No violent objections from me
RTHE FIRST time I went to see Steven Spielberg’s epic D-Day movie Saving Private Ryan, I didn’t get past what used to be known as the first reel. In the middle of Spielberg’s heartstopping, horrifying depiction of the American landing on Omaha Beach – men pitched into the purest, whitest heat of war – my then 15-year-old son sitting beside me tapped my arm.
“Sorry dad. I can’t watch this.” The scenes of violence – the worst that man can do to man – were too much for him, and we quietly slipped out. I came back another day to watch the film on my own.
But what if my teenage boy had been watching the current and hugely controversial TV series, Squid Game?
You may not have seen it but you’re pretty certain to have heard of it. Squid Game is a sort of cross between The Running Man and The Hunger Games: a dystopian fantasy; a life-or-death tournament where players must take part in superficially childish playground games where to win is to survive, to lose is to be executed on the spot. And trust me, those executions are depicted in merciless detail. Nothing – and I mean nothing – is left to the imagination.The special effects budget alone must run into seven figures.
But unlike Saving Private Ryan, which was about real people sucked into the killing fields of a real war (and one within living memory) Squid Game is pure fiction. That’s why I think teenagers can stomach the violence.
Not only is it not real (just as the actors in Ryan were spattered in fake blood and guts), but the storyline is entirely imaginary.
Squid Game, filmed in South Korea, is now officially the highestrated Netflix show of all time with 111 million “views” less than a month since its global premiere.
Like Ryan, it’s rated a 15 – but of course, kids much younger than that watch it in their bedrooms and on laptops on the school bus. That’s what’s causing all the controversy: some fear youngsters will be corrupted by the violence and seek to act it out in the playground. In fact teachers report pupils have already started to do just that.
I’m ambivalent about this. When I was at primary school, my mates and I faithfully copied cowboy and gangster shoot-outs from the movies .We’d stick our toy Colt revolvers into each other’s backs or temples and pull the trigger.The executed one would fall realistically to the ground, bucking and writhing in fake death throes.
Did this turn us into dead-eyed, violence-insensitive zombies? Of course not.And the overheated debate about Squid Game has considerable precedent. Remember “video nasties”? Or decades earlier, kids slipping into cinemas to illicitly watch X-rated adult horror movies?
I recall a teatime TV favourite from my childhood where one of the two central characters was routinely butchered and decapitated by the other.
The programme? Tom And Jerry. Never did me any harm.