Subject: The camera tells it all, or does it.
The danger of playing rugby is apparent to anyone taking the field. The slow motion camera shots show the impact of these huge, muscular men colliding with each other. It’s the essence of being a man to enjoy the rough and tumble of rugby it’s in the combative genes to exercise your power against another man of similar size, the push and shove which starts in the playground, carried on onto the playing field.
Unfortunately the cameras also introduce a frame by frame, segmental shot which often does little justice to actuality. How often we search for that one shot which shows us in the best light (as they say), a fraction earlier a grimace, a fraction later a smile and depending on which one we send, dictates the story.
In today’s rugby, the TMO camera is constantly roaming the pitch, looking for incursions to the law, a little like the camera in our streets surveying us when our guard is down so it is on the field of play, looking for a niggled response, a payback to something done earlier. It’s all being analysed by someone who is outside the emotional field force of the pitch and are we in danger of over sanitising the game, reducing it to a skipping contest much preferred by girls.
Are we also in danger of feminising all of our daily experience, getting onside with the girls in an effort to find a social compromise. Are we making a fetish of inclusiveness, to the exclusion of common sense.
When you take anything apart, you lose sight of the composite whole, the essence of the what makes it what it is, you lose the character of the beast if you dictate the motive to some sort of ideal.
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