Come for the food. Stay because you are being interrogated.
February 14, 2022: The ‘soft opening’ of a Michelin star restaurant. Six individuals personally invited by the head chef. It was a classy affair… until the lights went out and a bloody steak knife appeared on the vegan’s table.
My small group spent our regularly scheduled time having a murder mystery party. We were all given characters ahead of time, so we all dressed up and put on the persona of our characters. There was a script and a story for us to follow. Everyone had “innocent” and “guilty” lines to read depending on their role in the story. The “murderer” was selected at random upon our arrival; the host/narrator handed out regular playing cards numbered ace through six. Number six was the murderer… and not even the narrator knew who it was. We had so much fun!
After I got home, a strange thought came to mind: Why are we okay with making enjoyment out of murder?
I realize that it’s not the murder itself that we’re fascinated with… We all love a good ‘whodunit.’ We love the mystery of putting the puzzle pieces together to form a complete picture. However, the nature of the most successful ‘whodunit’s’ tend to be murders. We have dozens of books, movies, and TV series based around solving murders. Since the 1980s, there have been several hundred crime/drama TV shows in the USA alone (BerlinDancer, n.d.). Our culture has been sucked into a fascination with murder and subsequently all the gore that is usually depicted with it.
We can become desensitized to many things: gore, violence, immodesty, song lyrics, etc. A little bit here and there, and the initial shock wears off. Without that inner moral compass working, we stop recognizing what should shock us. It’s a slippery slope, and we often find ourselves too far gone to recover.
Do you flinch and find yourself appalled at on-screen murder? Why not?
On what else may you have compromised? Where do you find yourself on the slippery slope?
Don’t get me wrong. I love a good mystery…
… and Jazzy Knight didn’t escape justice.
Works Cited
BerlinDancer. (n.d.). The top 200 crime, police, and detective shows. Retrieved from IMDb: https://m.imdb.com/list/ls061126041/?fbclid=IwAR2bgRQzoFFdyc58XXMKzAL7oizmMi6TyA2q0MKSOPUH7x-KgyNx8pzXo94
Life in a Stillshot 
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