When I say the subject has been a source of world-class hypocrisy I am referring in part to the fact that, although this is now changing, over the years it has generally been the liberals who objected to excessive violence on the tube and the conservatives who objected to the raw sexual stuff and that the two tended often to switch positions and use each other’s arguments either pro or anti violence and pro or anti explicit sex. (Where sex and violence increasingly mix on the screen and in fact become a single phenomenon each chooses to see only what it wants to.) One side will tell you that the violence has a terrible seductive effect on the viewers who are coarsened by it and inspired to emulate the carefree aggression that they see. The same will be said of all the panting, pawing sex you witness on the tube-that it is corrupting viewers only it will often be said this time by the same people who deny that violence has any effect on subsequent viewer behavior; it will, correspondingly, also tend to be denied by those who argue that violence does affect viewers’ behavior.
Again, I think it’s obvious that this bombardment has a coarsening impact on those people who watch faithfully, and especially where children are concerned, it is surely giving many the idea that what they see portrayed on the screen as a matter of course is what they and others are expected to do in real life. Or, at a minimum, this coarsening involves making the unthinkable just a little less unthinkable, a little more OK.
My own objections, however, which are twofold, are somewhat different. First it is not the violence or shocking gore itself to which I object in TV fiction, but rather the volume, profligacy and undiscriminating nature of their presentation. You may read in the classics or observe in the theatrical production of Shakespeare, among others, episodes every bit as shaking and horrible as whatever it is that caused you to turn away from the TV screen the other night. I once saw one of Shakespeare’s occasional but memorable onstage eyegougings enacted in Cambridge, England, with the aid of suddenly popping out peeled grapes. It’s the sort of thing you tend to remember long after you have forgotten the names of the characters in the play. Moreover, much Elizabethan theater and other works to which we now defer as classics had plenty of bloody hacking, slashing and related butchery to them designed to amuse an audience given to the enjoyment of bear-baiting, public hangings and assorted other fun.
But in the better of this literature anyway, the violence in the story meant something; it was singular; it was committed by a particularly cruel character; it had some purpose beyond its mere power to titillate, frighten and repel. Nor do I think any age has seen anything comparable to our own unending, daily inundation of the home by filmed, super realistic closeup portrayals of human violence, of maiming and mutilation and slaughter. And although I also suspect that viewers, including kids, are probably better at keeping in mind the difference between art (if that’s what it is) and life than some suppose, I do think there’s a danger that a continuous diet of this sort of thing can eventually make us insensitive and impervious to the genuine article when we see it.
Here I come out for the only kind of TV violence I favor: the real stuff. This is my second worry about all the fictional violence on TV: that it will dull our reactions to the kind that is filmed not on a set but from Bosnia or Liberia or places in this country. I am not talking here of the kind of depiction of horrors that should be treated gingerly in the press, such as shockingly gruesome photographs of stricken or dead people whose living friends and relatives will be needlessly hurt all over again by the reproduction of this image. I am talking about those truly jarring, unsettling, very hard not to turn from images of the wounded kids in Sarajevo, murder victims in a dozen other massacres and wars, or screaming, limbless ones who committed no crime and caused no grievance but were merely unlucky enough to be in there when the terrorist group struck.
Different critics: There is, you understand, a whole school, different from the ordinary critics of TV violence, that thinks this kind of violent or bloody or just plain scary TV representation should go, but for policy reasons. These are the people who maintain that such a large dose of ugly reality and pain will get us all riled up as individuals or as a society or a government and cause us to take some kind of a position or think we have to do something or otherwise act in a way that they find troubling. There are people who say the filming of war scenes in Vietnam was wrong because of its impact on so much of the public, who believe that the horrors shown in Somalia or Sarajevo or Tiananmen are also something with which we cannot be trusted, that they tend to make us emotional and lead us away from the rigorous, coldhearted intellectual discipline required for policymaking. I grant that such sights on TV can be partial as to truth and in some ways misleading. But I think in an age of excessive governmental memoranda, autointoxication and blather, they are worth a thousand staged pictures of violence and a million political words. If we can’t be trusted with the sight of violent reality or required to deal with it, we ought to go out of business. My main worry about TV violence of the senseless, mindless made-up kind is that it may, in time, render us incapable of recognizing and responding to the real thing.
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