TRUE GORE: Entertainment Through Pain
Kurt Cobain hadn't been in the ground more than a month before a graphics file with the charming name of COBRAIN.ZIP started making the rounds of various, shall we say, disreputable BBS's. If you hadn't guessed by the archive name -- or, for that matter, the description file ["Brains Alfredo! The kids'll love it!"] -- it promised a view of the late Mr. Nirvana as a member of the Head Wound Club for Men. And even though the file was later declared a forgery (it apparently wasn't Kurt, but some other victim of Shotgun Etiquette), it was still a pretty damn gross piece of business.
(And how does da Flatline know about this? Awright, mea culpa, morbid curiousity, et cetera. Tell ME you never rubbernecked a bad auto accident, okay?)
That wasn't even an isolated case. Pour enough search strings into Yahoo! or Hotbot, and I guarantee you'll find Web sites with "Faces of Death" .GIF collections: crime-scene photos, autopsy shots, battlefield maimed, even that Pennsylvania politico who ate the bullet in front of a press conference on live TV (and inspired Filter's "Hey Man, Nice Shot").
I'm not gonna get up on my virtual soapbox and insist that this is a sign of the pending Apocalypse, but you gotta wonder about a species that actively seeks out pictures of their own dead and mangled. Now, pretty girls in the nude -- with or without some guy's schlong in the picture -- those I can understand: they're supposed to make you horny, you go out and have sex, and (ideally) continue the human race. But unless you're practicing to be a bulimic, the only emotion these true-gore pix should inspire is nausea.
There's no doubt us house-apes have become more and more desensitized to violence and the way it's depicted on-screen; what was unthinkable/unwatchable ten years ago has become commonplace. Back in the early 80's, when David Cronenberg was filming SCANNERS -- and pay-cable channels like HBO were virtually non-existent, never mind home VCRs! -- his producers were faced with the cold hard fact that a hoped-for sale to TV wouldn't happen as long as the infamous exploding head sequence was there. Cronenberg -- who's never let film gore bother him -- grumpily filmed an alternate scene in which the explodee in question suffered a "grotesque" (Cronenberg's word) heart attack instead. Nowadays, you can see SCANNERS on the Sci-Fi channel -- an unrestricted, basic-cable channel -- with headblast completely intact. (Hell, even Linda Hamilton used the scene as a punchline in her SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE monologue! And that's network TV...)
Maybe we can blame Herschell Gordon Lewis, who pretty much invented the splatter movie back in the early 60's with BLOOD FEAST. Uncle Herschell -- who gives every indication of being a gentleman and scholar as well as a cut-throat businessman -- had seen the market for "nudies" dry up and decided to give the drive-in-going public something they couldn't get from Hollywood: people dying with their eyes open and blood and guts everywhere. He cheerfully admits that, while editing FEAST, he honestly couldn't understand how a battered work print of his opus-in-progress could make casual viewers turn green and flee the room.
Then again, we could put the blame on special makeup effects maven Tom Savini, who elevated film gore to a fine art through his association with George Romero (notably DAWN OF THE DEAD, whose exploding-head and disemboweling scenes alone made it the 2001 of splatter flix). Savini did time as a combat photographer in 'Nam, and witnessed enough real-life gore to put the average guy off their feed for life; he says that, by viewing the carnage through his camera's viewfinder, it made it seem "less real" and therefore easier to stomach. Later on in his SFX career, Savini actively researched pathology tomes on gunshot wounds and the like in order to make his latex illusions more realistic. (For what it's worth, Savini is genuinely squeamish when it comes to the animal innards he packs his break-apart dummies with, refusing to handle 'em directly!)
Hell, you don't even have to rent a movie to be confronted by gore -- just pick up TIME magazine. With the recent carnage in Bosnia/Somalia/the Middle East/wherever, hardly an issue goes by without full-color shots of gruesome corpses in the streets (or, in a recent piece on the Rwandan massacres, an entire friggin' river of bodies!). And confronted with this photojournalistic Mondo Grosso, whattaya do? Do you go "Yuch!" and turn the page? Or do you examine the photo closer, checking the color of blood and comparing it to the stuff strewn around in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART N-1?
Some years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote a near-hysterical article about going to see THE OMEN and being horrified by (a) the sheet-glass decapitation scene and (b) the delighted reaction of a boy&girl pair of gorehounds sitting next to him. Now, I've always respected Harlan's opinions, even though he has a tendency to eschew flyswatters when a bazooka's handy, and at the time I figgered he was just overreacting as usual.
Now, I'm not so sure...
This page hosted by  Get your own Free Home Page |
Return to Back
Issues page  |
|
 Send mail to dflat@juno.com |
Back to Da
Homepage! |