The actor Jim Carrey did something almost unthinkable in Hollywood last Sunday, sending little waves of shock across the film industry: he publicly disassociated himself from a film in which he himself starred, Kick-Ass 2, because of its level of graphic brutality. Carrey wrote on Twitter:
“I did Kick-Ass a month before Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence.” He added that: “Recent events have caused a change in my heart.”
Mark Millar, the creator of the Kick-Ass comic books and the film’s executive producer, said he was “baffled” as there was nothing in the film that wasn’t in the screenplay 18 months earlier. So what happened to Carrey? I suppose he just started thinking.
Carrey is an outspoken supporter of gun control, writing last April that people in the US needed to “deal with our addiction and entitlement to violence”. The logical next step is to query the burgeoning “addiction and entitlement” to extreme violence as entertainment.
Once, Hollywood blamed the gun lobby for making weapons freely available, and the gun lobby hit out at movies for glamorizing violence.
Now, it is finally dawning on people that this opposition is artificial: indeed, the intermingling of freely available weaponry and culturally malign influences is a powerful cause of concern.
Alongside that sits a philosophical question for us all, about what degree of human suffering we should consume vicariously as entertainment, why, and in what form.
There are signs of Hollywood beginning to shift uncomfortably in its seat. After the 2012 Colorado shootings, in which James Holmes mimicked The Joker to murder 12 people at a screening of a Batman film, Warner Brothers postponed the release of Gangster Squad until scenes of mobsters machine-gunning a cinema audience could be cut.
Following the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shootings, in which 20 children and seven adults died, the film mogul Harvey Weinstein cancelled the US premiere of the Tarantino film Django Unchained.
Yet these tentative gestures merely raised more questions: if a film is too disturbing to see one week after a massacre, precisely when does it become decontaminated?
Source: The Telegraph
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