A LONG, long time ago in a galaxy not too far away, an old farmer was dying at the age of 110, who was famous throughout the Riverina for being as hardworking and capable as any other farmer in the region.
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He wanted to give his great-grandson one last piece of good advice.
He called the boy over and told him that the secret to a long life was a sprinkling of gunpowder on his porridge every morning.
The great-grandson did this religiously and, sure enough, lived to the ripe old age of 110.
When he died, he left 14 children, 28 grandchildren and a five-metre hole in the wall of the crematorium.
Boom boom! I’ve heard of violent deaths but violent burials?
Sorry, but an undertaker told me that joke was funny. I’d have thought an undertaker would be the last person to let me down.
I think it’s time I buried that joke too.
Earlier this month the film Alien: Covenant was released.
Another prequel to the film Alien, directed by Ridley Scott and with an MA+ rating, I’m musing it’ll be no adventure for the fainthearted.
With the recent releases of John Wick: Chapter 2 and the next Wolverine installment, Logan, for which Hugh Jackman took a pay cut to make sure the movie could be rated “R” and with the upcoming releases of Atomic Blonde, The Bad Batch, Kingsman: The Golden Circle and Mother!, US film critic Bob Strauss believes 2017 may well go down as the most violent in movie history.
Are violent images bad for us? Are they bad for children?
I don’t know. In 2012 surprisingly, analyses of school shootings by the US Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation do not support a link between violent video games and real world attacks.
However, a study in 2014 found watching violent movies makes people more aggressive (but only if they have an abrasive personality to start with).
Can violence in the visual arts ever be justified? Maybe. Does not the violence in Schindler’s List (1993) give us a much deeper appreciation of what the Jewish people were up against in WWII?
Does not the visual and even audial violence in the film Blood Diamond (2006) convey the utter frustration and helplessness of those trapped in African political violence? As a boy I never knew that Jesus had been ripped to shreds even before they put him on the cross. It appears that these days even a lot of older adults have either stopped believing this or never knew in the first place.
Although I studied the crucifixion intellectually at the seminary university, watching Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ gave me a deeper emotional appreciation of the sufferings of Jesus Christ and that made them more meaningful.
I mean here is the story of the most famous man ever in history. This same man voluntarily takes on the punishment for all the sins of the whole world so it’s going to look worse than having to pick up papers at lunchtime.
If you go into any bookstore these days you will see that the fiction section is several times larger than the non-fiction section.
A friend said to me “I don’t like reality TV! I watch TV to escape from reality!”
Perhaps violence in films or on TV needs to be used very sparingly and only to explain important truths because violence offends not because it looks fake but because it looks real.
FATHER BRENDAN LEE