seems to my current memory.
My point? I am so far out of the loop I can’t claim any hands-on knowledge of why morbidity is so attractive to the young. However, I have a supposition or two of what might spawn such an attraction. For instance, it could be for its exotic pseudo-romanticism and its shock value to adults. When I think in this context of the effect on young men who read Goethe's "Werther" when it was first published, I am a bit frightened. In trying to find the connection between my own early fantasy life (escape from dull powerlessness under parental authority into adventurous autonomy) and the current vogue, I find a more distinct difference in method of than in desire for escape.
Example: I play at collecting dolls. I think it is a good indicator of the temper of the times that there are dolls out there such as "Agnes Dreary", her brother "Viktor Dreary" and the older "Sister Dreary", one model of which is called “Watching the Garden Die”; there is a whole group of strange and violent looking dolls in "The Sinister Circus"(16"-18") line; a goth couple, but named Romeo & Juliet, with respectively a bottle of poison and a dagger in their hands; and there are the very glamorous Fashion Zombies. This sort of doll is relatively expensive running between $125-$250 costumed so they are for adults, I think. Why is violence so popular?
Example: Several young people in the San Jose area have committed suicide in this last year by various methods, including walking in front of light rail commuter trains.
Questions: Could the truly grotesque state of world affairs have something to do with this attraction to morbidity? Are we in some sort of vortex pulling us down toward the worst that’s in us? I do think the use of the words “The Fall” is not accidental. Every terrible thing that happens is immediately broadcast through an amazing diversity of media for us to see, hear and know. Young people are already by virtue of innocence rampant on a field of hormones in the throes of some exaggerated emotion or other all the time. With a depressive reality out there how does that affect them and how does morbidity make it better? Is it making fun of evil? If they laugh it can’t hurt them? Are they jaded or fatalistic? With the way things are, I often have real trouble keeping upbeat even with a strong faith that no matter how it looks, God is handling things. How must it be to be young now?
To tell it truly, I’m grateful that I am at this end of my life. I find myself not at all upset with the idea that though it appears the bad guys will be way ahead when the final quarter starts, I won't be on the bench much less the field, having been sent to the showers long since, and probably will watch the last of the game from the comfort of the skybox.
Conclusion: Being basically a worrywart, I do think there is reason to worry…about the young, especially—yes, but in deed about all of us in this off-the-rails country. Where do we as Christians stand on all this? Isn’t the message of morbidity that death is great and death wins? Do we believe that? There’s so much noise about pro-life on the one-track abortion issue. Where is pro-life when we are bombing the crap out of so many people in so many places? Jesus was so pro-life he let them kill him to save the lives of everyone forever. Where are we Christians on that?
I respectfully disagree. This is of the same alarmist vein that our country is punished for turning away from God. Even if the writer is exhorting us to be different flavor of Christianity than we were previously ordered to adhere to.
ReplyDeleteI consort with various artisans and writers who attend Horror Themed conventions annually where I exhibit my own work, and there is nothing untoward, subversive, or morose about them. A very brilliant friend and scholar has completed a dissertation about cadavers and dissection theaters as they are written about in early medical literature. I am of the opinion, if you are not interested in death, you are not truly paying attention to living.
As much as I hate it, and the recent news from our own small town of Greensburg and the torment and murder of a helpless intellectually disabled woman has had me in a ravening despair, there is still nothing new under the sun. Humans are no better or worse than they've always been. I am not a believer in any teleology of human existence, just repetitions wherein ugly, atavistic behaviors resurface, with the occasional upgrade in electronic gadgetry.
Hi Julie--- thank you for your comment. I wonder if we are perhaps arguing for two different constituencies. I read you as defending the legitimate role of death and morbidity as a subject for artistic and intellectual pursuit. This is quite valid. My original post was more concerned with young children who have not yet reached a level of intelligence and reason that are represented by your brilliant friend, artisans and writers. My interest was for children who are, by definition, still trying to gain a sense of themselves and the world around them. Many of them do suffer from angst and need more than well adjusted adults a sense of security and of acceptance. It seems important to me, anyway, to ask what possesses young people to throw themselves in front of light rail trains. As far as I am concerned, anything is fair game to put on the table. So I question whether marketing morbidity (even if it is being used in a way not related to its true definition) is really the best approach for young people. I agree with you that death must be embraced if we are to understand what it is to live. My experience tells me that death makes itself known to us all in our time, even when we are young, and it doesn't need the assistance of mass market machinery.
ReplyDeleteJulie, I appreciate your taking time to read and to answer my post but I was a little disappointed you chose not to address any of my questions directly.
ReplyDeleteI would like to explain why I do not relate to your interest in horror movies and the like. Yes, people are no better or worse than ever but their weapons and method of delivery are far worse than ever before.
I was born in 1938. My family moved to the Panama Canal Zone in 1940. My dad, as a civilian had a 2-year employment contract with the US Army. On Dec. 17, 1941, Mom and I were shipped back to Kentucky and Dad, told his contract was null and void, was in Panama for the duration of WWII.
While away from Dad, Mom took me to see a lot of movies. During a Lassie movie, she told me that, as a 4-year-old dog-lover not understanding events on-screen weren't real, I stood up on the seat when Lassie was in danger and screamed, "Lassie, don't go in there!"
Also, during newsreels, Mom had had to explain to me that films of bombs hitting and collapsing buildings were just pictures. Of course, now I know that it was real indeed for the children in the war-torn city pictured.
After we rejoined my dad in Panama in August 1945, from a post-WWII newsreel, in primitive color, I still can see the half-decomposed head of a Japanese soldier emerging from the sand of a Pacific Island beach. Though not a "horror film", it haunted me horribly.
I used to listen to an Armed Forces Radio broadcast of a program called "You Are There." I hardly ever missed it. Historical events were treated as current happenings with the news reported as if it were a contemporary incident, making it excitingly “real”.
I still vividly remember the broadcast aired on August 6, 1946. The setting was Hiroshima, immediately after the atomic bomb dropped on August 6, 1945. As I listened, my mother was heating up some Campbell's tomato soup. Though I was ten at the time, I still cannot bear the smell of tomato soup. It had been tied irrevocably to the hideous human toll described.
In the Korean war, reporters not yet "embedded" in military units mostly went where they would, reporting what they saw without much censorship. What they reported was sometimes retracted as “incorrect” but still the reported death and destruction and the real human consequences on both sides of the conflict were very difficult to deal with at age twelve.
Then came the Cold War. The Panama Canal was considered a prime target should that War turn hot.
On two occasions during the those years air raid sirens blared, sending us downstairs covered in our white sheets to huddle by the radio. "This is not a practice alert! An unidentified aircraft has entered Canal airspace. Wait for further instructions," droned the announcer repeatedly. We waited, fearing the blinding flash. Finally, the all clear sounded. We were never told any details. I had bad dreams about nuclear attack for years.
Viet Nam, Iraq twice and Afghanistan—real carnage, real destruction, real death and maiming in the most horrible ways never seems to stop.
With all the real life destruction and suffering, human and otherwise, from natural events like hurricanes and earthquakes and from man-made events like war, murder, child abuse, domestic violence, animal cruelty and environmental destruction by individuals and wholesale by corporations, etc., death and horror is readily available for study, without need for additional fictional horror, it seems to me.
We are told in scripture to think on things that are beautiful and uplifting or words to that effect. As the world has been since I came into it, were I not a Christian, I would be without hope.
I am sorry that it took me so long to circulate back around. I only have a brief reply- nothing should be "out of bounds" for a young imagination once the groundwork and difference has been laid between real and imaginary.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite writers, Umberto Eco, wrote a letter to his infant son wherein he promises to buy him guns- toy guns and every imaginable implement of war- "because a gun is not a game. It is an inspiration for play. With it you will have to invent a situation, a series of relationsips, a dialectic of events. You will have to shout BOOM, and you will discover that the game has only the value you give it, not what is built into it."
I think that might be the crux of the difference between a religious and a non-religious view of "morbid play".
Eco also write "And so dear Stefano, I will buy you guns. And I will teach you to play extremely complicated wars, where the truth will never be entirely on one side."
For Christians- the truth is necessarily on one side. And so, lacks as a tool for looking critically at reality.
So I say, yes! We will tell stories where the ghosts are lurking in our own attic, and monsters of every description will come to gobble up the children! Each one in a bite! But when we turn to the real world we have reverence for each living thing once we have contemplated its worth and fragility and the impact of its loss. I do not tease my son with balms of heaven or life after death. I tell him the truth- no one knows or can possibly tell us what happens to us after we die. Living with that finality makes us tread lightly and kindly.
Hi Julie-- I have not quarrel with this comment at all. It is very literate and affirming. I think the point at which we converge is "once the difference has been laid between real and imaginary"
ReplyDeleteI like Eco as well. My son is running around with nerf guns all day long creating any number of imaginative scenarios.
And yet I am a Christian, a person according to you who has of necessity truth on one side. This statement does not define me at all. So either I am not really a Christian or perhaps your definition of one might become somewhat more charitable.
If you do not find your faith to be the true one, I can hardly see having it at all. Religious faith is a great deal of exertion which strikes no chord in me.
ReplyDeleteSo I am damned if I do and damned if I don't. If I hold my faith as the true one then, by your definition, I am irrelevant for a critical assessment of reality. If I hold out room for tolerance and diversity than I am a fraud because I do not hold my faith is not the true one.
ReplyDeleteSo how do you do it? Why are you allowed to have your "truth" which is so edifying and capable of assessing reality and I am not?
Just wonderin
Julie, I cannot imagine a critical thinker who can be so sure of "truth" they are able to claim it with the exclusivity you require. Indeed, faith is, to use the words of the Christian bible, the "assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." If we are able to know and hold "truth" without doubt, I would then doubt it is indeed "truth". I don't want to pull rank, but at 71, nearly twice your time on earth and necessarily due to the things I have lived through that must be only book knowledge to you, "truth" has become a chimera to me. I can only look at what Christianity proclaims, see that it is a better system than any other for a life of peace, care for the environment, and concern for and sharing with my fellow beings and that, without allowing the power that lies outside myself that I experience as God, I am no better than anyone else at actually living that life, though I still fail early and often. I say in my bio at the church I work for that God gifted me with a life over which I had absolutely no control in order to force my rather strong-willed independent self to rely on that outside power which I call God which I have experienced in an undeniable way and which I see evidenced in the biblical account of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. That is my "truth."
ReplyDeleteAddendum: I need to restate a sentence that is incomplete as it stands above. It should read—
ReplyDelete"I can only look at what Christianity proclaims, see that it is a better system than any other for a life of peace, care for the environment, and concern for and sharing with my fellow beings and that, without allowing the power that lies outside myself that I experience as God [[to work in and through me, on my own]] I am no better than anyone else at actually living that life, though I still fail early and often."
When I refer to "truth" I am using the lowercase version. I feel you are using the Captial T- Truth- transcendent and eternal. I don't know what that is- and I am skeptical of anyone who says they do. Anyone may look at and criticize reality if they use the faculties that any may possess and apply it to the natural phenomenon before us. I doubt when people profess to have a wellspring of metaphysical Truth that others must partake in.
ReplyDeleteMay I ask how you hold out tolerance and open mindedness, and at the same time believe your way the the only way?
And as far as I can see, Christianity does not seem a better system. Maybe better for you because you have a community of like-minded people in a group, but that can be accomplished on a secular level as well. The Bible is a book filled with inconsistancies I would find it hard to live with. I have never felt the need for supernatural things and I am content with the natural wonders of the world. If there is more to life after earthly life, I do not expect it would be any different. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell- if you get a crate of apples and the ones on top are bad, you wouldn't expect the ones underneath to be good in order to redress the balance. You would assume they were the same all the way through.
Julie-- clearly you do not suffer fools. So the fact that you read my blog can only be a compliment. Thank you. I am glad you are here.
ReplyDeleteOh, I guess I didn't answer your question. I must confess I am at a loss to give you an adequate answer, as I do not believe anything I have written here suggests that I believe my way is the only way.
ReplyDeleteLol. Yes it is always other churches and religions that are intolerant. I think I would be less sour if religious organizations would take up good causes (i.e. ones I agree with!) For too long, you guys have been resting on your laurels regarding the civil rights movement, for one thing. I do not like that so many people are sitting on their hands while our neighbors slip into hopeless poverty. Nor do I see any Christians taking up the cause for expanding health care to all of our brothers and sisters. The tacit complicity that suffering is good (for others!) gets under my skin.
ReplyDeleteBut I enjoy your blog and exercising my critical thinking faculties (which I rarely get to do, spending every day with my toddlers.) So I thank your for indulging me when you could have put all my comments in the trash can. I hope you will stop by my blog sometimes and argue with me!