Blasted

Blasted is just about a middle-aged tabloid journalist who appears to be dying and invites his unsuspecting backward young girl friend into his hotel room. Reassuring her that he just inevitably a little comfort during his final hours. He rapes, humiliate and ridicule her before an armed soldier suddenly bursts in and wreaks appalling havoc, turning the scene into a European country battlefield. Who tells him about the way in which his girlfriend was raped and killed by soldiers – asking is that news. The soldier then rapes Ian. This is only half of the play.
Blasted did not blast me out of my seat; it was not in-your-face-theatre to me. It made me laugh, like when Ian stripped down and you saw his penis. LOL. In the last few years the line between fiction and reality has become blurred. Stories such as the one about rape, murder and war are not as unique as one would imagine. We tend to forget that when things are reported on the news, they really are real. Some writer didn’t hawk the story idea to a producer in the hopes of getting a multi-million dollar contract to film a summer film blockbuster. Real people got hurt or killed and families suffered.
I’m not a bad person, with a sick thought; I just think that we, people in my generation have been so desensitized to violence. We can watch people with bullet holes in them lying on the ground on Cops, or watch motorcycle crash victims get their brains operated on in emergency rooms on the Discovery Channel. Blood and gore have worked their way into our video games, replacing blue hedgehogs and Italian plumbers with fighters ripping the spinal cords out of their foes. This makes me wonder if the damage we have done to our perceptions irreversible? Maybe bringing the reality into our homes to see firsthand seems to be the best cure.
It is neither a suggestion nor a solution, though. As I would never wish that upon anyone.
-Mitchelle Ray Peterson, UCBerkeley