Last night I was reading Preacher. I read the first seven issues in white heat, and then spent about three minutes giggling to myself in my room – and then decided I had to call up vrikodhara and tell him all about it. Tell I did, and I was still giggling to myself when I fell asleep, about an hour later.
Today morning, I had this conversation with a friend who had read one of my “here, read this”-category of comics. He didn’t like it at all. He was extremely pissed, in fact, by seeing panels where a guy shoots another guy in the eye – the fellow who is shot shouts something like “Ugh! I am hit! I am hit! ” and the shooter pumps a couple more bullets into him, with the consoling words – “Oh, don’t worry, you look swell.”
Personally, I would have found the spectacle extremely funny. And Preacher is gory as hell. You have people with the lower end of their skulls shot away, you have vampires sticking knives into their own necks to escape a police dragnet, a guy called Arseface who has got an arse like a face – er, the other way round, actually, and then you have a serial killer who rips body parts off people. Plus there are truckloads of blasphemous ideas thrown around. I enjoyed every moment of it.
Am I the kind of person labelled “sicko” in a normal society?
Now let me get things straight. In all the years of my indulging in things of an amoral nature in comics, films and various other forms of art, I have never really had real-life repercussions of whatever it is I was indulging in. Occasionally, I would read or hear about people who get bad dreams or depressive thoughts because they read so-and-so book or watched so-and-so movie, and when I go and watch the same movie or read the same book, I would enjoy every blood-soaked minute of it. I got into horror fiction just so I could feel the horror, you know , the way people say Exorcist made me pee my pants, or Psycho messed with my head. There have been books which have made me scared when I read them, no doubt, but nothing that has given me nightmares or scarred me for life. There has been no permanent effect on my psyche. I do not make bombs in my room, I do not torture neighbourhood cats. I love cats. I do not necessarily love human beings, but I stay in harmony with them, barring the odd bout of verbal insurgency.
Likewise, violence. It is strange that people moan and complain when they see graphic depictions of death – gunshots, swordfights, whatever – onscreen or on the printed page. Hello? Isn’t this better than showing a superman ( your average X-ollywood Film Actor) who’s being fired upon by twenty men and survives without a scratch? This is what freaking happens when someone shoots at you – you will be very if you are still alive. You will be bleeding. You might not have been hit by the freaking bullets at all, but even the ricocheting bits of the surface where the bullet hits can be deadly. Seeing geysers of blood spouting from a decapitated torso may upset you, but remember that this is what would happen if you are in a swordfight.
It’s even funnier that it’s okay for children to watch cartoons where a mouse does unspeakably horrible things to a cat or those mythological serials that show armies on a battlefield shooting arrows at each other. Or one “good” god shooting at a “bad” demon and lopping his head off. “Cartoons are divorced from reality”, is what I have heard parents say. Oh yeah, right. Is it okay to mislead ( yes, it is misleading, isn’t it? ) children into believing that violence is all cartoony and non-bloody? If it’s okay to laugh at cartoons, it should be alrght to laugh at the “real” stuff too, isn’t it?
Everybody says we are a generation inured to real-life violence, so hardened that things barely shock when we read about it in the papers. We are drawn to violence, fascinated by it. So is it a problem when I go a step further and laugh at it? Just to make things clearer, let me point out that it’s extremely unlikely that I would be laughing at somebody who has been shot in real life. I would hardly be in a position to be humorous if somebody is pointing a gun at me. It’s just that, when somebody who is not real, who is an imaginary character in a make-believe world, is in deep, deep shit, I find that extremely amusing. I kind of relish the glee with with the writer must have thought up this situation, or I applaud the director and his twisted sense of humour and the enthusiastic people who went along with his ideas. I envy the rollicking time they must have had, when they were doing all this.
Shit. I wish you would laugh along with me.
