The Power Of

Below is a Terrible, Terrible version of a script

All three sitting around in DORM ROOM, on their computers

 

A; Hey guys, what’s for movie night tonight?

B; Why not a tarantino night? We could call it the Tarantino Feeture

C; The What?

B; Tarantino has a-

A; It was a pun. What movies do you guys have? I got Pulp fiction and Kill Bill

C; 1 and 2?

A; Just 1

B; Meh

A; Reservoir Dogs is on special at _____(online store), should I get it?

B; Why not?

A; Huh, that’s weird, It’s saying it’s not available in our country…

C; Yeah, you’ll get that a lot here

A; What do you mean?

B; It’s probably just a copyright issue

A; Oh hold on, I was looking at the game..

-pause-

A; Wait, there’s a game for this thing?

*All three watch gameplay for a few seconds*

B; Yeah, that’s reservoir dogs…

A; those polygons man…

C; How much is it?

A; 9.99, but it’s not for sale here, see? Not available in your country.

C; It was like that for stick of truth too…

B; Nah, Stick of truth was blocked for the anal probing scene. This one’s just violence

A; Then why doesn’t it just get an R rating or something like that?

B; R Ratings don’t exist for games; the highest it goes is MA 15+

C; Not true, we got R ratings in 2012

B; Then why isn’t the game considered R rated?

C; because despite the existence of the rating you still have to reapply for consideration.

A has been looking at a list of banned movies

A; Holy (expletive), you guys banned dawn of the dead?

B and C; Don’t ‘you guys’ us

B; Besides, we unbanned it

C; Eventually…

A; Silence of the lambs? What’s wrong with you?

C; We had nothing to do with it, we just-

B; Look, australia has a guiding set of morals and principles, and it’s not such a bad thing that we stick to them, alright?

A; Morals and principles?

B; Yeah, here

Turns his computer around, showing the rules/classification guidelines

C; Why do you even have that open?

B; I like to be prepared

A; For what? It’s not like there’s anything here…

B; That’s the joke

Awkward, quiet pause

C; There are actual guidelines and such, but they’re all written by the commonwealth

B; Long live the queen

A; But it doesn’t make sense

B; Why not? they colonized us after all

A; no no, the guidelines. they aren’t even followed.

Awkward pause

A; Aren’t you gonna ask

B; Nope

A; Too bad. In 1978, In Camera Pty Ltd were the first to file an application for classification, and it was refused on the grounds that it had too much violence.

C; Yeah?

A; Well in 1985, Fox resubmitted an uncut Ramero version, and even then it was still banned in queensland. When it was finally released, it was released as R +18 Plus.

B; Ignoring the weird fact that you know this, what’s your point?

A; Well what other horror film featuring intense zombie violence has been released recently?

C; Dawn of the dead!

A; Yeah, with an MA 15+ rating. The various plot beats are all there, there’s even more blood in this one.

B; Oh yeah, there’s even that weird… zombie… baby scene

A; Exactly- and yet when you check the ratings…

C; That doesn’t mean the guidelines are lax though. Maybe there’s just been a shift in society. Maybe we’ve just become so desensitized that ‘zombie baby’ is the only way to get a reaction.

B; I don’t think that’s quite fair…

A; It’s fair, it’s just wrong.

C; Prove it

A pulls out 4 stapled reports. Everyone stares at him

B; Why… do you have four

A; Last minute script revisions. In 2003, Nancy Signorielli did a study on violence in prime time television, looking at the quantity of violence. She then compared what she found from the 1990s and early 2000s to what she found in the 70s and 80s. Guess what?

C; She found they were the same. What about it

A; Stop stealing my lines. Yes, she found that the quantity of instances of violence had not dramatically increased- in fact, the only real difference between the two time periods was the amount of people involved in the acts of violence.

C; But that doesn’t actually prove anything; In 2003, -that same year-, The Journal of adolescence published an article looking at the effect of ‘video games, Television, Movies, and the Internet’. In it it says, ‘And I quote’: “Among the other media variables, a relationship was found only for exposure to movie violence.” Television doesn’t seem to be a source of Desensitization so much as a secondary factor

B; So the format is the driving factor?

C; Not the format, The realism. In 2002 the Secret Service released a report in which they observed the quantity of violent crimes that stemmed from certain backgrounds. In it, there’s a tiny section in which they mention the percentage of people who enjoyed violent video games, movies, and books before their crimes, and interestingly enough both books and movies were *twice* as popular as video games.

A; (typing furiously on computer, finds report, reads off statistics) But whatever the statistics, Correlation does not imply causation. Maybe it’s not the media that is influencing their actions as it could have been their actions that were influencing what they seeked in media

B: Exactly – the reason the system needs to be so strict is because we want to temper violence in media.

A: Welll……

B: In that same survey, how would those people seek out violence in the media if there is no violence for them to seek out? 63% of the people in the survey are exposed to violence from the media. That would explain why books were so highly favoured, because it’s not just about the depiction of violence. You have to imagine the violence yourself because there are no visual representations of violence.

C: So what you are implying, is that we should be trying to restrict the human condition of violence, which is not innate but taught?

 

-pause-

 

B: Well yes…

C: That’s fabulous.

 

-pause-

 

C:

• violence is not learnt, it is innate
• how we react to violence can be manipulated over time by what we see in the media
• the ratings determine what we see in media
• ratings should censor extreme graphic representations of violence, which is where technology should come in because C can talk about the 2002 study, and what it leaves out – the games that are popular today (e.g. GTA) came out afterwards.

 

THE FINAL ARGUMENT (do do dooo do):

• Desensitisation comes from technology, specifically the realism that technology allows us to depict
• Realism is the defining factor of how impactful the violence depicted in media is to us. More recent studies have shown that video games are more likely to lead to desensitisation depending on how graphic the violence is.
• The reason TV shows aren’t in any of these is because they do not have the budget to fully utilise these technologies.
• Technology → realism → violence
• Point: Augmented reality games are the culmination of realism and technology. It removes the final link between the virtual world and our physical world
• In all previous media, there has been a separation between the virtual world and the player. The player could always distinguish between the game world and the real world. The current focus of gaming and media technology is to break down that barrier
• A: C is right. People have always said the main argument against censorship is that people could always tell the difference between the game and the real world, but nowadays you have games that are adding tools to life. Just the other day, I saw an ad for Gunman, which is a game for your phone that uses your camera as a gun, and you can use that to shoot your friends and people on the street.
• C: Yea you forwarded it to us. It looks pretty fun, I’ve never seen that mechanic before in mobile games.
• A: But did you watch the video?
• C: Yea but-
• A: HE SHOOTS AN OLD MAN WALKING DOWN THE STREET. The rest of the video points out all the mechanics of how to actually play the game, but the first part features a simple shot with a scoreboard of a player shooting “old man” and getting a point for it.
• B: SO what you’re saying is, not only does this game desensitise its audience, but it’s actively encouraging aggression towards people who aren’t even playing the game.
• C: It’s like the no-Russian level of Call of Duty Modern Warfare, but with all control in the hands of the player.

(pause)

• B: SO what was the point of all this?

(all characters look at each other)

• A: (cue piano) Maybe what we should learn from all this is that no matter what we do, the human drive for violence is not only innate but insatiable and unquenchable. Perhaps on some level we all understand this, so we try to instill limitations, organisations and institutions from what we view as corruptive.

 

Technology gives us a way to break the limitations, to surpass both the limitations we put on ourselves and those which we implement through standards and regulations. Now, more than ever, it is up to the user to distinguish between the real world and Pandora. Despite the thinly-veiled connection between the Na’vi and the native American population, there is a conflict between the protagonist’s reality and that of his superior’s. By allowing technology to break that wall for us, we can lose ourselves in the fantastical realms of our creation…

(piano continues for 3 seconds)

C: So…James Cameron night?

There are multiple explanations I thought of for the narrative of ‘We have decided not to die’, almost all of which revolve around the idea of the circle of life. All of these assumptions, however, revolved around the idea that all three rituals were a continuation of the predecessor, or that the rituals were indeed just that; means to an end. I now believe I was wrong.

See, at first I thought it was the wrong way around (and that the three characters represented 1 protagonist); Transported through a tube of which we see he has no control over (he doesn’t press the elevator button), before being sent crashing into an open world of which he has no explanation. In the 2nd ritual, the character has arrived in a world that makes no sense to him; it’s cold, dark and stormy, yet he has the same habits he learnt from birth (the convulses in the elevator bear incredible similarity to the ones on the tarmac. This character is wiser, and has foresight of dangers ahead (we are shown that he has suffered the storm before, and he clearly seems to have some understanding of the impending collision. He leaps, and we see from multiple angles that he clearly survives. The final ritual (ritual 1) shows her at the end of her life, having accepted her death. She convulses, but is eventually elevated, rising above her troubles into the light. 

This is a seriously disjointed explanation, and is special in that it falls apart with the speed and intensity of my sleep patterns whenever I play Minecraft. The second theory was that these characters are in the process of death, and that the method of the death helped convey the religion the soon-to-be departed was from; Ritual one depicts acceptance of death, and how tranquility leads to nirvana, while ritual two shows a man who rose above his adversity through his own devices, and depicts him as a christ figure, crucified against the stormy sky. The third ritual seemed to be a representation of The Myth of Sisyphus, as Camus saw it. The protagonist is given 2 clearly easier routes as he exits the elevator (left and right), yet instead chooses the one that affords him the greatest enjoyment on his terms. As he flies through that window, like sisyphus, we see him lower his arms, and serenely, almost blissfully, take in the horizon before plummeting back to the bottom of his modern mountain. And yet, while this explanation seemed right for the moment, I realised that it wasn’t enough. It was still wrong.

“We have decided not to die” is a story about characters achieving immortality by simply not dying. Unless we explicitly see them do so, they don’t. through their varied presentation and editing, all three characters cheat death by simply not being dead at the end of their respective screen time. We know they die- The swimmer certainly drowns in the pool, the man who jumps above the cars could not survive the debris and lacerations that come from it, and the man who leaps out the window is sure to meet the pavement in a brief but incredibly wet kiss. And yet, each character defies the audience and fate. As much as we don’t want to see their demise, we need to know that they are dead, but without any sign that they are other than our expectations, we can’t, and therefore they aren’t.

Moral of the story; If a character dies, check for a pulse. 

As I sit down to write this blog, I dramatically look around my desk. 2 cameras sit, one waiting for a new lens that will never come, on a small clearing to my right. Copious models lie in various states of disarray to my right, their stare of blind acceptance as penetrating as any Adam Sandler movie should be (take that as you will). A sword of minecraft sits pinned to my corkboard above a plain white mask and below a picture my parents got me for my 6th grade graduation. 3 hard drives glare at me with blinking lights, urging me to finally get my shins together and finish that documentary I promised Mrs Shannon over the last few months. She’s a lovely person, and I feel bad for letting her down. It’ll be up soon, I think. My computer is dying slowly, it’s harddrive making screeching noises every now and then. I’ll get a new one soon enough, but I fear it’s getting too late. On my monitor I have the godfather playing; the way dramatic beats work in that film is interesting to me, but I have it playing at halfspeed, and silent, so that each actors individual reactions can be gauged properly. Point of this is; I don’t do deep attention, I skim. Unless it is something I truly engage with, I skim until I reach something different. This is a weakness of mine that I have yet to correct, but I’ll get to it.