(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[Easter Crime] In the essay "Defense for crime novels" Sigurd Hoel argues that it is health-giving to be exposed to murder. In literature, well to note, since those there act as "surrogate murder". Murder in the imagination reduces the need to kill properly.
It should have been an excessively radical stance in 1946, taking into account the violence orgy in the years ahead. Sigurd Evensmo thought that was it. He wrote several times about the Hoel essay, always ambivalent, but over the years increasingly dismissive of the hypothesis that fantasy violence can act as a purification process. In 1964 he wrote the petition "Murder at Easter", which opened with the question: "While the impressions are fresh, I allow myself to ask how many murders you committed at Easter [...] Did you like to murder women, and then for example by suffocation with stocking? If so: The victim completely naked or with some refined, black little things here and there? Was it important to murder many, or did you prefer the one but absolute perfect murder? ”
Hoel and Evensmo. Two radicals with diametrically opposed positions: One claimed that crime is healthy, the other unhealthy. Both views feel foreign and, despite their radicalism, are apolitical. The ex-politician Hallgrim Berg does not belong to the same stall as Hoel and Evensmo – not even the same stable – but in the book America's letter he is concerned about the unchristian message the entertainment industry sends out to the world: still people believe. Take the portrayal of family life, crime, promiscuity, drunkenness and substance abuse, and look at many of the points of view on social and political issues that are conveyed in the heaviest films. "
Many objections can be recognized in the objection. The need to blacken the superficial often comes with age. But there is something about contemporary times that counteracts such doomsday exaggerations. NRK is the nicest, we say (and I) and turns on Child TV, while the kids turn off because they have seen the shows before. On the Disney Channel. ("Mickey's Clubhouse" is broadcast on NRK every Monday, on the Disney Channel daily). Today, it is not as easy to convince yourself of the art or the massive influence of entertainment, either with positive or negative signs.
My generation was instilled with deconstructionism, irony and virtual wars in their prime, our pups get it with the infant formula. They do not believe it until they see it, and hardly enough then. In novels, war appears horrific, on TV news they are reminiscent of PC games. Politicians are home-made by the PR agencies. Norwegian celebrities are better actors in the gossip columns than on film. Reality series are more soap than Hotel Cæsar.
Black gall speech, but it illustrates a point: A generation is growing up that views the world as dramatized, thoroughly directed and populated by more or less credible characters and action patterns. For them, it becomes far more difficult to moralize over the immorality in a piece of fiction as long as reality, with or without goosebumps, is as fabricated as it is. They will never (say never!) Decide, as Hallgrim Berg does, to worry about Hollywood's presentation of the United States wars, and not the wars themselves. How wrong. Homicide somehow does not reduce homicide in reality, today's reality reduces the need for homicide. Good reading.
