Disney is working hard to make hardcore violence palatable for childen

I can recall every detail of the day I watched my first R-rated film with an unparalleled clarity. It was summer, and I was eight. Outside was windy and unpleasant as the fine Colorado dust was being blown fiercely by the harsh June wind. My brother and I were spending the weekend with my father, who was still in the early stages of a separation and struggling to find a way to keep his two utterly bored kids from killing and eating him. But there was no fun to be had on this blustery day, and there isn’t a god damn thing to watch on network TV on a Saturday afternoon.  In an act of sheer desperation and somewhat questionable parenting, my father sat us down and introduced us to the greatest American cinematic achievement, known otherwise as RoboCop.

Up until this point, violence, cursing, and partial-frontal nudity were all foreign concepts to me. Hell, they weren’t even concepts, I had no idea any of those things existed or were so awesome. Fucking especially the cursing.  As much as I thoroughly enjoyed the grotesque nature of it all, I was equally shaken and impacted by the visceral imagery. How I made it past Officer Murphy literally getting blown to bits by a ruthless gang led by Foreman’s Dad, I’ll never know.  But I knew well enough, then and there, that I had seen human nature at its ugliest, and guns and bullets and homicide were serious matters.  On that gusty, inclement Saturday, I learned to enjoy violence and also respect it. And the law. And robots.

Now, I find myself wondering if recognizing the time and place is being overlooked in favor for wider viewership.  Disney, makers of fuzzy sunshine and sympathizers to lawless pirates, decided not too long ago they wanted a slice of the savagery pie.  Traditionally, vehemence has occurred in Disney cinema to serve harsh but crucial life-lessons, like your mom may be hunted and shot in front of you or some awful things may happen to your toys once you forsake them.  Do you have any clue what happened to your toys when you started to ignore them?  Horrible things.  Watch Toy Story 3….don’t, actually….do.  Do watch it, but prepare yourself.

I find myself in this state of distress because I just recently subjected myself to Tron Legacy.  Yeah, all of it.  And look, it was bad, sure.  It did exceed my expectations only slightly, however.  Hell, it wasn’t even the worst movie I’d seen this week (that distinguishment belongs to the 20 minutes of Red that I trudged through).  It’s redeeming qualities are as follows; great visuals, superb score by Daft Punk, Olivia Wilde and her fine self.  The other 135 minutes are something of an incomprehensible mess, due largely in part to the overwhelming body count.  Before I knew it, characters were being cut in half, dismembered, decapitated, impaled, shot, and vehicularly manslaughtered.  Walt Disney himself must still be rolling in his Neo Nazi regalia’d  cryogenic chamber. I know I would be.

Of course, these people are not idiots.  The good folks Of Disney Studios know you can’t just slap a PG rating on indescribable gore.  But if you find loopholes like, say, killing “programs” instead of people. Yes, every entity in the realm of Tron is a mere computer program, meaning no actual blood or attachment. Every program, at the point of “termination” simply crumbles into thousands of little blue cubes.  Finito!  They even had the gall to cut off Olivia Wilde’s arm, making sure to linger on her non-bleeding wound long enough to show the kiddies’ “See! It’s fine! Everthings okay, no blood! Don’t freak out!”

But nothing compared to the films’ climax, in which the good guys are escaping from the bad guys yadda yadda they’re in little airplanes yadda yadda the good guys have a turret gun on theirs.  While staving off their attackers, the character on the turret gun spends a few minutes firing aimlessly and eventually  lands a shot directly on one his attackers…directly on his brain.  No exaggerations. He literally blew a hole right through that guys’ head.  In the theme of good taste, they held the shot long enough for you to say “the definitely just blew a hole through that guys’ fucking head” six or seven times. PG rating, mind you.

I was still aghast as the credits rolled.  What I had just seen was a solid two and half hours of unidentifiable, unrelatable beings get slaughtered in the most moronically stylish ways possible.  And while it was produced specifically not to make the violence resonate any longer than a few seconds, I was deeply perturbed BECAUSE of my familiarity with violence and not in spite of it.  Jesus, they blew a guys face off.  Know how many people lost their face in RoboCop? Exactly zero.

Look, I get it.  Disney is big business, so is blood and guts.  This is a country that loves its violence so long as it’s not terribly realistic, not against women, not against old people or young children, and not extremely messy, thanks.  A violent but approachable oeuvre like Tron Legacy serves only to soften the blow of unspeakably gruesome actions and leads us to forget the causatum of murder.  What’s more is Disney studios has bought the rights to the Seal Team Six capture and assassination of Osama Bin Laden.  How they plan on presenting every caustic emotion and consequence of such an event, I have no idea.  So, if anyone out there has any ideas of how to recreate Bin Laden being shot in the head in a gentle, stylized, PG-friendly manner, Disney would probably love to have you on board.