On some violence up here

I am on an airplane (again and alas. I do not like traveling though I travel). I am trying to maintain some semblance of my dignity though I why I am worrying about this status interests me, I am sitting in first class and that should be enough, I would like to think. I have carried on board my two volumes of reading materials: weighty tomes worthy of any self-proclaimed, would-be scholar. I’ve got my reading journal in which I would put my erudite thoughts with my blue-ink fountain pen (as opposed to my black ink fountain pen or my too fancy ball point).
     But it is for me hard to focus on the airplane because around me are very active screens on which films and tv shows are displayed and I am forever distracted. For example, on the screen one row ahead and to my right the gentleman is watching a film entitled The Hitman’s Bodyguard starring Samuel Jackson and Ryan Reynolds. He began watching before we even began taxiing and the film continues now through take off and meal service. And every time I lift my head and cast my glance over to his screen it explodes with incredibly violent images: the film began miles sago with a shootout in which I swear twenty or fifty people were killed.  I think that the plot line is I merely a ploy to sustain scenes of violence and bloodshed to be accompanied by flowing rivers of blood flow and cavernous images of at least twelve wounds a-gaping. It doesn’t seem to matter what happens as long as it is accompanied by shootings, bombings and mass carnage.
     Perhaps the action serves as a substitute for the mundane lives viewers think they live. Thoreau says our lives are not as mean as we think, but I think that these scenes of violence serve to exacerbate a dechromatization of our lives and make them seem even more dull. Full disclosure: I have seen all seasons of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Boardwalk Empire.  I know the joys of screen violence. I did use the violence to leave my life behind. I remember Thoreau declaring that at times he felt like consuming raw squirrel with his bare teeth. I do not think he indulged this fantasy, but it perhaps permitted him to exorcise some demons.
     These images do distract me from having to think very hard; indeed, to think at all.

Perhaps these films waste the energies of us so that we don’t have to manifest them in the public sphere where action would be certainly welcome. Like the spectacle of sports in large stadiums and on the television screens, violence in the movies takes people out of the public sphere and leaves them deposited where they remain will remain out of the way and thus, out of harm’s way. (I look up: another shooting and twenty people dead, though not Ryan Reynolds nor Samuel Jackson!!On the screen in the seat next to me Charlize Theron is beating up on two or three well-armed men. I think they don’t stand a chance!) I would imagine also that these films take one’s mind off the fact that we are eight miles high and a long way to touch down, though I recognize that these films are prevalent on the ground as well. In the theaters, I suppose these films distract us from the brutality prevalent every where else but very evident in the reports of the daily newspapers. No matter when I look, up here someone is getting blown up, and there is still fifty minutes to touch down.