Ralph Fiennes, Who's Played Some of the Most Brutal Villains in Movie History, Says Audiences Have 'Gone Soft' and Trigger Warnings are a Joke

Hannes Magerstaedt. Getty Images.

Sure, Ralph Fiennes appeared in some British costume drama or delightfully quirky Wes Anderson comedy your girlfriend made you watch. But the guy has also done some terrific popcorn movies like Kingsman and the 007 films. 

But to me, he made his bones playing iconic, savagely violent bad guys, both real and fictional. Spoilers ahead:

--In Schindler's List, he's the concentration camp Kommandant who would casually use his prisoners for target practice.

--In The Menu, he's the celebrity chef who serves rich, smug assholes. In every sense of that verb.

--In the Harry Potter franchise, he's He Who Shall Not Be Named. And trying to murder a baby wizard barely made the medal stand for the worst shit he pulled. 

As good as Fiennes is when it comes to portraying pure, insensate evil, in my book that makes him an authority on the topic of scaring the snot out of the general public. And how to best to approach the delicate sensibilities of that jittery, troubled, easily upset group often condescendingly referred to as "Modern Audiences":

Source - When asked by BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg if audiences have gone too soft, Fiennes said, “I think they have. I think we didn’t used to have trigger warnings. I mean, there are very disturbing scenes in Macbeth, terrible murders and things. But I think the impact of theater should be that you’re shocked and you should be disturbed.“

Fiennes added, “I don’t think you should be prepared for these things, and when I was young, we never had trigger warnings for shows. Shakespeare’s plays are full of murders, full of horror. As a young student and lover of theater, I never experienced trigger warnings telling me: ‘By the way, in ‘King Lear,’ Gloucester’s going to have his eyes pulled out.’ It’s the shock, the unexpected, that’s what makes an actor, theater so exciting.” The actor did say that warnings for things that might effect people physically, such as strobe effects, should remain.

Well played. Well played indeed, good sir. 

I thought bringing Shakespeare into it was the perfect touch. Because while the nobles up in the balconies at The Globe Theater might have talked a good game about his use of language, character studies and dramatic flair, the Groundlings down in the cheap seats laid down their tuppence for some good old fashioned poisoned teenagers, murders, and gouged out eyes. 

But what he's describing isn't limited to Elizabethan England or Hollywood cinema. It's deep in the human race to tell stories about things that are disturbing on a deeply psychological level. Notice those ancient cave paintings never look like the kids drawings on your fridge. Stick figures in front of a house with a curl of smoke coming out of the chimney and a smiley face sun wearing sunglasses. It was all about blood and gore. Hunting scary critters before they got hunted. And the stories they told around the campfire weren't exactly NPR shows. If they were, they'd be the true crime ones. 

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As a matter of fact, true crime is pretty much the most popular form of entertainment in human history. One of the major driving force of literacy in Europe was cheap, lurid, salacious novels. That's where the term "Penny Dreadfuls" comes from. You can draw a through line directly from those to the fare my very non-violent Irish Rose listens to on her commute every day.  

And consider your classic fairy tales, which have stood the test of time for a reason. Even though they're all about terrifying trips into the forest. Danger. Menace. Trolls. Giants. Wolves eating old ladies. Old ladies trying to cook and eat children. Sexy virgins moving in with seven short imbeciles armed with picks and axes.

Which begs the question of why people today are so dainty and fragile that we've decided they need fair warning so they can steel their senses to handle the same content that has been entertaining humans since we came down out of the trees. And I guess the short answer is, we've raised a generation filled with pussies. Not the whole generation, thankfully. Not even the majority. At least I don't think. But the ratio of Pussies-to-Normies is the highest it's ever been. 

And Fiennes could not be more correct that we've got to stop trying to protect them from stuff they need not be protected from. It's only taking their already two-ply softness and adding five more plys to it.

That goes for children too. I know personally I'm better off for not knowing in advance I'd see the mother of an adorably innocent anthropomorphic woodland creature straight up murdered by a hunter. It taught me a lesson about managing the deer population and the usefulness of deer carcasses. That meat from Bambi's mom probably filled that man's freezer and fed his family for six months. While the head on his wall gave him and his friends hours of the sort of fireside storytelling those cavemen enjoyed. 

So let's stop the pandering, once and for all. Suck it up, you little hothouse flowers. Life is terrible and dark and violent. So your entertainment should be too. That Child Catcher who scared the pee out of me in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was less scary than actual child catchers. You hated seeing Mufasa die, well guess what. Your father is going to die. I watched my all time childhood movie antihero get bitten in half by a shark like he was a pretzel rod on the deck of his own boat. And it taught me not to go hunting 3-ton Great Whites in a broken down old fishing tub. A lesson I've carried with me ever since. 

To steal a line from Ricky Gervais' stand up, let's take all the warning labels off of everything for two years. Then put it up to a referendum. That goes double for trigger warnings.