Coalition of Conscience

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?

Michael L. Brown, Ph.D., is Director of the Coalition of Conscience, based in Charlotte, North Carolina.