Hands down the best article the ordinarily genius Shawn Macomber has ever written is up in all its ultra-genius glory at The American Spectator, and I do not say this simply because Nietzsche, Fight Club, John Stuart Mill, and A Purpose Driven Life are all preceded in the text by Shawn's memory of the time I defended zombies in the Weekly Standard. (No snark, please.)
Indeed, Shawn defies my popular wisdom, taking a thinking man's look at big-bucks torture flicks. Turns out they're only sorta-big-bucks torture flicks, among other things. His skewer job on the real horror of these films -- the constant attempt to 'contextualize' their nihilism in chin-stroking pseudophilosophies of choice and human nature -- is boffo.
But am I...persuaded? I sit, I stroke my chin over the actually-not-so-boffo box office receipts for the late train of grislocentric movies, and I ponder Shawn's suggestion that if we really were cuckoo for dismemberment and mutilation why then snuff films would be the biggest of big business all across America. I'm about to say something about Violence and America over at TAS -- it's probably, in fact, up by the time you read this -- and on that score I have to say here that part of what's most troubling about the torture flick thing is that it integrates into the culture as 'just one' of a vast set of artistic and entertainment 'choices.' It's a free market. If you don't like it, don't see it. And those who do might be just as 'normal' as you are, Mr. Puritan Jerkbomb. You can see where this is going.
And I can see that this is a pretty svelte way of spluttering that even if we're not wholly corrupt by a mass blood 'lust' -- to borrow a word thrown around suddenly by Pat Robertson -- well then the real problem must be that we're partially corrupt!, etc. etc. But either way, I still don't like it, so...there. The question, Raymonds of the world, is what do we want to be?
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