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It’s All Opera, Baby

There are stories like THE SOPRANOS that do the work to humanize and shade the majority of characters bumped off on-screen, the kind of stories that engage with the reality and the mutual agony involved in the taking of a human life.

But engaging with the reality of our fleeting existence is only part of the human experience — and most stories where death happens hardly deal with it at all. The vast majority instead treat physical assaults as swiftly passing moments.

A lot of people see this as a bug. It is a feature.

Cinema is heightened. All of it. What’s more, the stories tend to be depicted you know, cinematically. Violence may be morally wrong, legally unacceptable and romantically unappealing — but done right, it’s also cinematic as all hell.

A punch looks like an angry word feels. And there’s a reason we call emotional betrayal a stab in the back. It just — as in all things — depends on the context.

That being said, the above assumes a coherent story being told at least competently. Trash is trash, in any format.

And while yes, there’s a solid argument that much of the violence in media glorifies it in the eyes of a non-zero portion of the viewership — I’d argue there’s an equally valid argument along the lines of that same non-zero portion of the viewership being a bunch of humorless cave-dwelling toads that suck their own toes for pleasure.

And if the choice lies between death by teen hopped up on FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS & SHAW and a world where all entertainment must be made palatable to humorless toe-sucking cave-toads, then I’ll just sit here and wait for ZACK SNYDER’S THE BREAKFAST CLUB.

Up next Today Is Rich With Hilarity Andrew McCabe’s disturbing account of working for Sessions and Trump “He didn’t read intelligence reports and mixed up classified material with The Warzone Formerly Known As Chicago Today for something a little different, we’re going to address a scary Fox News standard: Black on Black Crime!!!!! Especially in Chicago!!!!1!! So.
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