W. Doug Bolden

The IGBOR Effect

In the newest issue of Entertainment Weekly, I read an article by Stephen King asking questions about the movie United 93. A lot of critics, he mentions, have stated such things as "I am not sure if we are ready?" or "Be careful when you see this!". He expresses anger, saying that the critics are trying to baby us. He likens it to the American government trying to keep war images from our eyes and to prevent pictures of dead or injured troops from being used by the news.

Now, one could argue that the idea behind the government's withholding of certain visuals has little to do with really wanting to protect the American people, and a whole lot to do with disruption of information or at least keeping propaganda positive. Still, his point does seem valid.

Only, I think it is somewhat wrong. I do not think that the press are taking it upon themselves to parent us, no more than they usually do. I think our society is just becoming extremely unable to handle the notion of things going awry. I cannot think of a super great term for it, and alas no Latin phrases come to mind, so I will just call it the IGBOR ("It's Going to Be Okay, Right?") Effect. It might also be called pussyfooting. It probably should be called "Look away from the elephant" syndrome. The main question is whether or not its a good thing.

One of my first real experiences with IGBOR, at least the first one I paid attention to, came when I was up at college. In one of the computer lounges, I was playing the moderately violent, if fantastical and unrealistic, first-person shooter Blood. There was nothing quite so satisfying as setting undead cultists on fire with my flare gun and watching them burn. It STILL makes me chuckle.

While playing it, a fellow college student called me out on it. She mentioned that she did not like violent videogames. She had watched a man die. In fact, she worded it much as "Have you ever watched a man die?" and more implied that she had rather than stated it outloud (she had, by the way, it was a hit and run case that happened my first year at UAH). The answer to this question is that I had watched a man die in an emergency room. I have had the unfortune to see a few violent acts in my life. Her implication, of course, is that because she had witnessed this violence, she could no longer accept it in a videogame. The videogame "mocked" her suffering as a witness. It brought up bad memories.

I know, fairly well, at least two rape victims. I know at least a couple of people whose mothers have died while they were kind of young, or who have lost family members to cancer. I know people, including myself, who have lost friends to violent crimes or to the war effort. Unpleasant things happen to us all the time. This is an universal fact of humanity. I do not think anyone, besides the extreme optimist, would argue this fact very much. If we live, will suffer on occasion, or we will be the luckiest people on the face of the earth.

Where does this suffering fit in media? Should it be used as a tool for knee jerk reactions? Should it be a a balm? Should it copy life to the most minute, and tragic, details? Should it gloss over them? Should it glorify them? Should it desensitize us? Should it make us more aware of them?

IGBOR speaks quite loudly. You take a movie that deals with really unpleasant things, and chances are it is either melodramatic or near comedic with excess. I think movies like Hostel exist we because occasionally want those outlets but a more realistic protrayal of Americans being cut to pieces in an Eastern European death house would have been too much. As it is, its an orgy of violence that we can barely accept because it just seems ludicrous. Think, also, of South Park. It often faces the unpleasantries of life, but does it as a joke. Think of Lifetime, that channel that brags about being "TV for women". They commonly deal with issues such as pre-teen pregnancy and rape and incest through the devices of extremely over the top performances.

Think about it, IGBOR has been there for years. All those old epics, those old fairy tales, those old fireside stories; they are all violent and filled with death. But they are filled with death in an over the top way. In Shakespeare, deaths were either off stage or were the results of over the top sword fights. Death was a literary device, and rarely all that real.

When we grieve, we do not throw a chair against the door to dramatic music, we sit there in the half dark and we let the tears flow. We cry in the shower. We might cut ourselves, or even take half a bottle of sleeping pills because we have no idea what to do. But none of this is as over the top as these TV movies want us to believe. Grief is largely a private thing. Anger, too, is largely private. All these emotions erupting out of the bad parts of life tend to send us deeper inside of ourselves. And I don't think we like going there. So we have these melodramatic, unfunny comedies of terror where we can see a farce of real suffering and we can quickly put our fears and terrors upon the effigy of humanity expressed by the characters and IGBOR is alive and well. No problems.

This is where movies like Requiem for a Dream, Deliverance, Cannibal Holocaust or Irreversible get us. These movies have their own descent into melodrama, I admit, but something about the way they approach suffereing is different. We are not able to make it into a comical, obviously fake experience. Cannibal Holocaust was shot so realistically that the film makers had to bring the actors who played the students out to show that they had not actually been brutally slaughtered. It is also the first movie in years to give me nightmares and keep me up at night. Requiem for a Dream is the only other movie that I would say is more haunting. In movies, even tragic movies, we have moral lessons and we have bad guys and good guys and we have hope and we have conflict that can be resolved. This is what allows them to work and keeps IGBOR in place. Doing the right thing works. Being the good guy works. In Requiem for a Dream, all we had was human stupidity and suffering. We are shown that the characters are human, much like a magician showing no strings attached to his trick, and then we sit through an hour and a half of the worst possible lives they could possibly lead. Yes, they are arguably bad guys and the movie has an arguably moral outcome, but we are tricked to look beyond and to accept that as people. We find ourselves more aware of their pain than their mistakes. It is beautifully done. I still get nervous and teary-eyed thinking about it.

IGBOR is there for me, as well.

But, didn't 9/11 have something of a moral lesson and have sides that we can attribute to "good guy" and "bad guy"? Yes, at least sort of. I don't think that is the complete point, here, though. It is one of the rules of the IGBOR Effect that we are less comfortable dealing with the "heavy" issues that we have somehow been involved in. Like the girl lecturing me in the lounge, implying that if I had known death I would not be able to handle the game. It was a dumb assumption on her part, but understandable. And, in the case of 9/11, it happened to all of us Americans. It was a giant wake up call to how vunerable we are. It was a wake up call to how fragile we might be. It was blood on our own land. It was a giant getting hit by a much smaller, much weaker enemy. In some ways, it was a minor blow (even the hit on the Pentagon did not cripple us), but it forced us to realize that no, everything is not going to be okay. Not always. Alright?

This is why critics are quick to point out that we might not can take it. 9/11 was more than the death of thousands of people and the crashing of planes. It was demonstration of mortality of our very country and life style. Those people knew what sort of military threat we were. Yet, they still attacked. I know one of the first things that happened was a quick campaign to silence anyone that said things like "At least the terrorists were brave." with a comeback like "No, they were cowardly, bastards!" which was largely nonsense. But it reinforced the idea that we were ultimately ok, but some craven cowards had gummed up the works.

Five years down the road, it seems that most of us would rather forget that it was a handful of guys who believed that doing this would protect their way of life. We are still somewhat in drift, a nation in limbo who kind of just wants things to go back to the way they were. We have this big hole in our national history, and we are not quite sure what it will take to fill it.

I don't think the press is trying to protect us, to parent us. I think they are just like the rest of us. They want everything to be ultimately ok in a way that it is not. Their warnings and misgivings are their own insecurities showing up. They were not comfortable with it, and so they inform others in a blanket statement that they will not be comfortable with it. And frankly, those others are not going to be comfortable with it. But the deed has already been done. The "ok" has already went out the backdoor. It is now a matter of moving past it.

I think America really needs to let go a little of IGBOR, before we come completely removed from reality.