"Back at it again"... Or, "The Total Depravity of Man"

Once upon a time, 2 years ago, I began blogging. First at this site, then later at MySpace. Fed up with the incessant "Internal Error" messages at MySpace (which never seem to get resolved), I have decided to return to Blogger.com & start fresh.

That being said...

Last week, the movie "Saw 3" debuted in theaters across America. Having heard much about this series from coworkers over the last couple years, I decided I would watch the first film in the trilogy. What a mistake that turned out to be. It is roughly 90 minutes long - I endured about 45 minutes before shutting it off.

It wasn't that I couldn't stomach the grisly scenes of the movie - in that capacity, war films such as Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down could just as easily turn one's stomach. Honestly, I was overcome with disgust over the path that the entertainment industry is continuing to go down.

Much like the days of the Roman Empire, we now have a multi-billion dollar industry in which people pay to watch people suffer prolonged pain & gruesome death. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to watch a scary movie, or that we can't/shouldn't have any movies that in any way depicts people hurting or dying. However, the line has been crossed when we have several major Hollywood films produced each year which, despite whatever so-called plot is constructed by the producers, largely relies upon unique (or bizzare) ways of killing people in graphic detail over the course of 90 minutes. As far as entertainment value, the plot of such movies plays second-fiddle to the grotesqueness. People are becoming more and more desensetized to graphic violence. What's next???

Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine about this, and he brought up the point that the same people who keep this industry afloat are also the people who scour the internet to find videos of westerners being beheaded in Iraq. Why MUST this be made available on the internet??? Why do people feel the need to watch it for themselves??? Don't give me some "freedom of speech" or "freedom of the press" CRAP!

As a society, we have devalued human life. We hurt people for pleasure, or watch people pretending to be tortured/mutilated for pleasure... and we actually PAY for it.

Are we any better than the Romans?

Why?

Or why not?