Off with their heads
The most memorable news footage of last week – to my disappointment – was the North Melbourne football club standing to attention in full uniform behind their president, as he apologised for off-field indiscretions by two of their clubmen.
The scene actually reminded me of a mother’s apologies to a shopkeeper for her son’s bad behaviour, only these little boys hadn’t actually pilfered any sweets, fractured any laws, or killed any people. They made a ‘funny’ home movie.
Admittedly, they did break the golden rule of comedy – to make the audience laugh – but given the video was found on Facebook, one is expected to turn a blind eye to things such as a lack of comedic timing, production values, wit, creativity, logic… these auteurs are, as you’ll recall from the opening paragraph, footballers.
In the video, a rubber chicken is seen interacting with a highly blurred and pixelated world that sort of almost resembles a world that nearly looks like our own but not quite, and even meets what is believed to be a female chicken, in this instance, acted by a garden-variety frozen chook straight from the supermarket freezer. The poultry protagonist is male apparently, because for two seconds he is shown drinking beer, and the female is so because she is fond of wine.
I will spare you any exploration into gender stereotypes at this point. Suffice it to say I’ll never look at my father or the Yarra Valley the same way again. (Whatever happens on Wine Tour, stays on Wine Tour, right?)
Nonetheless, Chicken One eventually finds itself comfortably ensconced within Chicken Two, and then, from what can be deciphered from the camera-phone footage, Chicken One runs his de-feathered friend over in a van. If you have that mental picture, blur it, put a terrible soundtrack to it, and make it an order of magnitude stupider, and you’ve got North Melbourne Video Productions.
Despite the canyon-wide void of artistic ingenuity, it became, without even so much as a light tickle of humour or irony, newsworthy. It became a bloody headline. For a bloody week!
After a good seven days of endless repetition, investigation and condemnation, this god-awful video was, strangely, found to possess value of a kind. It held up a shiny, city-sized magnifying glass and all the journalists, editors, fem-bots, save-the-children types (and everyone else who hadn’t seen the film either) all marched themselves obediently and ant-like into comical self-immolation.
“We demand apologies!” shouted one. “Footballers are supposed to be role models!” shrieked another. “Make a donation to a women’s group!” begged a women’s group.
Those with Brain One in their skulls knew instinctively to get out of the way.
It fast became another marker on the ever-sliding scale of what is deemed newsworthy in our country, and it illustrated just how disconnected we are from the rest of the world – from our own world, even – that boyish jokes like these should even be noticed, let alone be given a week’s attention.
Are we not aware that there are whole industries based on the exploitation of women, and that they choose to be exploited? Ever heard of advertising? Modelling? Hollywood? Pornography?
How about the exploitation of children? They don’t even have the good fortune of being able to select their line of work! As you celebrated Easter this year, were you concerned about the hundreds of young African boys and girls who worked slavishly to bring you that chocolate bunny? Probably not, but it sure tasted sweet, didn’t it?
Our country remains participant in two wars, the economy has many thinking we’ll be eating bread and dripping next week, Europeans are rioting over things not concerning football, people are still being jailed/killed/starved for no other reason than being born in the wrong country, Earth is picking fights with us every other month…
“But the chicken, THE CHICKEN WAS A FEMALE!”
Good god.
And what about footballers – sportspeople – as role models? Whoever the sad sap was that first proclaimed jocks should be looked upon as heroes, either spent way too much (or way too little) time looking at them on the school ground. It’s bad enough that educators fawn and kneel prostrate over the sporting achievements of their students, but when society finds greater worth in the extra-curricular activities of footballers than it does in the actual achievements of say, surgeons, engineers, or scientists, something is wrong. Heck, there’s more worth in aspiring to be Superman, and he’s fictional.
To be fair to the humble populace, many did express surprise at what they thought was a huge overreaction. The many letters of outrage were countered with a large – but probably not equal – number of letters calling for the restoration of sanity and for the world to be turned right way up again.
Bulldog player Jason Akermanis agreed, and seemed to me to be the first football-related personality to actually come out and speak his mind, and speak sensibly.
Now there’s a headline.