More violence needed

Using movie fantasy to face the truths of the real world

As my friends and I exited the Waikiki theater, having just seen The Replacement Killers, I asked what they thought.

Our group consisted of mixed company; comments ranged from "too violent," a view more common among the females, to "all right," the predominant male opinion.

I thought the movie was fine. Stuff got blown up and plenty of people (most all of them bad bus) got plugged. I deemed it a film worthy of my patronage.

As I thought about it later, though, there wasn't a whole lot of cool stuff to accompany the excessive levels of violence.

Sure, Chow Yun Fat has some on-screen presence, and Mira Sorvino can handle like Nixon can schmooze the masses, but there weren't any memorable lines.

In Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger stood in a multi-level office complex with a helicopter-mounted Gatling gun, tearing apart police cars with is multi-hundred-round-a-minute firing capability.

The Rock also had some nifty scenes, like when Nicolas Cage held a pair of flares aloft while F-18 Hornets flew over Alcatraz, dropping bombs. That scene sent chills down my spine.

But where The Rock had some liquefied nerve gas, the best Replacement Killers could do was some bullets inscribed with Chinese script. It wasn't the same.

Whereas in Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan got rip through downtown Moscow office buildings with a tank, in Tomorrow Never Dies they could only manage a motorcycle.

What has happened to the traditional American violence we've come to cherish and love?

Before, we could watch Arnold and Clint, with all their rugged individualism, take on the toughest situation with some massive weaponry and a few one-liners.

These days, Jackie Chan does a few moves with more closely resemble a choreographed ballet than martial arts, and the macho white men of yesteryear are all of a sudden teaming up with foreigners and women to attract a larger audience.

We need to get back to the days of raw violence, where men were too insecure to allow their ladies any significant role in the action scenes.

Call me old-fashioned, but I know that even the sensitive men of today's modern world require opportunities to vent.

We need more movies like Braveheart, which featured realistic scenes of 13th-century warfare that were so nasty even I had my fill of guts and gore.

These film meet an important need in our sterilized, free-from-struggle lives: fantasy.

Without fantasy, we'd all have to live away from the virtual reality lifestyle we have at present and revert back to the "actual reality" of our parents. How primitive.

But now there's a reactionary movement saying thre's too much violence in movies, video games, and the media. I can't believe it! What's up with our society?

We'd better come back to our senses now, or else our children won't know what to do if Hawai`i is ever invaded. Thank goodness for the NRA, because otherwise there'd be no one who knows how to operate a gun and thereby save us from rights infringement.

Besides, how else are we going to become desensitized to the outside world's struggles? News about the Third World's internal violence would come dangerously close to affecting us if we didn't maintain our ever-decreasing level of concern about the real world.

As a member of this society, it's important to get your recommended daily allowance of violence so that you can go about your day oblivious to the sort of injustice that pervades the modern world.

Who'd want to carry the burden Amnesty International manages, watching out for those deprived of justice? As for me, I just pretend it all doesn't exist.

It's a lot easier fo me this way. I go so far as to pay extra for entertainment that lets me feel like killing people is somehow justified.

Sure, I could spend less and watch the theater plays on UH that expand my view of the world beyond Honolulu, but I prefer the cinema, because with movies like Commando, I can make believe war is just a figment of some director's imagination.

In Europe, there's a different perspective on the levels of violence and sex in movies. Since killing people is illegal, Europeans tend to frown on excessive levels of it in their films. Adult situations, however, are more tolerable, since that sort of thing is perfectly legal.

As Americans, however, violence is an integral part of our lives. Without it, we'd have nothing to keep us callous to deaths like that of Rodney Laulusa, who was killed in January a block away from my house in Palolo Valley.

Although unarmed, he was deemed dangerous enough to warrant being shot in excess of a dozen times.

If it wasn't for he inundation with savagery I experience on a daily basis, I would have been shocked at such happenings in my own neighborhood.

Fortunately, though, I was too wrapped up in my own agenda to notice the deterioration of the social fabric around me.

I can't help but wonder if this attitude of self-absorption, insensitivity, and indifference to the plight of others has permeated all ranks of society.

I'd like to think we still have something human about us, but I don't have much evidence to go on.

As technological breakthroughs make it less and less necessary to exit our house to accomplish our day's activities, a corresponding rise in violence and depression is evident.

And the world offers no solution to this problem except more psychologists.

It could be I'm analyzing the situation too much. Maybe all we need is more violence in our movies, so that I can drug myself into ignoring the problems around me.