A current TV commercial for Mercedes Benz ("Trip
to the Museum") shows it speeding (yeehaw!), then
crashing through a museum window in an orgasmic
shower of glass, with a 180-degree skid finale.
Hoo-ha! As well, there are recent news reports
about YouTubing pranksters who pretend to be hotel
personnel, telephoning sleepy guests to give them
false alarms about gas leaks, urging them to smash
their room windows. Har har.
Social psychology is one of my blind spots, but I
think there is something about breaking glass that
seems to excite baser instincts and prurient
enjoyment. For many years in the past, no western
movie seemed complete without a bar-room brawl and
broken glass everywhere. More recently, action
movies revel in any number of glass-smashing
stunts, with protagonists diving through
skylights, windows, or whatnot.
Real life is another story. I have long thought
that broken glass itself is one of the great
unsung forms of litter and pollution.
---more below--
Sidewalks, streets, parks, woods, beaches: where has one not
been exposed to the nuisance or danger of bits of
glass? A friend once told me he was afraid to walk
his dog on a network of paths in his neighborhood,
due to the prevalence of broken glass there.
Environmentalists complained about the debut of
two-liter plastic soft drink bottles -- and they
are banned in Canada's Prince Edward Island -- but
I, also an environmentalist, was happy to see them
supplant the glass torpedoes which were a major
source of broken glass litter, and also known to
explode if dropped in supermarket or home. That
still leaves beer and wine bottles (or goblets) to
excite the glass debris of drunken rowdies.
So I not only decry movies and ads which revel in
fountains of broken glass. I not only decry the
easy vandalism of broken bottles and windows. I
think glass itself, like asbestos, is bad material
per se in many of its common uses.
I would not know where to start in reducing the
ubiquity of glass and its trash; I simply raise
the problem. How many decades did it take the auto
industry to make its window glass a little bit
safer? Public awareness should push design and
materials-science in a better direction away from
glass, where possible.
Roger Ebert has faulted movies which resort to the
cheap thrill of toppling fruit carts. Similar
fingers should be pointed at directors who abet
the pornography of broken glass. As in that museum
ad.
The hotel-alarm pranksters are obviously
low-lifes. But Mercedes Benz as well should be
denounced for pandering to the broken glass
mentality.