7. You Become Desensitised To Screen Violence
When you become a movie nerd, you quickly develop a need to see everything. The best, the worst, the longest, the shortest, and eventually, the most extreme. Extreme cinema is an odd little section of film-making, because the results vary in quality and they are hotly debated by just about everyone who watches them. Whilst this does have the amusing effect of seeing people in the internet discuss the artistic merits of Lucifer Valentines Vomit-Gore Trilogy (believe me, it exists), it also means that you become desensitised to just about everything as you slowly sit through all manner of unspeakable obscenities, all in the name of nerdhood. But, lets say youre not into that kind of thing, and you can never bring yourself to watch such horrifying and depraved filth. Ill take my Spielberg and you can have your Buttgereit, thank you very much. Well, even if you do not choose to seek out extreme cinema There are scenes of brutality and cruelty in loads more films than the dodgy ones you see discussed on forums on the internet. Take Fargo- generally considered to be the Coens masterpiece, and an arty film, if not actual art- a film which has a scene at its climax where a man is chopped up and fed into a wood chipper. Even Danny Boyles recent film Trance has torture, beatings, decaying corpses and a man being shot in the one place he wouldnt ever want to be shot (in close up), and that film courted very little controversy when it was released. A flick through Scorseses canon reveals stabbings, mutilations, headshots, fingers being blown off, fingers being hammered off teenage prostitutes, and much more. This is just popular cinema- not even the extreme stuff. Eventually, these scenes wrack up, and you see more and more until you just stop being bothered by them. They mean very little in the end. You end up just being completely desensitised to screen violence. Which is a pretty bad thing, probably.