MURDERING someone is wrong. Killing someone accidentally or in the course of saving your life is not.
I was completely boggled the other day when I had to explain to the Kid that the movie “The Call” (Spoilers ahead) is the story of a murder.
In the movie, a serial killer kidnaps teenage girls with blond hair. (There’s a sad backstory that might make you feel bad for him if things weren’t so creepy and weird.) And the main character, Jordan Turner, played by Halle Berry is a 911 operator that messes up and lets a girl be kidnapped and murdered by him.
Anyways, it’s a while later, she’s dealing with PTSD about that poor girl getting murdered. And another girl gets grabbed by him – though they don’t know he’s the same guy yet.
It’s just a teenage girl heading to her car in a parking garage and a guy grabs her and throws her in his trunk. He takes her cellphone, but she has an extra one confiscated from her friend.
So she’s able to call 911. And with the help of Jordan, Casey Welson (Abigail Breslin) makes some truly courageous attempts at saving her life.
But she still ends up strapped to a table.
She still ends up a bit cut up.
She and Jordan both discover the same creepy murder room and bunch of bloody scalped blond hair.
And Jordan arrives just in time to save her. Like, he’s literally cutting into Casey’s face when Jordan bashes him across the back with a nitrous tank.
He’s knocked sprawling, presumably unconscious.
She runs back to untie Casey and they’re about to make a run for it, then he jumps on her back and they beat the crap out of each other.
She knocks him down and she and Casey run again.
He attacks again, and she stabs him. He can’t move.
Jordan begins to dial 911 – and Casey stops her.
Instead of calling the police and having him arrested, they leave him in his hidden hidey-hole to die.
And the screen blanks out.
They never tell the police they found an underground murder room. They leave tons of forensic evidence showing that they were BOTH down there, not just Casey. They leave all those scalpe wigs with their DNA evidence of the dead girls behind.
The end.
That is murder.
When she hit him to save Casey, she could have grabbed the scalpel off the tray and stabbed him. It would have been self-defense.
When he attacked them the second time, she could have killed him then. It would have been self-defense.
But when Jordan and Casey put him back in the hole to die – that was murder.
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Jordan could have smacked him with the tank, then stabbed him in the spine. He would have been alive, paralyzed, and she could have claimed she was trying to kill him in self-defense.
He would have been able to answer questions.
They found his dump site where he threw all those girls’ bodies.
What if it wasn’t his only dump site?
What about all the families and friends wondering where their loved one went?
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I sometimes feel as though our media output has far outpaced our maturity level as a society.
We socially condition people to think that murder is okay.
Then we are upset that people are murdered.
How many movies and television shows have the police breaking all kinds of laws, and not getting in trouble? They’re constantly beating information out of people or killing the bad guys because “a trial would be a waste of time for a scumbag like you”.
WTF?!?
A law enforcement officer is not judge, jury, and executioner.
The limits of their authority are to cuff you and take you to jail.
It’s up to a judge and a jury of your peers to decide your fate. And they should be impartial while doing it.
Giving someone a gun and a badge doesn’t make it okay for them to MURDER people.
And constantly showing in movies and TV that people can MURDER someone just because that person attempted to murder them is horrifying.
If someone tries to murder-death-kill me, I’m going to fight for my life. And if I end up killing them in the process, I can live with that.
But I’m not going to tie them up and torture them.
You only have to watch “I Saw the Devil” once to see all the bad choices he makes in the name of revenge. Because of him, lives are devastated and blood runs in the street.
And then what?
So yeah–
Murder is wrong.
