Just last week, I went to watch an action movie at the theater. While waiting for the main show to start, there was a wide array of trailers for upcoming films full of fast-paced violence and gore--the usual. Among these was a preview for the newest Jason Bourne movie. While I’m not a fan of extreme cinematic violence, I’m rarely fazed by what I see on screen. I was mostly unaffected by the multitude of violent acts portrayed, from guns fired to punches thrown. However, one particular scene from the Bourne trailer struck out to me: a large, heavy truck plowing through a busy street full of oncoming traffic and innocent souls.
The scene struck out to me because just a few days before, the horrors that transpired in Nice, France filled up every news network I could find. The Nice attack was carried out by a large, (armed) heavy truck plowing through a crowd of unsuspecting victims. But this act of violence, though similar to that of a famous Matt Damon action movie series, brought along global mourning rather than anxious audiences, and rightly so.
The unsettling parallel between a real life tragedy and popular thematic violence is just one instance of what seems to me as quite a hypocritical trend. I am by no means equating actual, life-threatening terrorism with staged scenes that are made only for enthusiastic viewers. But I can’t help but wonder why we, as a society, are so quick to romanticize fictional violence while the pain of actual violent events is continuously omnipresent all around the world.
I don’t believe that protagonists such as fictional mercenary Jason Bourne or extremely popular video games such as Grand Theft Auto actually inspire people commit terrible acts. Violent individuals will be violent regardless of their exposure to what they see on screen. However, I still find it peculiar that we so easily are able to celebrate on-screen violence as long as it’s carried out by our own protagonists and heroes. Our attraction to gore and explosions seems to show how violent our society truly is intrinsically, whether or not we’d like to admit it. While I shed tears for lives lost in the tragedies that take place far too often, I too find myself eager to attend the next action movie. The double standards of violence between reality and fiction is a paradox that I find peculiarly unsettling, and is possibly an issue worth paying attention to.
