On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Richard Pisacreta, Ph.D. went:
> If the latest research is 30 years old, its time some people got to work.
I agree with that!
> The latest playstation kickboxing games, and others, look real as
> hell to me. When students tell me that the movie "Ghandi" was
> boring except for the massacre scene, and my 15 year old comes home
> a few months ago and tells me that a few of her classmates thought
> that the images of 9/11 were "cool", an alarm bell goes off. Women
> fainted when they saw the original Frankenstein with Karloff in the
> 1930's. Today people watch mass murders, rapes, decapitations,
> buckets of blood exploding, and eat popcorn at the same time. Don't
> tell me we're more "sophisticated" today.
I won't. Instead, I'll present some literary evidence that children's
fondness for images of gore was very much apparent in the 1930s (the
decade you cite). Here's an excerpt from a poem published by Ogden
Nash in 1935. The title is "Don't Cry, Darling, It's Blood All
Right."
...Hardboiled, sophisticated adults like me and you
May enjoy ourselves thoroughly with Little Women and Winnie-the-Pooh,
But innocent infants these titles from their reading course
eliminate
As soon as they discover that it was honey and nuts and mashed
potatoes instead of human flesh that Winnie-the-Pooh and
Little Women ate.
Innocent infants have no use for fables about rabbits or donkeys
or tortoises or porpoises,
What they want is something with plenty of well-mutilated corpoises.
Not on legends of how the rose came to be a rose instead of a
petunia is their fancy fed,
But on the inside story of how somebody's bones got ground up
to make somebody else's bread.
They'll go to sleep listening to the story of the little
beggarmaid who got to be queen by being kind to the bees and
the birds,
But they're all eyes and ears the minute they suspect a wolf
or a giant is going to tear some poor woodcutter into
quarters or thirds. [...]
I'm not sure that the children of 1935, as described by Nash, were
very different from the students you're describing now. Might they
not have perked up during the massacre scene in _Gandhi_? Might they
not have described the images (not the events, but the images) of
September 11 as "cool" (or the contemporary equivalent)?
Someone show me evidence that there's been a change.
--David Epstein
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