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SUBJECT: THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS POSTED: 31/05/01 BY: SAM
I ran across and article on www.anti-social.co.uk the other day stating that what's wrong with society today is video games. To be honest I'm usually pretty sick of this kind of statement as it usually come from some fat old biffer who's never played a video game in their life (and if they did it was probably pong on the Atari back in the early 80s) who's trying to lay the blame for the problems with society today squarely on someone else's shoulders.
However, with anti-social being the fine site it is, I thought this couldn't be the case so I settled down for a good read. Basically the argument they were making was that games, unlike life have a solution, be it to rescue the girl, destroy the bad guy or save the world, there is a definite (and obtainable) goal which will end the game and leave all the characters living happily ever after which, lets face it, just ain't gonna happen in real life.
Not only did I agree with the points they were making but they actually echo something I've been saying for many years now, that being that fiction of any kind is hazardous to your health. Everything from books to films to video games are a distorted view of reality and society as a whole is finding the line between fact and fiction harder and harder to differentiate between.
Lets take TV for example, recently we've been flooded with these "real life" programmes which claim to show us life as it really is. Really, is that so. When was the last time you saw a whole week of someone's life happen in 28 minutes with a nice neat voice over wrapping it up at the end? EEEERRRPP! You lose, 'fraid not. So where s the boring bits, where's the tedious chores, the hours spent commuting, the mind numbing crap that makes up most of our week. I don't think so. Shock announcement here ladies and gentlemen…. this isn't real, that's not what really happens.
Another of my personal hates was big brother, wtf was that all about??!! Once again, this ain't life boys and girls, it's a frickin game show. They were there to WIN MONEY!! And what's wrong with your own life's that you have to spend your precious time wasting away watching this crap. I bet if everyone had a countdown clock showing how many seconds they've got left, be it measurable in the thousands or the millions they'd stop wasting time pretty bloody quickly. I notice the "contestants" all disappeared back in to obscurity now we haven't had them shoved in our face every 30 seconds. good riddance
right now, onto films (and filmed drama as a whole). This one, as far as I can see is the most dangerous of the lot for 3 reasons;1) every one looks good, 2) no one ever dies, 3) there's a happy ending. Ok so theses aren't strictly true but hear me out here.
Point 1) every one looks good. So name me 3 fat leading ladies. U can't can ya. About a year ago Kate winslet was going around saying she wasn't gonna lose weight (not that she was that big anyway) cos that would be an insult to the average woman on the street yaddy yaddy yaddy… and what's she found, that if she didn't lose the frickin weight, she didn't get the frickin job. Really, what a surprise. It's a cardinal sin in holly wood to be showing us "ugly" people (for ugly read same as the rest of us). Most female characters in a film get up in the morning with full make up looking fresh and spry and hopping into her size 8 dress and skipping off to work and men getting up for a leisurely shave and pulling on their ready ironed suit and departing for the office, ITS CRAPP!! Believe me after 3 1/2 years of co habitation I can tell ya that what actually happens is that real people wake up with their eyes welded shut with sleep, go "Uuuuurrrgghh" at the sunlight shining thru the curtains for a while before wobbling off half asleep to the bathroom for the mornings evacuations before searching for some half decent clothes and rolling off to work feeling like their world could end any minute, which would be quite a trick in that for them it hasn't even started yet. For those waking up with a hangover imagine that the house has been rearranged and someone's dipped ya glasses in treacle which you just cant get rid of.
Sorry, I'm getting off the point here, what's even worse is that any "ugly" person in a film (once again read: same as the rest of us) is obviously the bad guy and cant be trusted and this is starting the seep into todays society. If you bump into a youth on the street today who, how shall we say, looks a bit shifty, your gonna automatically tense up and expect them to do something nasty. Well that's bull! People cant help the way they look (which leads me breifly onto another point, they say you cant judge a book by its cover…errrr, well if its yellow and says "yellow pages" on the outside its probably a good bet that its actually the yellow pages. The rant about crap sayings will have to wait for another time though cos this is takin to long as it is and I'm no where near done)
Point 2) no one ever dies. Well yes they do but what I should have said is no one ever dies of some thing inconsequential or minor or real life. You see Arnold schwarzenegger being blow up and thrown around and you never see him in his films going "ohh, I've stubbed me toe" or " ouch, I've got me knackers caught in the elastic in me pants". Unless they're shot point blank by something the size of a bazooka you're not gonna see any more damage that a little cut on the forehead which spends the rest of the film getting smaller and smaller till it disappears by the final act.
And if the fact that you see bad guys spewing magazine after magazine of large calibre ammo at the good guy without hitting him once wasn't bad enough, (having used firearms I can tell ya its usually harder not to hit some one you didn't want to hit in the first place than it is to hit the person u were aiming for) the fact that the good guy than pops up, fires one shot per baddy outa his little pop pistol and kills all the bad guys stone dead really puts the icing on the cake. No wonder kids are under the impression that guns are just toys, even when the good guys get hit it miraculously misses anything vital and they can then carry onto the end of the film and save the day. Which leads me onto my next point..
Point 3) there's always a happy ending. This is the one that really gets my goat (not that I own one mind, its just an expression) most films have a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. The beginning introduces the characters and sets up the situation for the rest of the film. The middle gives the main character, the hero in particular a specific task, objective or goal, be it save the girl, the world, or just their little puppy, and the end has the bad guy being defeated, the world being saved and the hero getting laid (usually). From this society has started to believe that no matter how bad our life gets, if we complete our goal, we'll all live happily ever after (and get laid). It's a fallacy people…..there is no master plan, if nothing we do matters then all that matters is what we do (hmm, where'd I hear that before). Stop tryin to defeat the bad guy and live happily ever after cos there is no bad guy, there is no happy ever after. All there is, is your own life, the 70 odd years that you'll be around. its your friends, your family, your choices. Live your life cos when the end comes, there's no one to blame but yourself.
v1.0 14/10/00