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Many
movies and television shows employ fake blood to implement their
stories. But in very few cases has the fake blood been utilized
in such a way as to convey the surreal aspect of actually being
exposed to large quantities of blood in a violent setting.
I
remember coming up Hayward, my family living on A Street in a
Mexican neighborhood--I must have been about four or five, I hadn't
even started kindergarten yet. I was playing with another neighborhood
boy, and these two guys came up and started rousting us, looking
for this kid's older brother. I was very scared. Even as a little
boy I could tell these were some serious guys. At the time I saw
them as grown-ups, but they had to have been teenagers. Anyway,
my friend's big brother came out of his house, walked up to these
two guys without a word, and cut them both through their T-shirts
and into their guts with his knife right there in front of our
little boy eyes: SNIK-SNIK. The blood flow was immediate, profuse,
and right at my eye level. It soaked their shirts and their pants
(at the time, I thought it looked like they'd peed themselves,
and perhaps they did as well) and dripped onto the sidewalk in
spatters and puddles.
It
was like a window between two worlds had shattered, and all that
blood was pouring through the crack. The blood was redder than
red, seeming to stand out from the background more real than anything
else there. (When I was older and started dropping acid, I would
have described it as psychedelic--and that it was.) The two bullies
stood there, hunched over and dripping as they pressed both hands
to their respective wounds holding their guts in, begging my friend's
brother not to cut them anymore, tears and snot running down their
faces. He let them go, and I never saw them again.
The
only movie outfit I can think of that handled blood at all effectively
was the Hammer Studios. They didn't even pretend that a 2D rendition
of such a vital fluid could be at all realistic: their fake blood
was garish red ketchupy stuff that wouldn't even fool a small
child. It was a symbol for the crazy-clown, evil-funhouse mindset
that grips you when large quantities of blood actually flow.
Another
thing media fail in is their characters' lack of response to large
quantities of blood. Unless you're really jaded, or have a lot of
emotional control, large quantities of human blood WILL affect you.
I remember
as a teenager discovering my friend Chopper's murdered body right
after he'd been killed in a drug rip-off. The door to his hotel
room was partly open. I pushed it in and stepped inside--and there
Chopper lay on the hall floor with his head beaten in with a lead
pipe, a pool of blood soaking the cheap hotel carpet in a wide expanse
around his ruined head. The blood had even sloshed up on the baseboards
a little, and I remember being surprised that there could be that
much blood inside somebody. That's one constant: No matter how many
times you see it, it's always a shock how much blood the human body
actually contains. The pool of blood, my friend's empty eyes staring
at nothing in particular, and the SMELL: that hackneyed odor of
copper or hot metal. And you unconsciously pick up on other pain-
or terror-induced pheromones laden in the congealing mess. It's
paralyzing. The smell gets your INSTANT attention. You freeze and
scan the environment with every sense on overdrive. When blood is
spilled by perpetrators unknown like that, you'd better believe
you're checking your surroundings in frantic paranoia, making sure
you don't fall prey to the same threat.
I
remember when the phone rang in the depths of poor, dead Chopper's
hotel room, I literally jumped from the floor. When I landed,
I whirled and ran as fast as I could from that room of death.
No shame, no regrets, no guilt or blame.
In
real life, you don't have casual conversations around lots of
blood. You don't behave casually at all, unless you're a sociopath
or a homicidal dick.
Not
being part of that particular lifestyle any more (and not missing
it a bit) I don't know how I feel about media renditions of violence,
and blood in particular. Does it hurt? Does it contribute to violence
in our society? Off the top of my head, I'd say no. Violence in
media and games is a shadow, a reflection of the forces in our
society that express themselves through violence. Attacking media
violence is like punching your reflection in the mirror: all you'll
get is seven years bad luck and a sliced-up hand. I will say that
I feel violence in the media is presented a little too casually,
but perhaps that's more in the nature of an inoculation, an attempt
to emotionally anesthetize people from the possible effects of
extreme experience. But still:
I
remember a few years back, watching TV in the wee hours alone
(my wife and child safely asleep and me unable to). I was watching
some cheesy '70s cop show, and a disposable character had just
bitten the dust, some snitch tossed screaming from the roof of
a multi-story parking garage. It was handled antiseptically, no
blood, no emotional response displayed by any of the characters,
but it punched me in nuts. I just sat there in my easy chair crying
and crying, unable to stop. And I thought how ridiculous it was
for a grown man to be crying alone in the night (alone except
for my flickering conduit to the television consensus that is),
crying for some throw-away character in a two-bit piece of period
dreck. But I don't think I was crying for him at all.
Copyright
© 2000 Michael Hansen All Rights Reserved
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