My favorite absurdist defense of Hollywood’s infatuation with violence is the idea that they are just portraying the gritty realism of violence in society:
With new clues, a Philadelphia homicide unit reopens the 1998 murder of Carrie Swett, who had joined the abstinence club, Hearts Wait, just before her death.
Carrie eventually learns the club members aren’t who they claim to be. Tina, the outspoken president, apparently is carrying on a sexual relationship with the youth pastor, Nathan, who oversees the club.
In a flashback scene, Carrie confronts Tina and encourages her to stop meeting alone with the youth pastor.
Tina replies, “You’re just some slut with a whore for a mother.”
Carrie also tells a young man who fears he’s homosexual and two teens who are sleeping together that there is nothing wrong with their feelings or actions.
The members of the club respond to Carrie by calling her “dirty,” “whore,” “slut” and “b****” before stoning her to death.
Last year, the FBI reported that six of the 16,692 murders in 2005 were hate crimes, which includes all crimes attributable to biases based on race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/ national origin, and disability. None of these six – or 16,292 – murders involved Christians stoning insufficiently abstinent girls, or anyone else, for that matter. Of course, it’s much safer to pretend that Christians stone women to death than make any reference to the particular group that does actually does stone women to death on a regular basis.
Freud has been discredited for decades. It is amazing that his unscientific theories are still being relied upon to attack those who don’t believe that unmititigated promiscuity is a benefit to society.
I refuse to watch any television show that is based on protagonists with any responsibility for investigating crime or involvement with the legal system. They’re uniformly shallow, boring, eminently predictable and inherently authoritarian.