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musicandchips
Thoughts from 30-Something London
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Monday, October 06, 2003 :::
Russian Roulette Revelations
Last night the psychological illusionist Derren Brown played a game of Russion Roulette live on British television. During the hour-long show he whittled the 12,000 people who applied for the position of gun-loader and sole witness down to one fella, the one he felt he was most able to 'read'. This chap, James, then loaded a live round into one chamber of a .357 Magnum, sat behind a bullet-proof glass shield and counted slowly from 1 to 6 (corresponding to the six chambers of the gun). From this count Derren deduced which chamber the bullet was in, put the gun to his head and started clicking. On reaching the chamber in which he believed the bullet to be he fired the weapon into a sandbag (actually he'd already fired once at the sandbag on an empty chamber, purely to raise the tension). Of course the press, police, politicians and charity groups are all going potty. He's accused of being irresponsible, of trivialising gun crime, of glamourising suicide with a cheap, dangerous and sick stunt.
Personally I couldn't disagree more. Anyone stupid enough to 'try this at home' would probably have ended up with a Darwin Award at some point anyway, and if someone is tentatively suicidal I doubt that a TV show would push them over the edge. I actually found the programme rivetting. I'm a huge fan of Derren Brown anyway, some of the things he's able to do are quite frankly breathtaking, and despite knowing that there was no imaginable way he would shoot himself in the head he held the drama and tension during the final performance on a knife edge. I will concede that friends and relatives of those who have taken their own lives in the past would have found the show distasteful in the extreme, but then why watch it? There were disclaimers and warnings throughout the programme that warned explicitly of it's content. Similarly I think it highly odd that a show so clearly broadcasting the extreme danger that guns pose (indeed the entire drama of the climax is reliant on this basic premise for it's edge-of-your-seat tenseness) should come in for such criticism, when kids TV is littered with cartoons of people and robots shooting at each other, when Hollywood movies are, in the main, orgiastic visual extravaganzas dedicated solely to the purpose of demonstrating the superiority (moral and physical) of the gun-wielder, when prime-time soap characters are regularly shot only to reappear later (thereby enforcing the view that firearms are typically non-lethal). Indeed one has only to look at the current state of the world to see why young people might be tempted to view guns as a legitimate means to conflict resolution; Israel bombing Syrian territory without discussion, America and Britain using force over diplomacy in Iraq and Afghanistan, North Korea developing a nuclear weapons programme as a deterrent; the list goes on.
On a lighter note (literally and metaphorically!) I came across this today and have seen nirvana! I'm not a major fan of junk food, but in just over a week's time I'll have all the information I need to permit the occasional indulgence in a guilt-free manner! I can't wait!! Hurrah for Andy Goff!
The Darkness album is back on again I'm afraid, it's just too good!
::: posted by Andy at 10/06/2003 06:19:00 PM
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