19 February 2008
I’m watching Titus in a classroom with a group of nearly sixty students. It is horrifically violent. We’re halfway through and the worst violence is still to come.
When Lavinia, daughter to Titus, shows her father the bloody stumps where her hands once were, the group of boys sitting around me laughed out loud.
There is nothing, nothing funny about that scene.
Sometimes people laugh when they are nervous, uncomfortable, or embarrassed. Do you remember laughing when your friends got hurt skateboarding…I remember laughing when Jake made a really bad landing on his skateboard and was really cut up…of course, I am much more mature now and wouldn’t laugh at the stumps of Lavinia, but maybe 15 years ago I would have…especially if the gruesomeness of an extremely violent and serious film has pushed me past insensitivity. That was a run-on sentence.
— Tadd · Feb 22, 12:27 AM · #