Violence Sucks

Last night, M and I watched "Drive", with Ryan Gosling.  It was an excellent film, and Gosling...is a bit of a genius.  He always seems to play these dark, tortured characters, but finds a way to make each of them unique, thus avoiding the DeNiro-ification of his budding career.  Plus, he's not exactly hard on the eyes.  There's just something  about him.  But enough about my boyfriend Ryan Gosling.

I just cannot get over the extreme, gratuitous violence.  Some would say that it's actually not gratuitous, that it's necessary to establish realism. I couldn't disagree more.  I feel that so much can be implied or even illustrated overtly - - without subjecting us to the uber-realistic sounds and sights of brains being blown up and splattered everywhere.

We have no place watching a fellow human being be violated, unless we're simultaneously trying to protect them.  Or let the crimes we've witnessed motivate us to change the world for better.  We are not supposed to simply bear witness to it.  We are not supposed to see it in intimate detail, just because. We are not supposed to be so acquainted with another human's insides.  

Some people are unfortunate enough to have no choice but to witness these horrors in reality.  But I'm guessing that they struggle indefinitely with remembering and feeling traumatized by the images.  Since when did such violence become something you might just randomly come across in a film on a Sunday evening? 
The film had a great story and was absolutely engaging, from start to finish.  But I literally had to cover my eyes, and ask M to tell me when the bloodbaths were over.  I just couldn't take it.

I remember when Pulp Fiction came out (in 1994), everyone was taking about how violent it was. It was a new brand of violence that hadn't been seen in films before.  It was "get your brains blown out" humour.  I just didn't get it, and still don't.  And the kind of violence I just described seems to be commonplace in many films today, almost 20 years later.  Maybe I'm off base, but I feel like the world is getting more violent too.  Columbine. A man decipates a passenger on a greyhound bus. A Toronto grad student gets her eyes gouged out and her nose bitten off by her jealous husband. Just today, I read news items about how a dude in New York doused a 73 year old woman in gas and set her on fire in an elevator.  And how a guy followed his ex girlfriend and her 3 friends in his car, rammed into them, and then opened fire, killing 3 of them and then himself.

What do you think? Are we becoming desensitized to violence as a culture? Are we actually becoming more violent as a result, or do we just hear about it more in the media?