Sunday 27 May 2012

Killing Time


I recently watched the fantastic film God Bless America, excellent movie by the way, and it got me thinking about spree-killing. This isn’t that unusual though there’s a whole host of things that get me thinking about spree-killing but most of it is on the E! network. This got my wheels turning in a different way. It got me wondering why we, as a society, have such a soft spot for people with ridiculously high body-counts?

It might help when one of them is Woody Harrelson

There are two kinds of film about people who kill large numbers of people, thrillers and black-comedies. Thrillers tend to focus more on serial killers protagonists who rarely grab a huge amount of screen-time. At bests they clock up body-counts somewhere in the low teens however there is always an extra hook to make them particularly gristly. Sometime they’ll cut the skin off, other times he might do something funny with the heads… if I ever flip I plan to leave each of my victims with a massive dildo sticking out of there chest like an x-rated version of Alien. The point being that a writer has to make a serial killer do something more crazy than just killing a bunch of people. Otherwise we’d end up rooting for them.

Yeah he made a guy knife-fuck a prostitute
but he did behead Gwyneth Paltrow.

Any time someone just snaps, a word I’ll come back to later, and kills a bunch of people we all just nod in understanding. Fantasising about opening fire on a bunch of our fellow humans is something we’ve all done. If you want evidence that people root for crazed mass-killers then look no further than the greatest pop-culture icons of modern-times. I’m talking of course about Batman. Everyone loves the Batman from the tip of pointy ears to the bottom of his ridiculous cape he is one of the most beloved characters ever, there is only really one pop culture icon who might just edge that popularity contest… The Joker.

Oh fuck I think I've attracted his attention... don't move.

We all love the clown-faced psychopath. Why? Because he, like Batman, is the personification of a deeply held belief that each and everyone of us is only one bad day away from flipping-the-fuck-out. It’s the reason we use the word snap. A word that means to break under pressure. All of us are constantly placed under a huge amount of pressure by the fact that we are good people. Bad people vent and yell and demand the universe adjusts to their requirements. Good people bury it all. Good people are placed under a huge amount of pressure because of the simple fact that every step towards civilisation we have taken is another step away from a world where dick-heads get murdered.

Vikings rarely tolerated dick-heads

I'm obviously not going to argue that civilisation is a bad thing, that would be a ridiculous position to take. I am saying that everything society has done to protect good people from the forces of evil has, unfortunately, protected raging douche-nozzles from the wrath of the righteous. When everyone carried a sword and there was no such thing as a police-force there were a lot less wankers. I'm not saying that people behaved better under those more primitive conditions, that noble savage bull-shit is exactly that, but that there were physically less of them because they were more prone to being straight up murderlised. Societal advancement can, it could be argued, be viewed as an ongoing struggle to move the line you have to cross before your murder becomes justified.

You'd go to PRISON for killing this.

I personally believe that the main reason for this is not a huge advancement made by our civilisation but rather simple population growth. Back in the 1500s you would never meet more than about five hundred people unless you were in a war. As such it was very easy for news of your dickery to be spread to all and sundry. Today tossbags are much more dilute. In the average day it is entirely possible that a spiteful, feckless toss-gargler may easily reach the point where they fully deserve to be stamped to death by a large man in knife-boots. However no single individual has to deal with as more that ten percent of it. In addition those that are exposed to them are very unlikely to be in contact with everyone else who has had this piece of shit ruin their day. Remember the last time some objectionable monkey-fucker ruined a small section of your day. Now imagine spending 24 hours with them. You're probably already imagining how you'd kill them.

I'm a traditionalist.

Our society, in it's present form forces good people to co-exist with a whole bunch of jizz-bungles that, on balance, probably don't deserve to live. I'm writing this in a beer-garden and I can count at least five of them in eye-line. That's why we relate to the central idea of going postal. Each and every one of us has our own list of who we'd take down, we've all fantasised about it... hell I'd imagine most of my readers have got the weapons selected. The world is filled with two types of people. Those who hear about a high-school massacre and react with surprise and horror and those who are surprised every single day that there isn't one.

eddie <tightly wound>

No comments:

Post a Comment