| Author | Message | ||
     Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.56 |
I was chatting with a paramedic at Old Trafford yesterday in the first aid room and he came out with a phrase that has stuck in my head all day. I'm going to have to use it in a story - although in a fiction it won't have the same impact as it had last night as he was telling us a true story. Apparently they'd been bothered a few nights running by a girl who was faking suicide attempts in order to get some attention. On her last release from hospital she had formed a suicide pact with another guy she met in the mental ward. What she didn't expect was that when he jumped off the top of the car park was that he'd grab her and drag her with him as he fell. The paramedic I was talking to was at the ground level when this happened. the phrase he used which has bothered me since is (and the quotes are real - this is word for word) "she hit the deck and her head popped open and her brain slid across the road like a snail." The worst thing about this was he was telling this as a funny story... | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.181.12.102 |
I got told of a suicide many years back by a friend, again as a "funny story" - a guy at BT threw himself off the top of a building one morning, landing in the car park - guy who saw it was most amused that "he hit the ground and bounced back up a bit. Burst when he hit the second time though". | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 80.47.50.55 |
I had to go on a training course with the fire brigade once. They showed us a video of what was left of someone's head when they jumped from a tall building. Needless to say I used what I saw in a story. | ||
| Paul_finch (Paul_finch) Username: Paul_finch Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 195.93.21.74 |
Sadly, I can top the OP's original anecdote with plenty from my police days. It's not meant to be callous or unsympathetic. It's a form of defence against the stress that can result from experiencing such things day in and day out. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.4.248.133 |
I cannot imagine witnessing a more horrible event than someone falling from a distance - joking about it in any way, actually appalls me, though I distantly understand the need to somehow "process" it - I don't know how I'd process seeing something like that, and I imagine I'd need years of therapy to get over it. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 82.38.75.85 |
I'd be the same as you, Craig. But I can understand that if, as a paramedic, police or fire officer you're seeing this kind of thing regularly, you would need to form some kind of "defence" to it - and laughing about it is probably one of the best forms of defence. It seems callous to people like us who don't have to deal with those kinds of scenes regularly, but I can understand why they do it. I certainly couldn't cope with having to deal with incidents like that regularly like those guys do. | ||
| Steve Bacon (Stevebacon) Username: Stevebacon Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 90.210.209.184 |
I think most jobs involve some form of behaviour that the public might frown upon, if they were aware of them. Weber's horror about the paramdedic's dialogue is based on the authenticity of the detail. For me, when a piece of horror fiction works, it's because of the level of verisimilitude that the writer has included. It's difficult to fake. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 82.38.75.85 |
>>I think most jobs involve some form of behaviour that the public might frown upon<< Mine doesn't, Steve - the work of a management academic and educator is beyond reproach.  | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.193.5 |
Caroline, that's gruesome! It reminds me of the quote from Kipling's 'The Phantom Rickshaw' (used by Fritz Leiber as the epigraph to his great story): "There was a crack in his head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death." | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.193.5 |
Um, Weber, I meant. Sorry Caroline! | ||
| Alexicon (Alexicon) Username: Alexicon Registered: 10-2009 Posted From: 88.106.98.193 |
Caroline says: '...the work of a management academic and educator is beyond belief.' Absolutely. | ||
| Alexicon (Alexicon) Username: Alexicon Registered: 10-2009 Posted From: 88.106.98.193 |
Oops - misread your original post,Caroline. You actually said...'beyond reproach.' Apologies. Confused (as ever). lol | ||
| Alexicon (Alexicon) Username: Alexicon Registered: 10-2009 Posted From: 88.106.98.193 |
Remember the A/V clip of the South Vietnamese army officer blowing the insurgent's brains out with his pistol? Or the Al Qaeda hostage beheadings? IMO When you've seen footage like that, and/or witnessed similar events in real life,incorporating it into fiction doesn't seem to work. By definition,it's a pale and hollow reflection of the reality that you experienced. BTW,I wonder if the paramedic Weber describes would have been quite so flip if the falling girl had been a relative? | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.14.249 |
I have assiduously avoided all such videos, of beheadings, murders, etc. I admit to being curious about them - I have a desire to see, yes, maybe it's primal, or animal - but I know the psychic cost will be too great, and so I've avoided all such footage. I prefer my gore non-CGI, plenty bloody and gory and brainy and revolting, but thoroughly unreal. Watching the turtles and pigs being killed in CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE (I think that was the title...?) was horrific, and an image I'd rather not have in my head as it is. Anyone who complains, btw, about movies? About the violence in scripted movies, about the "depravity" and such - movies like NATURAL BORN KILLERS and others? You all know the outcries. Well, I don't care what the movie is, real life is SOOOOOO MUCH WORSE, at all times through history. There are people on death row in America, or that are serving life in prison, that no one's ever heard of - just your average, everyday, non-celeb/headlines/news-stories convicts - who have committed acts of murder so utterly heinous and bizarre and terrible and beyond almost imagination, that to run down the rolls of them would stagger one to utter disgust, and make one plug one's ears against it all... and that would be just a snapshot in time, just the now, the present darkness... the world is a rotten, stinking, ugly, miserably evil pit of inhuman wretchedness, so much of the time, and so so far from our thoroughly sanitized senses.... And have I even touched upon the horrible unintended things that happen to people? car accidents, plane crashes, etc.?... No, the world is unrelentingly cruel, miserable, and often, utterly pointless. Happy Holidays!  | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
I've said this before, but we're so used to seeing faked violence and death onscreen that when you see the real thing it actually looks fake. It's an odd and dehumanizing experience. | ||
| Paul_finch (Paul_finch) Username: Paul_finch Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 195.93.21.74 |
The sickening reality of regularly witnessing the reailty of death, violence, crime and its aftermath, etc, at first hand, is that you have to make it into something routine. That's the only way you deal with it. Someone asked if the paramedic would have laughed if the victim had been his own relative. I can assure you from personal experience that when you're called on to face these appalling situations, the very first thing that goes through your head is "thank God it wasn't my child, thank God it wasn't my wife" etc. You are in no way immune to the personal tragedy, but you have to press it down to a place where it stops hurting you. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.21.232.241 |
Over here an animal rights group called GAIA filmed what happens in a regular slaughterhouse. Snippets of it were shown in the evening news. Appalling beyond description, especially the cries of pain and the look of utter dread and horror in the animals' eyes. A cow is basically put in a iron cage so it cannot move and then attacked from all sides with knives. You could see the poor thing knew what was happening as it was being cut to pieces. Unpleasant watching. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.0.107.17 |
I have assiduously avoided all such videos, of beheadings, murders, etc. I admit to being curious about them - I have a desire to see, yes, maybe it's primal, or animal - but I know the psychic cost will be too great, and so I've avoided all such footage. I prefer my gore non-CGI, plenty bloody and gory and brainy and revolting, but thoroughly unreal. You've articulated my own thoughts exactly, Craig. I can't understand at all the mentality of people who routinely email or text such real life imagery thinking it is somehow cool or worse yet "funny". Likewise, I'm the type of guy who will go out of my way to avoid looking at car crashes because of what I might see and have imprinted on my brain. And as for slaughterhouses - don't get me started! We really are a weird race of beings. | ||
| Paul_finch (Paul_finch) Username: Paul_finch Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 195.93.21.74 |
Those who enjoy watching real-life death and torture are oddballs, in my opinion. And I make no apology for passing this value judgement. I can understand the sort of curiosity that drew vast crowds to public executions, but those who go out of their way to watch another creature suffering purely because it gives them pleasure are only one step away from being serial killers themselves. Of course, this doesn't mean that we horror writers are totally blameless - not everyone, it seems, understands the difference between reality and fantasy. I remember an excellent interview with Alice Cooper, in which he described going ballistic at two fans, who stopped him outside a concert hall and presented him with the gift of a cat which they'd captured, mutilated and killed. At first he was outraged that they'd taken his horror pantomime so seriously, but then he began to question his own role in the atrocity, and was forced to ponder that the mentally challenged might simply not get it. For a time, he apparently almost gave up the gory theatricals, though personally I'm glad he didn't - the majority of his fans totally understood that it was nothing more than lurid melodrama, and why should they suffer because one or two pillocks didn't? I also remember contributing to the Brit horror mag NASTY PIECE OF WORK back in the 1990s. That mag frequently took the 'horror' label to its extreme, but scandal began to brew when rumours got out among fans that some of those writing complimentary letters to the mag were imprisoned sex offender. Worrying stuff, eh? | ||
| Alexicon (Alexicon) Username: Alexicon Registered: 10-2009 Posted From: 88.106.82.173 |
Unfortunately,(perhaps with others on this board) I've seen more than my fair share of terrible 'on scene' fatal incidents - mainly involving unrelenting heavy plant and machinery. Fatal traffic accidents too. Although not a member of the emergency services,my first basic human instinct is to get in quickly and try to provide some aid,comfort,relief to those involved,sometimes ignoring the threat to one's own safety. I'd like to think that we would all act in the same way,but it seems too much to hope for: I well remember a couple of fatal traffic accidents unfolding in front of me,and,incredibly,rubber-necking bastards were just cruising past through the wreckage,unwilling to 'get involved'. I never glibly talk about the horrific details of these events; it somehow seems to breach some private moral code within. Those memories simply enter the mind's maw and become part of the psychological cement-mixer,churning over and blending with the rest of life's experiences (good and bad) until they become part of what you 'are'. Only then,IMHO, are you qualified to incorporate them -in a completely unrecognisable form -into a work of fiction. Am I making sense? | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.56 |
Completely. You have to remember that I'm on record here several times saying that there are no boundaries to what you can make jokes about, but this shocked me. He actually said that he laughed when he saw it. I know that to do that kind of job you need a certain level of healthy cynicism but to start finding it laugh out loud funny may be crossing a boundary. | ||
| Alexicon (Alexicon) Username: Alexicon Registered: 10-2009 Posted From: 88.106.82.173 |
There ARE no boundaries to what you can make horrific jokes about - as long as the context is either hypothetical or fictional. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.4.232.3 |
There are boundaries to joking - there are jokes you can tell, that will land you in trouble, or get you horrified looks, etc., almost no matter what the context. google-Image the artist Ivan Brunetti - he's known for doing oh-so-cute covers for The New Yorker - he's also done comics like that, oh yeah, the ones that come up in google that make your eyes go googly. A friend sent me a book of such comics... I keep it in a locked trunk, for fear of it being discovered by authorities... there are simply no acceptable contexts for these "jokes".... |