Gore No More

I have a low tolerance for gore and violence in the media. I tried out a new show on Monday nights called The Cleaning Lady. It comes on right after 911 Lonestar, a show with Rob Lowe as a fire captain of a Texas firehouse with a quirky crew. Did I mention Rob Lowe? I’ve been crushing on him since his teenaged days in The Outsiders. That man doesn’t age.

The Cleaning Lady is about a woman who witnesses a bloody murder. She gets caught when her phone rings and offers to clean up the mess in the parking garage in exchange for her life. By the time the epsiode was half over, I knew I wouldn’t be watching that show anymore. Too much gore for me.

It’s like Breaking Bad. Everyone raved about it. I made it through epsiode three, where the contents of a bathtub dripped throught the ceiling, remnants of a person acidified. I know it’s only chucky tomato sauce, but still. Gross. My mind can’t handle it.

Game of Thrones? Nope.

Quentin Tarantino films? No. I tried to watch Once Upon a Time in Hollywood but had to turn it off at the end. Ridiculous. Why ruin such a good Brad Pitt film with outrageous swimming pool scenes of gore? To many it’s funny, and the perps get what they deserve. To me, it’s nightmares for a month.

I watched shoot-em-up westerns as a kid on a black and white TV. The bad guys (always in black hats – maybe brown – who knows with black and white TV) got shot off their horses, and that was okay. There were no prolonged dying scenes in full technicolor. I even wrote and performed a play in the basement called Bad Bart, my in-house western. We had the fake silver guns and everything.

I read the Handmaid’s Tale but can’t bring myself to watch it. The DVD came. I held onto it for a month and sent it back. I bought Schindler’s List as a VHS tape back in the day but never took the cellophane wrapper off of it. Just the idea of what would be in that movie kept me from going there. I used to teach The Diary of Anne Frank to Iowa 8th graders and borrowed too many Holocaust films from the AV department, showing piles of hair, shoes or eyeglasses at the concentration camps.

My conspiracy-theory ex will tell you that it was all made up.

But I digress.

I got Disney+ to watch the Beatles documentary and forgot to cancel it. Maybe that’s a good thing. There won’t be much blood and gore on that channel.

For now, I’ll stick with Rob Lowe and 911 Lonestar. Sure, there’s blood and stuff, but it’s Gore Light, which is all I can handle.

I watch the nightly news with the latest school and freeway shootings.

Believe me, that’s bad enough.