One night last year I stumbled upon the opening credits for a program called “World Of Pain” on a satellite channell called Bravo.
The program is the usual sort of lurid voyeuristic pap that one finds on such channels, but what shocked me were the opening credits for the program which featured clips of people suffer excruciating pain: being impaled by javlins, falling on their facess, being hit by cars and in several cases, on fire.
One particularly horrific segment showed a fire blackened victim next to a burning car. The person was still partially on fire and raising a plaintiff arm to someone directing a fire extinguisher at them.
The images still haunt me.
I have been wondering who could enjoy this sort of thing? Who are the people who go have accounts at rotten.com and ogrish.com? The issue has puzzled me.
Filming other people’s pain and humiliation appears to be a massively popular phenomenon.
Examples include the benign Jackass/Dirty Sanchez japesing on MTV through to the Bumfights phenomenon (where homeless people are paid to fight or pull out their teeth on camera etc) , the spate of copycat videos where youngster have filmed themselves fighting or attacking people (including the new “Happy Slapping” phenomenon in London) and the “World of Pain” type programs discussed above.
I wonder if it could be linked to TV violence and its effects on children?
As I read on Abelard.org today:
Violence on television affects children negatively, according to psychological research.
The three major effects of seeing violence on television are:
- Children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others.*
- Children may be more fearful of the world around them.
- Children may be more likely to behave in aggressive ways toward others
…If you think wall to wall violence on TV has no effect, why would you imagine that one-minute adverts in the breaks do have an effect?
[* emphasis mine]
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