Kinds of Violence

We walked out of the cinema in a sombre mood. It was Vic, Meatloaf, the Guerrilla Gamer, the boots and me. Behind us, the dying chords of the poignant closing scene of the new Rambo picture echoed from the almost entirely deserted theatre.

“That,” said Vic, “was full-on.”

“I loved it,” said Meatloaf defiantly. For new readers: he used to be the editor of an almost definitely unofficial PS2 magazine until his publishing company had finally been stomped into the gutter by Sony’s crack legal goons.

The Guerrilla Gamer looked shellshocked, which given the eponymous subject of the movie was either appropriate, ironic, or possibly both.

“See now,” he said, and then swallowed heavily. After a moment to gather his thoughts, he went on. “See now, when I go to see a Rambo movie, I expect a few things. I expect Rambo to shoot like, a hundred guys; I expect Rambo to blow something up; and I expect Rambo to come out with some kind of half-arsed wisdom about how doing both tells you something about yourself as a human being.”

“What’s the problem?” Meatloaf rumbled. “That film had all of those things.”

I thought it was time to pitch in.

“Yeah,” I said. “But where previous Rambo movies were basically pantomime, that thing we just saw in there was like the bastard child of Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, the Killing Fields, and Predator.”

“Plus 7th Heaven,” added Vic. “You know, that Christian TV show. Because of the whole naive missionaries thing.”

“That was some seriously realistic violence,” said the Guerrilla Gamer. “Like, when he shot those guys with the 50mm machine gun. Or when they made those people run across the minefields and the blood… and when they cut the arms off that…”

“What a bunch of pussies,” rumbled Meatloaf again. He gathered his black trenchcoat around his ample frame and stalked off to find a kebab.

The Guerrilla Gamer, Vic and I slumped on a bench near a potted palm. For some reason I looked in the pot. There were no cigarette butts, of course, but it made me realise how far things had come since the last time a Rambo film played at the cinema.

“Remember when getting shot in a Hollywood movie meant having a red dye-pack go off under your shirt, and then you fell down either really unconvincingly or you did an unreasonably gymnastic high-dive off a bridge or overpass?” asked Vic.

“And when watching a hundred guys get shot by Rambo really was cool,” the Guerrilla Gamer added. “As opposed to harrowing.”

“It makes you think though, doesn’t it,” Vic said. “I mean, we just walked in off the street, paid like $60 to watch the most full-on hour and a half of sick-arse violence I’ve ever seen. But if you tried to do even a quarter of that in a computer game…”

“Ah,” said the Guerrilla Gamer. “Equivalence. I see what you’re driving at.”

“Soldier of Fortune: Payback got banned for way less than that.”

“But in the game, you’re in control,” I said. “That’s what the OFLC always says. It’s worse because you’re in control.”

“I was in control of that experience,” sneered Vic, referring to the movie. “I walked up, I paid my money, I sat in the chair, I faced the front, I kept my eyes open. At any time I could have walked out, but I didn’t. How’s that any less control than having to press the space bar every time I want to see Rambo shoot something?”

“Someone,” corrected the Guerrilla Gamer.

“Well yeah. It’s not like in Soldier of Fortune: Payback you can choose not to shoot someone. Do that, the game ends. It’s like with the movie. If you want Rambo to stop shooting people, walk out. It’s the same thing.”

The scene where the Burmese army slaughtered an entire village full of women and orphans played unbidden through my mind. I had a horrible feeling I’d be seeing it a few more times before sleep finally took me at 0245h that morning.

“Maybe it’s because the movie depicts actual stuff that’s happening in the world today, while the games are all fantasy,” I suggested.

Vic clutched at his greasy forehead.

“But that’s even worse!” he cried. “Take the opening credits: real footage of real suffering is allowed to be used for trash entertainment, but if I get a bunch of digital men who never existed, put them in an imaginary setting, and then pretend to be a mercenary who isn’t real shooting them with digital bullets so they die in an admittedly grotesque but not at all realistic way, that’s grounds for a banning but…” Vic worked his mouth up and down a few times.

“Stay with it,” said the Guerrilla Gamer. “You can bring it home.”

“…but if I go to a real place and depict real people in an only slightly fictionalised situation, and if I use millions of dollars worth of digital editing effects to create utterly realistic 50mm bullet impacts, and real landmine victims so Rambo - of all people - can make a few more millions for Sly Stallone and all his little wizards, why, that’s just fine. Slap an R on it and put it out for general release!”

Meatloaf wandered back, clutching a huge kebab drenched in tomato sauce. It looked almost exactly like someone had cut the arm off a child and now he was gnawing on the wet end. He regarded each of us in turn, as if examining a collection of strange new insects.

“What?” he asked, and took a huge bite.

And that’s when, at long last, Vic threw up all over the boots.