Monday, April 18, 2016

TV Cesspool

http://nypost.com/2016/04/10/in-a-race-to-outshock-the-viewer-quality-shows-become-ever-more-immoral/

I don't watch very much TV ... just not that interested. I don't consider myself a "prude" -- I managed to make it through "Pulp Fiction". Probably the weirdest thing I ever watched was "Sin City" because I heard so much about how "brilliant and innovative" it was and it had Bruce Willis in it. I guess it's as "shocking" as anything here, but it's not on TV:
Thursday night, on ABC’s “Scandal,” Olivia Pope, the protagonist — long established in the show’s vernacular as a “white hat,” or good guy — beat a wheelchair-bound stroke victim to death by pulping his face with an aluminum chair. 
It was a lengthy scene, and even for a Shonda Rhimes soap that bills itself weekly on “OMG twists” — gruesome scenes of torture and dismemberment, politically expedient murders and illegitimate war, rape, kidnapping, blackmail, and one interminable scene where an imprisoned terrorist chewed through her own wrist to escape — this one was morally and artistically bankrupt.
There is a litany of such things in the article and this is the NY Post ... AFAIK, not exactly a "bastion of puritanism". They close with this observation:

“At a certain point, as always happens in Hollywood or culture in general, a set of superficial things come to stand in for quality: sex, violence, moral complication,” says Martin. “When done well, it’s the highest form of art. If it’s done poorly, and if that’s all you’ve got — the idea that quality is tied to immorality — you enter the realm of the absurd.”

"As always happens in Hollywood or culture in general"? So did Socialist Germany get into "absurd" on the first million Jews, or did it take a few? Did we get there on the first 10 million legally aborted babies, or are we there now at 60 million? Or maybe we have to double it.

"Immorality"? As near as I can tell currently from the culture that would be "Not applauding when an obvious male in a wig and a dress follows your 8 year old granddaughter unaccompanied into the ladies bathroom at the park".

"Morality" is applauding.

"Absurd"? What the hell does "absurd" mean these days?

They seem to think it will "cycle back" and evil will no longer be good and the guys in the white hats will be cheered once again. Perhaps my prayers will be answered.

No comments:

Post a Comment