Monday, April 8, 2013

#Redbox52: The problem with feelings

Ahhh! Happy Monday! I hope that everyone's week is going well. Normally, Monday is my day off, but now that we have a couple people that have moved on to new television stations (one to Fort Myers, the other to Orlando - gonna miss 'em so much!) things have gotten a bit shaken up. Not to worry though, I'm working better than ever and happier in the past few weeks than I've been in a long time.

So, onto this week's #Redbox52, Killing The Softly:


First thoughts: good movie - a taaaad bit violent, but since I don't mind violence, it's alright by me. I can definitely say the best thing about this movie is the intentional use of news footage from the financial crisis of 2008 - it was literally brilliant

Or maybe I'm so used to movies just doing their own thing that when I see something done well, it just blows me away.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to watch. The clips that were used were always placed against a scene that directly related to what was being said, I love that.

There was a lot of interesting dialogue in the movie and for some people that was a setback, but there were a few interactions that really got me going, one in particular was between Driver (Richard Jenkins) who works with the mafia as a middle man of sorts and Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) who is a hitman.

They're discussing a hit that needs to be made and Cogan goes into why he doesn't want to hit a particular target and gives a better understanding of the title of the movie.
"I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don't like feelings. Don't want to think about them."
It caught me off guard a bit once I understood what killing someone "softly" actually meant. After thinking it over, it brought to mind various interactions I had in the past with people on social networks, from Tumblr to Twitter, one of the great things was that you're able to make a connection with people, getting a glimpse into whatever parts of their life they're willing to expose.

The downside, of course, is that depending on what you put out there, you also are opening yourself up to a lot of criticism. In fact, I would go off on a limb and say that most interactions online whether it's commentary on a show or on an event happening in someone's life, what a celebrity is wearing or something happening in the news, since we don't directly know the people we can say whatever we want to, often without feeling any sort of remorse.

As someone who works in the news industry, one of my biggest fears is that one day, I will stop being able to relate to people, that I will eventually get desensitized to it all. Just yesterday I did a story about a 7-year-old who was mauled by 2 pitbull mix breeds that died and another story on a 90-year-old man who was murdered. A former coworker of mine once told me that one of the things that haunts him is the fact that when he would drive around town, the first thing he would remember is the stories he had done.

I drove around town a few weeks ago and realized, I was the same way. On one corner, a homeless person was found dead, on another, a manhunt for a robber that had guns and was taken down by dogs. It breaks my heart a little bit to think about how in just a matter of 1 year, I covered 3 or 4 stories about teenagers dying behind the wheel, far too many memorial services for young people who hadn't even gotten a chance to get to college, to live their lives to what we considered a full extent.

It hurts. On one hand, as a reporter, I don't want to relate, I don't want to have feelings about my stories because God knows they would haunt me...but on the other, to not have some sort of feeling about it all would make me less than a human. I don't know how reporters in the field, covering wars, genocide, sex slavery - it's one thing to do a long form documentary on it, but in news, it's often that you cover something for a day or two and then it's on to the next thing, no follow up, no seeing how things go later in life. It's a hard balance because if we stayed on one thing too long, the sad truth, is that most people wouldn't care...and I think that's probably what hurts the most.

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