Someone I once knew told me that if you want to know where Fascism began you should look at the Colosseum in Rome. A place where men and women were slaughtered, where Cicero said he felt sick at the sight of the murder of fifty elephants in one day and a place where the things that happened were glorified by the people and called ‘games’.
Quite opposite to the Greeks who structured the plays in their amphitheaters with such rigid rules that is was an innovation to go from one actor to two and then to three. And we can be assured that the Aztec ritual of cutting their enemy prisoners to pieces so their blood flowed on an altar had not just a religious significance to those watching.
It is because we know of the fascination of watching death that many thinkers see television action films as no more than the Colosseum in a new guise. The modern equivalent of an arena where one can imagine one sees more blood than there actually is and, interestingly, see very little that is new from the Roman days who imported every animal and invented every cruelty to audiences who were eating and drinking.
I am sure as we watch these films we don’t think about our natures and what these films are tapping into just as I am sure we don’t think of ourselves an inherently cruel or fascist for doing so.
If everyone lives it can’t be wrong can it?