In discussions about capital punishment, the sadistic reason that people went to public hangings is rarely stated with as much brutal clarity as it was by Henry Fielding at the end of last night's episode. Yet it is one of the best arguments against them.
shareYes, agree completely, horrible. Yet, Sadam Hussein's execution last year was just as vile, if not worse and that was in 2007!!
Och, people haven't really changed.
We just pretend we have.
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These days the general public simply get their grusome entertainment in other ways. Instead of going to public hangings we watch Big Brother or rent 'gore porn' films and watch pretty girls being mutilated and killed. The public's taste for blood has not diminished, it's merely been channeled towards other outlets.
Any socitey where children video violent attacks on their mobile phones and publish them on the internet for public consuption, is not that far away from the desire to watch captial punishment. Dear Buddha, please send me a pony and a plastic rocket.
>>>The public's taste for blood has not diminished, it's merely been channeled towards other outlets.
For me the most overt expression of this was the film 'Gladiator', where the film clearly intends us to regard the Romans as unpleasant for going to watch people fight and die in an arena for entertainment... while we all sat there in the cinema, being entertained by images of people fighting and dying in an arena! Happily people don't have to die to provide violent entertainment these days, but the desire for it doesn't seem to have changed.
Isn't that part of the point of 'Gladiator'? I thought it as very aware of this paradox and was asking the audience to think about it.
share>>>Isn't that part of the point of 'Gladiator'? I thought it as very aware of this paradox and was asking the audience to think about it.
Yes, I would agree - but do you think people went to the cinema hoping to be challenged by a polemic about violence as entertainment, or did they go in the expectation of seeing Russell Crowe chopping up baddies with exciting music in the background? Indeed, how many people came out of the film thinking about the inherent paradox of the piece? Some, to be sure... but most?
But 'some' is better than 'none', and all you can really ask for.
share>>>But 'some' is better than 'none', and all you can really ask for.
Well, all YOU can ask for, maybe. But I'm really bad-tempered and unreasonable, and judge humanity to a higher standard. It doesn't make me happy, mind you, it just makes me think about ways in which to bring the world to an end.
A revolution of grumpy old men eh? Doomed to failure I fear. The police would simply issue The Times crossword, and play radio four over the loud hailers. The entire mob would be pacified. Though granted, radio four is almost as likely to provoke a riot as pacify one these days.
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Absolutely. Instead of public hangings we have sites like Rotten.com (where you can happily watch hours of real footage of people being tortured to death in perfect technicolor) and SnufFX, which mixes hard-core porn with videos of graphic, violent death - in fact, the perfect example of Henry's comments about urination, defecation and ejaculation.
As a species, we haven't changed at all...