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The
Entertainment Industry and Our Culture of Violence:
America’s
Great Moral Disconnect
By
Dr. Michael L. Brown
April
23, 2007
If
you needed a diversion from watching the news about the tragic campus
massacre at Virginia Tech last week, you could have been entertained
by any number of movies on TV, like Scream 3, the ever-popular blood
fest which aired two nights after the killings. Or you could have
made your way over to the theater and taken in the double feature
Grindhouse, hailed as the most violent chick-flick of all time.
If you weren’t in the mood for movies, you could have lost
yourself in a video game like Grand Theft Auto, rated Mature for
“more intense violence or language than products in the Teen
category.”
Yes,
it is a tragic irony of our contemporary culture that we can be
so traumatized by violence in its murderous, real life incarnation
– rightly so – while at the same time be so titillated
by extreme violence on TV, the movies, and our computer screens.
The moral disconnect is massive.
Today,
young people in particular are entertained by an endless barrage
of scenes depicting bloodshed, torture, mutilation, and gore, scenes
which create an appetite for more extreme forms of violent entertainment,
and the entertainment industry is only to happy to comply. Yet it
is considered off limits even to talk about the deleterious effects
of this violent bombardment. To raise the subject is to evidence
an extreme form of prudery, to be out of touch with reality, to
advocate censorship.
But
this is not a question of censorship or prudery. It is a question
of common sense. According to an April 23, 2000 news release, “Playing
violent video games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or Mortal Kombat can
increase a person’s aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior
both in laboratory settings and in actual life, according to two
studies appearing in the April issue of the American Psychological
Association’s (APA) Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology.”
Does
it take the APA to tell us that a constant saturation of extremely
violent images “can increase a person’s aggressive thoughts,
feelings and behavior”? Isn’t this perfectly logical?
A
ten year-old boy watches an NBA playoff game and then dons the jersey
of his favorite player and runs to the nearest basketball court,
wanting to be just like his hero. A teenage girl watches American
Idol and says to herself, “That’s going to me next year,”
as she sings and shimmies in front of her mirror. And in 1999, two
unstable high-school students in Littleton, Colorado watch Natural
Born Killers over and over again and say to themselves, “We’re
going to do that one day too” – and they did.
Yes,
it is no secret that the Columbine killers, whose murderous acts
preceded the Virginia Tech massacre by almost eight years to the
day, immersed themselves in video games like Doom and Mortal Kombat.
They were also infatuated with movies like Natural Born Killers,
and, in the massacre, they may have acted out a murderous school
scene from The Matrix.
In
the aftermath of the massacre at Blacksburg, some were raising the
inevitable questions about gun control legislation, but I found
myself wondering, “What kind of movies did the killer watch?
Did our culture of violence help fuel the fires of an already sick
mind?”
It
appears that the demented young murderer was enthralled by the South
Korean production Oldboy, an ultra-violent movie which featured
themes like incest and sadistic revenge. In one scene, the movie’s
chief protagonist pulls out the teeth of his former captor using
a claw hammer. (Not surprisingly, Oldboy was hailed by critics at
the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.) Did images like this influence an
already unstable psyche, helping to push him over the edge?
To
be sure, the entertainment industry did not slaughter thirty-two
people on the Virginia Tech campus. It was a mentally ill killer
who pulled the trigger and was guilty of the horrific crime. But
we are sticking our heads in the sand if we refuse to ask ourselves
whether there is a connection between the extreme violence of the
entertainment industry and the desensitizing of our youth.
Followers
of Jesus are not exempt from this process of hardening, and if we
allow ourselves to be entertained by all kinds of violence and sex,
we too will become desensitized. Christian parents, what are you
kids watching? What kind of games are they playing? And what is
entertaining us as adults? What images are filling our hearts and
minds?
We
do well to heed Paul’s warning to the Ephesians: “So
I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no
longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking.
They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the
life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the
hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have
given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind
of impurity, with a continual lust for more” (Eph 4:17-19).
Hardening of the heart can be fatal.
Recent
Hollywood releases include movies like Saw III, with the MPAA list
of offensive elements including “strong grisly violence and
gore, sequences of terror and torture, nudity and language.”
Yet as one website noted, “Parents read this as a warning,
kids as a come-on. “‘Terror and torture’? I’m
there!” Can’t see it? Must see it.”
An
online review for parents describes Grindhouse scenes including,
“faces melting, martial arts kicking, flesh-biting/eating,
dismembering, and bashing with metal poles. Heads and chests explode,
spewing goo and blood.” Another website warns of disturbing
images in the movie, including a sex scene in which the woman realizes
that the man has been decapitated. Yet a review on the Bloody-Disguting.com
website raves about Grindhouse and its “three hours of car
crashes, car chases, explosions, blood, guts, gore, slime, knife
fights, sex scenes, fake trailers and more action than you’ve
seen all year.” As expected, Grindhouse has been a smash box
office hit.
In
1968, the ultra-liberal, child educator Benjamin Spock wrote, “[A
nursery school teacher told me] her children were crudely bopping
each other much more than previously, without provocation. When
she remonstrated with them, they would protest, ‘But that’s
what the Three Stooges do.’ This attitude did not signify
a serious undermining of character. But it certainly showed me that
watching violence can lower a child’s standards of behavior”
(Baby and Child Care).
What
would he say today?
The
Coalition of Conscience is a network of Christian leaders and believers,
currently based in the greater Charlotte, North Carolina area, who
are working together for moral and cultural change through the gospel.
Dr.
Michael L. Brown is the Director of the Coalition and serves
as its voice to the local and national community.
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