HBO is redy to push the envelope again, this time with extreme violence. The 13-part mini-series starts tonight:
Epitafios is as gripping as its murders are ghastly, a spiraling reverberant circle of horrors that keeps widening as the bodies pile up (more than two dozen killings by the time the series ends) and the killer's motives become clear, if perverse. The film breaks rules in somewhat the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho": Hardly anyone in the cast seems safe from extinction and could become the killer's next conquest at any moment. In tonight's premiere, a character who seems he'll be one of the principal good guys is chewed to death by pit bulls.
Does such entertainment encourage killing in our culture? I suspect it's like most influences: it's one influence among many. The people who dismiss violence on TV ("Hey, dude, it's not like you watch a serial killer show and then go out and become a serial killer") are being disingenuous (or just stupid). No one claims that. The question is, does such entertainment lower the moral quality of its viewers? If the answer is "yes," then it follows that its viewers are more likely to do unbecoming things, which might lead--in extreme and particularly twisted individuals who have many other problems--to serial killing. If the answer is "no," then it won't.
But here's the real rub: Nothing is wholly neutral. Everything--every action, every thought, every sight--has a small moral effect, either for good or bad (hence the prescience of St. Therese of Lisieux's Little Way). Granted, thousands of these effects hit us every day and most of them are momentary and the effects miniscule, but they do affect us. The only question is whether each of them affects us for better or worse.
How do you think Epitafios will affect its viewers for an hour every week for thirteen weeks?
