Images Matter

I should have no desire to watch a film that stylizes violence for visual pleasure, nor glorifies violence as something to emulate. In the physical world I live in, I have been exposed to: a bloody woman at my back gate asking for help after appearing to have been raped, helicopters circling my neighborhood after shots were heard in the night, people shot and killed in neighborhood businesses, gunfire within the apartment directly below me, and shotgun wielding police outside my apartment door—and I haven’t lived in the absolute poorest neighborhoods. Whenever a filmmaker invites me to escape from my life for two hours, and spend ten dollars for parking, fifteen dollars for admission, and another fifteen for popcorn and a diet soda while I do it, I’d like it to be a film that does not encourage me to desensitize myself to my violent world, nor remove from me the defensive mechanisms that I need to recognize the dangers of my physical world. If as a filmmaker you want to array a seductive soundtrack and choreograph violence within a hyper-stylized template that offers an end result that can only be described as a false consciousness, I invite you to utilize the wealth you’ve amassed, and finance an epic, 3D, CGI-laden blockbuster of you fucking off.