I remember sitting there wide eyed as
Arnold Swazewazizname blows a hole through the head of his counterpart in
‘Terminator 2’. My better half looks on first at the screen, then at me. I’ve
known her long enough to hear her thoughts. “Why the hell do you like this
insane movie? And also, tell me again why I’m with you?” I don’t really want to
take my eyes off the screen, so I try and answer telepathically too. Apparently
I have not perfected the art. All the guys I know love the movie. Women think
it’s too graphic and takes violence to a whole new level of insanity. Do you
think the robots should have sat down over coffee and settled it amicably? What
it boils down to is that men like violent flicks. Women don’t.
Why? I’ll tell you why. (Cue ambient music please) A couple of thousand years ago, men and women had distinct roles. Men were the hunters. Women were more of the gathering type. Men were close to the action; hunting wild boar, steering clear of vicious lions and bringing down woolly mammoths. Stuff that got the adrenaline pumping and the bones a-breaking.
Now fast forward to the 21st century and we seem to be missing the testosterone-heavy, action packed activity that’s been instilled in our blood. To whom do we turn to for help? You know it – good ole action movies.
Give us car crashes, men shooting at men, men shooting at aliens, men shooting at aliens while crashing their cars. It’s all good to us.
Women don’t seem to understand this need. They’ll be dragging us to movies about a bookstore owner falling in love with an actress, or something about a notebook. Or worse yet, a love story with subtitles that’s spread over 3 hours. All we need is a bit of action with a semi-decent plot. Safe to say that we’re flexible on the plot part too. And don’t you think that the gore, explosions and occasional sex scene isn’t integral to the movie. You might question it, but we’re pretty sure it’s justified.
“Why does a respectable man with a doctorate eat people, and in the most gruesome fashion?”, you might ask. C’mon…everyone is allowed to get hungry. He just ate what was closest to him – his friends. Give him a break.
“What are the chances of the helicopter crashing into a highly flammable LPG tanker, which flips over a couple of times landing close to a petrol pump before exploding?”
I’m come up with a fail-proof formula to calculate the probability of the occurrence.
(N+1)p-3 . ‘N’ being the number of helicopters in the world with ‘p’ being another letter that I had to put up there to sound authentic. The answer I came up with is – pretty good.
“Why doesn’t she just kill her counterpart straight off. Why does she need to gouge her eye our and leave a deadly snake lying around to eventually seal the deal?”
Any violence aficionado knows that it’s a metaphor. What the director is trying to communicate is that the world has turned a blind eye to… I want to say… reptile conservation.
It’s only because of these kinds of violent movies that I have a plan, if, heaven forbid, disaster is eminent. When monsters of the netherworld are near or if a killer in a hockey mask is on the loose, I know exactly what to do. Scream like a little girl and run like crazy.
While you might have been keeping a close eye on the hero of the movie, I’ve been watching the tiny vanishing dot in the background. The extra who decided not to risk his life in the battle to save the earth. The one who left unscathed.
I am that man. He who lived to tell the tale. All because of the movies he has watched.