Thirty minutes in, they kill someone by hitting him repeatedly in the head with a hammer and then chop him up into pieces before shoving him down an ice fishing hole in a frozen lake. I had to stop.
It made me sick to my stomach. The resulting anxiety raised my blood pressure astronomically. It made me grapple with whether or not I wanted this normally awful human being to get away with something even more terrible, just because he wasn't as bad as the other guy. Well, the latter might actually be an edifying internal conversation, but it was a Friday night. I just wanted something entertaining, as promised, not to weigh moral quandaries as I bit my fingernails.
My reaction to the murder scene is not surprising to me. I had the exact same experience a few years ago when my older brother suggested that I watch the television show Dexter. For those that don't know, it's about a serial killer that kills serial killers. I never made it past the first episode. I couldn't overcome the gruesome bodily harm happening to the people in the show, not even if they were the most terrible, horrible people that ever existed.
One time in college, my boyfriend and I went to the downtown mall in Charlottesville to watch The Last King of Scotland there in their small theater. The end of the movie is pretty gory, and I think my boyfriend may have lost feeling in his hand from the vice grip I had on him.
Even the Hunger Games movie made me nauseous.
I just don't like violence.
Part of it, too, is that I have no stomach for seeing internal body parts/fluids. Last year, I watched one of those doctor shows on Netflix. In this one, most of the characters in the show were surgeons. I liked it, except that every time the surgeons cut into a body and blood appeared, I had to turn away.
Blood in real life is no different. Worse, perhaps. Earlier this year, I got a toenail removed. The doctor showed me a long needle (yikes), and reminded me that it would sting. Trying to be a mature adult, I turned my head while he injected the anesthetic and took deep breaths. I reminded myself that it was a routine procedure, no big deal. But as soon as I they finished, and I turned back to look at the constellation of red on my toe where the doctor had repeatedly stuck said needle, I started feeling dizzy and nauseous and just really bad. Seconds (minutes?) later, I woke up disoriented and pale with doctors swarming around me. "I don't think you should consider medicine as a career choice," a nurse joked. I don't think I'm ever getting a toenail removed again, if i don't have to, I thought.
So, after the ice fishing hole scene in Thin Ice, I'd seen enough to know I wasn't going to like this movie any better by finishing it. I pressed "stop." I told the blu-ray to "eject." I connected my TV to Netflix and watched a sitcom about a guy in his twenties who unexpectedly ends up with a baby on his doorstep (because we don't have enough movie/tv shows with that storyline). The acting's pretty terrible. The characters are ridiculous and the opposite of nuanced. And it was exactly what I was looking for on a Friday night. I may have lost some brain cells, but at least I kept my dinner down.
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