Free Thoughts on Violence

I listened to two interviews with the directors of Hostel II and Captivity recently, which made me think a bit more about "torture porn" and the public debate over the effects of violent media. I'd always dismissed extreme horror from afar, but these guys seem pretty intelligent and sensible. Unfortunately, I can't say the same thing about the audience. So, though its a dead-horse subject, I thought I'd wildly speculate about the effects of violent media, just for kicks.

One thing that bugs me about the debate is the exclusive concentration on ratings. This implies that negative effects can only happen to people who are 17 or younger. I'll accept the fact that the younger you are, the more susceptible to media messages you are, but that doesn't mean that everyone over 17 is not influenced by what they see in movies, on TV, and on the internet. My feeling is that kids are deprived of violent and sexual media (or at least it is discouraged by parents) and then when they go away to college, they binge on it. It has the appeal of the forbidden fruit, and they feel as though they have to find out what they've been missing (and there's a natural draw to it, at least for males).

Is it that hard to believe that watching a ton of extremely violent media might make an adult more apt to be violent? Chuck Klosterman had a good point in the terrific doc Metal: A Headbanger's Journey about media effects. He knows that the lyrics to Ozzy Osborne's Suicide Solution is about boozing, but accepts the fact that maybe someone might misinterpret the lyrics and think its primarily about killing yourself. That's all I'm saying here: its not a huge leap to think that someone might not get the subtle subtext of a movie like Hostel II (which, according to Eli Roth, is about young Americans' lamentable lack of worldliness in the post-9/11 world).

Let's say one 22 year old watches Hostel II (fine, Hostel PART II) once, watches about 2 or 3 extremely violent movies and plays 40-50 hours of extremely violent videogames every year, while another 22 year-old watches Hostel II 5 times, watches 20 or 30 extremely violent movies and plays roughly 400 hours of violent videogames per year. If these individuals were 17 or under, we could blame the parents of the second one. But they're not. They're adults, and they can do whatever they want. Does that mean that the second individual cannot be swayed by what he watches and plays? That seems to be the common wisdom, which is complete bullshit (I think).

My understanding of the existing research on media violence is that only those who are prone to violent behavior and/or have behavioral problems are likely to be negatively effected by violent media. So clearly, its less about an individual text and more about the context in which it is seen, the context in the viewer's life. I'd speculate that if a person who is prone to violence could be made to act violently, it wouldn't be by an individual movie or game but through an unvaried "media diet": nothing but torture porn, 1st-person shooters, and Faces of Death. If you had two anti-social 30 year-olds, and one of them watched nothing but torture porn for a year, and the other watched one or two per year and instead just listened to a lot of metal and lifted weights to get out his aggression, it seems possible that the second person might not only be less apt to be violent, but be less apt to be an anti-social person.

That's another thing: I doubt that watching or playing a ton of violent media will make you more apt to torture or kill someone, but it might make you a shittier person in general. It might have the same effects as heavy porn use. Neither is going to make you go rape or kill someone, but you'll be less apt to go out and try to make deep, lasting bonds with people. Like drugs or booze, excessively sexy and/or violent media (or rather excessive use of such media) makes a person happy; its tricks your mind into thinking that you're doing something good by releasing endorphins, when in actuality, you're just fucking with the chemicals in your brain without really changing your life circumstances.

Maybe anti-sociability is the real threat, not Columbine or Virginia Tech-like disasters which, sad as they are, are still extremely uncommon. Consider the following detriments to being anti-social:

• Politically, you're easy to control. By listening to the new Rage Against the Machine album, anti-social adults think they're sticking it to the man, when in fact they're just listening to music. Not that RATM is excessively violent or sexual (certainly not excessively sexual), but only that the adult whose desires are sated by media is less apt to interact with the world at large, less apt to learn about something from someone else or debate a point and more apt to regurgitate whatever the rock star said. Sure, sometimes media can be a catalyst for action, but from what I've seen, its just as often used as a substitute for action.
  

• Economically, you're destined to spend most of your life on a lower rung of the ladder. To achieve success in any line of work, it helps to be able to connect with other people, and if all you can talk about is the Burning Crusade, you're not gonna make it very far, whether you want to start an organic farm or work for Goldman Sachs.
  

• Healthwise, you're more likely to be a burden to the system. In the long run, anti-social people are more apt to be angry and depressed, and angry and depressed people are more apt to require treatment (which funnels R&D $ and time away from cancer research, etc).

If you're going to treat the concept of media effects seriously, I think you've got to get past two ideas: only children are susceptible to media's influence; seeing or playing an individual text once is likely to have a substantial effect. It seems like there's going to be more and more violent and sexual (and sexually violent) media out there, whether we like it or not. Perhaps this will mean that we have to stop thinking about individual texts (because if you ban or regulate one, someone else will just make a similar one to replace it) and start thinking about regulating media diets the way we are starting to regulate tobacco or booze use, for instance. Maybe you could tax the shit out of all sexually violent videos to deter people from using it. You can't just rely on parents to dictate their offspring's media diet for the rest of their lives. At some point, adults will need to realize that media they freely choose could make them as anti-social (and as much of a burden to the system) as an alcoholic.

The industry, academia, and the world at large seems to tacitly accept the fact that a 16 year-old who watches extremely violent and or sexually violent material will be negatively effected by it, but I can't imagine that they would ever be willing to accept the possibility that a 22 or 32 year-old can be negatively effected by violent media as well. 'Sup wit dat?

When thinking about how to regulate violent media, I like to compare the negative social impact of violent media to that of drugs and booze. We've decided that people are too easily fooled into thinking that the pleasure of doing heroin outweighs the negative effects on them and, since they cannot help but be a part of society, on society as a whole. We've also decided that that's not the case with booze, or cigarettes for that matter. Sure, people can drink themselves to death, but its harder to really fuck up your life with booze than w/ heroin, so one is legal (but heavily regulated) and the other isn't. Where does violent media fit in to all this?

I'd say its more like booze, for now. Maybe, you get a few cases of it possibly influencing someone who wouldn't have been as violent as they turned out to be to become more violent, but society is hardly falling apart. But this could change if people inundate unregulated online video sites with homemade torture porn (and if people think that Eli Roth is the problem, they should wait until the internet does to the horror genre what it did to porn - make it more extreme, cheaper, and more accessible). And maybe the measure of how bad things are getting has less to do with how many massacres we have and more to do with how socially, politically, and economically active a violent/sexual media-sated generation turns out to be.