How far to desensitizing America?

By Kyra-lin Hom

A couple weeks ago, late one Friday night, some friends and I went to the downtown Seattle Meridian theatre for the opening of "Silent Hill" (Rose, with the intention of finding a cure for her daughter's fatal disease, accidentally drives into a nightmarish alternative reality where she loses her daughter.

The story line consists of Rose trying to find her daughter and a way home.). I wasn't expecting much more than a hack and slash movie with acting bad enough to rival "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones" and screenwriting horrifyingly comparable to NBC's "10.5." It was, after all, a video game to movie adaptation and those never start or end well.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't terrible. Those of my friends who were veterans of the "Silent Hill" game were entranced by how closely the movie stuck to the nuances of the game. The story was predictable and lost a lot as the end approached, but the cinematography was beautifully disorienting and the special effects were fascinating in their realism and pure "scare value".

After leaving the theatre, I began to reflect. My group had been sitting in the very front row with all but one of us enjoying the "scare" that gave the movie its R rating. A scattered handful of people behind us were screaming. A few girls could be heard crying. A rare and unfortunate feint-of-heart would occasionally have to leave and relieve their stomachs of their popcorn and candy burdens.

"Silent Hill," which opened April 21, was the gore fest promised by the synopsis, but more so was it was nerve- and moral- numbingly gruesome. Thinking back on the images that had flashed before my open eyes, I realize that that which bothered me so little should have left me feeling violently ill, lightheaded and maybe even traumatized. Yet I know that the majority of the people in that theatre were of the same mind as my friends: that was so cool!

The giant media moguls want money. Media, as an industry, cannot exist or function without it. To make money, media must sell. Who are the largest consumers? The younger generations without any responsibilities and their hands deep in their shallow pockets. The younger generations want what's new, exciting, hellified and rebellious - bring on the blood and forget the plot. "Psycho" from the 1960s doesn't even weigh in on the blood and violence scales of today. Amateur, student films have more gore in 30 seconds than was in the entire span of the 1975 "Jaws." Media keeps pushing the limits on what they can and can't show, knowing that more outrageous and controversial equals more profit. The consequence is the desensitizing of society.

Many people are concerned that manners and morals are at an all time low. It's nothing new for ratings of "sexually explicit," "violent" and "disturbing" to be crowd magnets rather than repellants. There is no doubt that an alluring glamour has always coated the darker side of life. Where that line is drawn, however, between the good and the bad, is pushed back further and further every day.

The problem lies in that there may be no alternative. Society's morals seem to be slowly slipping further and further from the supposed straight and narrow path, leapfrogging down an abyss of desensitization from one horror to the next in an attempt to outdo all of its predecessors. This process is responsible for the unusually high number of absolutely horrendous films that have been shoving their way onto the big screen: "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (2003), "House of the Dead" (2003) and its sequel (2005), "House of Wax" (2005), and "Bloodrayne" (2005). Shall I continue?

All replace intellectual content or moral horror and outrage with simple splatter.

I have only one question, and I ask it as much out of curiosity as I do out of concern, "How far are they willing to go?"

Kyra-lin Hom is a West Seattle high school student who writes every other week for this newspaper. She can be reached at kl_hom@yahoo.com