Monday, August 8, 2016

Losing Bobby

It's a sad day, but the #1 post I ever made involved Bobby Peru from David Lynch's movie Wild at Heart is now gone. I took a screen capture of Bobby throttling Peanut (Laura Dern). It was frivolous at the time, the scene had so much character and Bobby is who I consider is the most evil villain in cinema. And that silly screen capture became the single biggest reason anyone ever came to this self-absorbed pity fest. I took it down once before because I didn't think it sent the right message about my blog. Then I put it back up again because I thought it was sort of clever. Then I made a .gif animation of Bobby and that became popular too. I didn't even care that this is blatant copyright infringement.

Well, I spent some time in Guatemala with a television and the violence against women or women with guns, or women being slapped or women being raped or killed or chased was completely out of control. It was actually like a scene from Wild at Heart where every radio station is news about a beheading or some ghastly tragedy and Peanut goes crazy and then Sailor finds a rock station and they dance in the desert. Every channel I turned on involved a woman being slapped or assaulted or else a woman cop dressed in skin tight slacks and 2 inch heels and a huge perm of hair gunning someone down in cold blood. It simply became too much. Maybe I am sensitive again to the insane amount of violence on television and y'all will think this is being prudish. But I saw that the Bobby Peru photo was still getting traffic and I decided the only way to purge it would be to delete the whole post and any post I had of Bobby menacing poor Peanut. I love that movie, and I love Lynch and the characters are not generic and the violence is not frivolous; it is a smart film, violence is not glorified or used gratuitously in it, but I can't leave that photo up anymore. It makes no difference because surely someone copied it off my page and it will be out there beyond my control along with a million other screen captures, or someone could recreate it in about two minutes, but I renounce it. I renounce the casual use of violence on television. I boycott all commercial advertisers who encourage such filth. I do not think they should be censored; I believe they should only broadcast movies about beauty and animals. They should choose life. Does violence on television cause violence in real life? Yes, the violence on television IS violence against the viewer but mankind loves to experiment with himself. The rage and distress the viewer feels is violence. Sometimes we want that, but we are now being overdosed. Does that rage and distress translate to acts of violence against people who didn't even watch the television? How can it not? Yes, victims tend to attack others, even those who are not the source of the attack. It's a chain reaction.

Does it matter to my blog? No. It's only a minor detail that I share with you as part of my due diligence. I deleted some other posts that I decided were in bad taste or else the topic was too tasteless to promote. Goodnight, Bobby Peru. You blew your head off after the bank robbery went bad, but that doesn't mean I will worship your evil here. Rot in hell you repulsive monster. I love you, Peanut.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.