2.2. Skim the text and find any information on the impact media violence has on children.

Violence in Pop Culture

If artists, as Ezra Pound said, are “the antennae of the race,” they’re picking up some plenty bad vibes these days. A few years ago, who would have imagined that one of this season’s top-grossing films (no pun intended) would be about a psychopath who not only murders women but also skins them? Or that the actor who plays the film’s helpful psychopath – his quirk is cannibalism, but he finally helps track down the nasty psychopath – would be introduced by Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” to a studio audience whose female contingent oohed and aahed as if he were Mel Gibson? Or that meanwhile, over in the world of letters, a young novelist would describe, in revolting detail, women (and, less notoriously, men, children and dogs) being tortured and butchered? Or that his novel, suppressed by its original publisher, boycotted by feminists and savaged by critics, would become a best seller? Or that the best mind in American musical theater would conceive a snappy show about the assassins of American presidents? Or that MTV would still be blaring last year’s hit song about a teen incest victim pumping a bullet into her daddy’s brain?

Sure, ultraviolet fare has always been out there – but up until now, it’s always been out there, on the fringes of mass culture. Nowadays it’s the station-wagon set, bumper to bumper at the local Cinema 1-2-3-4-5, that yearns to be titillated by the latest schlocky horror picture show. And the conglomerated, amalgamated media corporations obligingly churn out increasingly vicious movies, books and records. Mayhem has gone mainstream.

America’s addiction to make-believe violence is like any other addiction: it takes more and more to accomplish less and less. In his horrifying “Silence of the Lambs,” director Jonathan Demme straddles the old and the new, taking a gruesome plot and filming it with Hitchcockian discretion and taste. “We wanted to exploit people’s endless fascination with scary stories, and provide them with a tremendously powerful version of a scary story, but we didn’t want to upset their lives,” he explains.

But people are upset by the assault of brutal imagery on radio, TV, in the theaters, in best-selling books. It is not any one film or program that is singularly disturbing; it is the appalling accretion of violent entertainment. It is the sense that things have gotten out of control. And there is legitimate alarm at what all this imaginary violence might be contributing to in an increasingly dangerous real life.

American Martyr: Even as we express such heartfelt concerns, we are packing into the multiplexes, lapping up the fictive blood, renting $1.5 billion worth of “action” videos a year and eagerly awaiting the next Stephen King novel. In a violent world, where violence continues to be perceived as a solution, violent make-believe will continue to be a part of that world’s imaginative diet.”

To be fair, violent narratives go back a lot further that the Steadicam – or even the Marquis de Sade. But the amount of explicit carnage in both serious and popular fiction has exploded, and there’s a similar trend in detective novels, whose villains have become increasingly psychotic and whose medical examiners must find it increasingly hard to act blasé.

Movie violence these days is likewise clearer, louder, more anatomically precise and a lot sexier. When a gunslinger got shot in some black-and-white potboiler, all we saw was a white puff of smoke and a dab of fake blood. When Jamie Lee Curtis takes one in the arm in the protracted climax to Kathryn Bigelow’s “Blue Steel” (1990), there’s a slo-mo eruption of ersatz fabric, gristle and blood that ends up looking as pretty as a nature film’s blooming desert rose.

Ammo clips: In the past decade, a growing number of feature directors (Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne, among them) got their training in TV advertising. This new breed of director has been bringing ad techniques to the larger screen. But where, on the small screen, one hears a pop can hiss, on the large screen one hears black matte ammo clips clackering like castanets. Or bones being cracked. “Today we have the technology to do sequences that are louder and bigger and more effective than before,” says “Die Hard 2” director Renny Harlin. But it’s not simply that the special effects are more sophisticated than before, it’s the way in which – and the purpose to which – directors use them. It’s all so insidiously yummy that you lean forward to get closer to the action. Our ability to feel compassion is brutalized by excessive brutality, especially when it’s given that Hollywood sheen.

In all of pop culture (as in most of society) women are the victims of choice. An awful lot of hostility against women is being played out in popular culture these days, and it’s not pretty.

But the psychological road between real life and make-believe doesn’t run only one way. In this society, mass-produced and mass-consumed movies, books, records and TV programs are a considerable part of our real lives; they contribute greatly to making us behave the way we do. To argue otherwise is to consign the arts to a total passivity – always mere reflections, never real influences. The popular arts are certainly quick enough to claim allegedly positive effects of their noble-farmer movies, triumph-of-the-spirit novels and anti-drug rock records; they ought to accept some blame for the negative ones.

Pop a cassette: When it comes to the impact media violence has on children, well, moviemakers are quick to insist these flicks are not for kids.

By the age of 18, the average American child will have seen 200,000 violent acts on television, including 40,000 murders, according to Thomas Radecki, research director for the National Coalition on Television Violence. (The average 2- to 11-year-old watches TV 25 hours a week.) University of Illinois psychologists Leonard Eron and L. Rowell Huesmann studied one set of children for more than 20 years. They found that kids who watched significant amounts of TV violence at the age of 8 were consistently more likely to commit violent crimes or engage in child or spouse abuse at 30. “We believe… that heavy exposure to televised violence is one of the causes of aggressive behavior, crime and violence in society,” they wrote in 1984. “Television violence affects youngsters of all ages, of both genders, at all socioeconomic levels and all levels of intelligence… It cannot be denied or explained away.”

Seven years later, Huesmann remains convinced: “Serious aggression never occurs unless there is a convergence of large numbers of causes,” he says, “but one of the very important factors we have identified is exposure to media violence… If we don’t do something, we are contributing to a society that will be more and more violent.”

At the same time, because we are being so inundated with violent images – both artful and manipulative – it is almost impossible to resist growing numb. We risk becoming insensitive to the horror of suffering, and that is probably what worries social scientists most. “Sadly enough, that [numbing] is normal,” says Edward Donnerstein, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Think of the tape of the Los Angeles police beating Rodney King. Everyone was initially horrified, but now, when you’ve seen it several times, you’ve become desensitized. Your outrage is moral, intellectual, not visceral.

James Cameron, director of both “Terminator” films, explains: “If you’re making films for mass-audience consumption, there is a fine line between action, which is good, and violence, which is bad. Now, basically action and violence are the same thing. The question is a matter of style, a matter of degree, a matter of the kind of moral stance taken by the film, the contextualization of the violence.” For the time being there’s no light – just more fright – at the end of the tunnel.

Source: Newsweek, April, 1991

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