Headshots, “humour” and Priming us?

The “hypodermic” model of media is sooooooooooo 1970s. Nobody serious believes that monkey see, monkey do. The whole thing is dodgy, and rendered politically unpalatable by those who try to use it for nefarious (CENSORSHIP!!!) purposes. And of course, the historians and sociologists will point – with some plausibility – to previous moral panics around television, radio, mass literacy, the printing press. Some poor blighter probably got scolded by his/her tribe for a particularly lifelike cave-painting, which was only going to serve to distract that young Thag from his important hunting work…

With those disclaimers, there’s something deeply disturbing about Reacher and Mr & Mrs Smith (yes, we have a month’s Amazon Prime). Not the acting (fine), scripts (funny) but the astonishing levels of non-consequential for anyone except the corpsified violence. They’re dropping bodies all OVER the place, headshots of the obligatory guards, John Turturro getting (fatal) truth-serum jabs in his ass. No legal, sleep consequences. Nothing. This is who we are supposed to admire? People who can kill without blinking?

Reacher is at least a “fantasy” (and that absolves it, oh yes). But Mr & Mrs Smith play it all for what they think are “laughs” – not funny ones – about bodies in compost (because the disappearance of someone worth $15bn in the company of a young black man and Asian woman is not going to spark any investigation, is it?).

Yes, I know, I am a) rambling and b) boring and c) in need of Getting Out More. Certainly I am done with Prime, except maybe for a few classic movies. No more box sets, especially ones with a bodycount. There’s going to be quite enough violence and horror soon enough, I don’t need to get a head(shot) start.