DESENSITIVE

I saw someone die the other day. I was peacefully watching TV when it happened. It was awful; it was remorseless and cold. The murderer was brooding, yet dashing and heroic. His victim fell before him unceremoniously as I watched helplessly from my couch. No one rushed to the victim’s aide as the murderer then went on to save the day, committing no less than thirteen more homicides before he seemed satisfied. The authorities caught up with him soon after, found some justification in his actions and promptly let him go free, honoring him with congratulations. Alone in my living room I was horrified and aghast. I’d like to say this is all true, truthful though it wasn’t really true; it was one of my favorite movies.
I am utterly desensitized. If an atrocity is coming at me through a picture tube or radiating down on me from a movie screen, I can withstand unspeakable acts conceived of the world’s most troubled minds. I have witnessed carnage and gore dramatized with spot-on accuracy available to previous generations through only their most graphic nightmares. I have been raised in a pop-culture where attractive heroes and anti-heroes alike murder their enemies without impunity. I have seen the special effected, digitally constructed, award winningly acted injuries and deaths of more people than I could ever fathom counting. My nagging, naïve, useless sensitivity was amputated long ago.
I’ve seen artificial death in every possible form; impalement, hanging, dismemberment, decapitation, disemboweling, fire, water, earth, and wind: mortal injuries from gunfire ranks in the innumerable. I’ve seen the skin melt from bodies and people chewed to pieces by both beast and machine. I’ve seen deaths based on historical events and some planned for the future. Poisonings, self-inflicted arterial bleedings, plummetings from a building’s twentieth floor, head on collisions, blown up, crushed, beaten and electrocuted are all old hat. Homicide, suicide, patricide, regicide, infanticide, and genocide are all put aside. I am invincible; I cannot be disturbed. What I can’t decide is this: having shed my nasty pathos for the dramatization of human demise, have I strengthened a segment of my cerebral constitution or devolved to some form of sociopath?
Here is the problem: Headlines don’t get me like they should. I’ve developed into a mechanism detached from the catastrophes that aren’t tangible. A News Flash illustrates for me the burning falling debris from the doomed Columbia spacecraft; the news paper reports to me about snipers stalking random individuals in the Washington Area, and reckless kids that race their parent’s European cars like they were weapons. Innocent people, often elderly people, are being invaded and beaten and robbed in their homes… their homes! I hum to myself, shake my head and go on with my day.
I can remember watching the Twin Towers fall. I thought the morning’s breaking update was lying to me as I stood dumbfounded half-ready for work. I remember any remorse or horror, veiled by numbed sense of disbelief; a TV generation reaction to the most disastrous incident to befall our continent in my lifetime. It kind of worries me knowing I am not an endangered species or even really unusual in this respect. Everyone around me laughs when Arnold Schwarzenegger overkills a villain, cuing a witless witticism. What’s perhaps even more disturbing that this is not a phenomenon even unique to my peers. The generation to follow me has a video game outlet that allows them not only to witness the most inhuman acts, but also act them out themselves in the virtual realm. These games are disturbingly real and staggeringly graphic, with the only consequence being GAME OVER appearing in red letters.
What’s the answer? Do we have a problem? How will desensitization affect us in the long run? Debate after debate rattles through our society placing blame for the rising level of violence in our culture. Popular music, news media, video games, the Internet, movies, TV; every form that we employ to mass-communicate with each other has been witch-hunted at some point. In shrinking our world through the wonder of our invention we’ve promoted images and philosophies that unify us with familiarity while also giving us more faces and contrasts to fear and hate. Human Nature seems to force us farther apart the more we learn about one another.
People were once products of their environments, now the all-consuming image factories selling us artificial rock star rebels with the same face design those environments. Individuals are no longer individual, we chose our identities from a carefully crafted catalogue of modes of fashion, attitude, and demeanor. One can choose from ‘A’ –‘Ally McBeal power-suit’ through ‘Z’ -‘Jennifer LopeZ pop-diva’ though never both. One can be ‘West Coast Gansta’, ‘one of the guys from Friends’ or ‘garage-band, sk8er boy, punk mosaic’. A great deal of us invest far too much of what’s left our individuality into an image designed to sell CDs and soft drinks. Imagine if you took the money you spend last year on soft drinks and spent it on night school tuition or perhaps gangster group therapy.
One of my first memories of the movies involves my mother’s voice leaning in to me as the film opened, assuring me that the people and actions we were going to see weren’t real. They’re not really hurting each other and they certainly couldn’t hurt me. Almost every child hears these words in the spirit of ‘parental guidance’, planting the roots of media literacy in all of us. If that same voice could always be there, during designer jeans and perfume ads, during glitzy award shows, and before every music video I think we’d be on a far better path. I believe what we spend on jeans is nearly as frightening as what we spend on guns, and don’t kid yourself; in the realm of image those items aren’t too far off. What all of us need to do is listen to that nurturing voice and learn to read what’s overt below the advert. Media literacy is the necessary antidote to the onslaught of virtual carnage that surrounds and surrounds the kids of the next generation.
Everything created and marketed and packaged for us is selling an image… everything. The computer, furniture, shoes, food, music, and vehicle you buy define you as a person in this world. There’s no way around it anymore, everyone who purchases anything is buying into an image in form or another. A fourteen-year-old kid from Argentina who buys Calvin Klein jeans may not be familiar with the specifics of the androgynously chic image Calvin is selling, but he is buying into the ‘Americano’ image that Calvin represents. When Britney Spears talks about boys, when Martha Stewart suggests a centerpiece, and when Bruce Willis expires a bad guy, they are each selling an image.
Enlightenment in our society is, and will henceforth be known as media literacy. Media literacy at its core is essentially understanding that you are a customer. Questioning what you see before you in an analytical sense; Am I part of the intended target audience? What is this saying about my image? How will this improve my life? Am I buying this for need or want? I’m a customer when I go to the movies, exercise and wash my hands. The trick to being media literate is also understanding that though I may be a customer, I don’t have to buy. I prefer to peruse; as an enlightened consumer in today’s world of virtual carnage, I remain detached.
Detachment, in conjunction with a literate understanding of media muscle, will ultimately attain desensitivity. I’d like to amend my earlier admission. Though I have seen the dramatized deaths of thousands of nearly innocent characters I do not suffer from an amputation of humanity, nor does my generation. Though carnage and violence may be seen in a different light these days, our evolution as a species in a world always trying to sell us something will remain prosperous for those of us intent on seeing what’s offered for what it is.
There’s nothing wrong with buying the expensive jeans, or the Eminem CD, or the diet soda, as long as your aware of what you’re buying and what you’re buying into. The real challenge that faces my generation and the generation to follow is not witnessing the portrayal of death and violence and excess, it’s understanding that it doesn’t have to affect you as an individual. No matter what Calvin, Britney, or Bruce’s opinion, tomorrow the sun will rise and you will have to be you for a whole new day.
I am utterly desensitive; I remain attentive, entertained, and impermeable. I see virtual pain, suffering, and the gruesome demises of various super-villains for what they are. I sit unrepentantly through action movies, Pepsi commercials, and music videos well aware that I won’t be buying. I won’t apologize for enjoying the diversions that other people craft and I enjoy. After all, I’m media savvy, I’m not a monster.