The unimaginable killing of 20 young children and seven adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., last week has not only reinvigorated longstanding cultural conversations about gun control, it’s also reignited the ongoing dialogue about the impact of violence in the media. At issue is the question of how—and how much—portrayals and depictions of violence in popular entertainment influence those who consume it.
In the wake of the tragedy, many entertainment outlets acknowledged that some fare scheduled to be televised or released shortly after the shooting could be deemed as insensitive. Cable channel Syfy, for instance, replaced an episode of Haven on Friday night because the one originally slated depicted scenes of violence in a high school. Paramount Pictures nixed the scheduled Pittsburgh premiere of Tom Cruise’s violent new thriller Jack Reacher. The Weinstein Co. did the same with the Los Angeles premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (which we’ll return to momentarily). Meanwhile, Fox, HBO, Showtime and TLC all made lineup changes.
And though a clear link between the 20-year-old Sandy Hook shooter and video games has not yet been established, some were already speculating about the possibility of that connection. Well-known conservative Ben Stein wrote in The American Spectator:
I read that the killer was socially awkward (putting it mildly) and ‘reserved.’ I know what that often means. He spent much of his miserable life playing shoot ’em up video games on line or on machines. … In these games, the ‘player’ just spends his whole day attempting to exercise and exorcize his loneliness and low self-esteem by shooting imaginary creatures and creating damage all day long. At a certain point, just ‘killing’ on the console blurs into doing it in real life. ‘Killing’ is just what the kid does all his life. How much of a stretch is it for him to shoot into a movie theater or a political gathering or a kindergarten in ‘real life’ if his life is so pitiful that he does not know what’s real and what is not?”
Commenting on the Connecticut gunman Adam Lanza, University of New Haven criminal justice professor James Cassidy told The Christian Science Monitor:
Clearly, this is a young man who was very, very angry and willing to express his anger in almost unthinkable ways. But I think we do also have to look at ourselves here. Yes, it’s unclear … what factors were the most prevalent, but certainly the fact that we have a mental health system that is failing right now plays a role. We’re also coming to understand that while violence on TV, in movies and in lyrics haven’t led to more crime, it does appear that a certain faction of society is vulnerable to such violence, that it disinhibits them in some way.
Elsewhere in the culture, back-and-forth salvos attacking and defending violent imagery were heard in a variety of quarters. Just one day before the shooting, Parents Television Council president Tim Winter took AMC’s The Walking Dead to task for its spectacularly gory depictions of violence, then asked how on earth such gruesome imagery earns a TV-14 rating. In a PTC press release, Winter said:
Throughout its run, the AMC program The Walking Dead has featured some of the most graphic and brutally intense violence and gore imaginable. In the current season alone the show has depicted hundreds of scenes of grisly murder both of living and ‘undead,’ but human, characters. The intensely violent content has included depictions of the cleaving of human skulls with a machete, extreme gun violence, including graphic depictions of blood and brains splattering after gunshot wounds, and the use of a sharpened human bone as a weapon to stab another character. … Clearly, this is content appropriate to an adult-only audience, but AMC has rated every single episode of The Walking Dead as suitable for a 14 year old child.
In an eerily haunting reply, Walking Dead executive producer Glen Mazarra seemed to scoff at Winter’s concern via this Twitter response: “If little kids don’t watch @WalkingDead_AMC, how will they learn what to do in a zombie apocalypse? #Educational#PublicService.”
A similar conversation has emerged around Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained, slated for a Christmas Day release in theaters.
Writing about the film’s gruesome violence—a Tarantino trademark—Entertainment Weekly movie reviewer Owen Gleiberman said:
Django Unchained, Tarantino’s deliriously kicky and shameless (and also overly long and scattershot) racial-exploitation epic, is set in the slave days, and among other things, it’s a low-down orgy of flamboyant cruelty and violence: whippings, a scene in which a man gets torn apart by dogs, plus the most promiscuous use of the N-word ever heard in a mainstream movie. Is Django attacking the cruelty or reveling in it? Maybe both. … The film achieves that QT hypnotic mood. But only for a while. In the gaudy-bloody last 30 minutes (think over-the-top and beyond), the mood vanishes. And Django Unchained becomes an almost sadistically literal example of exploitation at its most unironic.
Tarantino, however, is clearly weary of the suggestion that those who produce violent entertainment need to take responsibility for it. In an interview with the BBC after the Sandy Hook shooting, Tarantino said, “I just think you know there’s violence in the world, tragedies happen, blame the playmakers. It’s a Western. Give me a break.”
No way, says Nicole Clark, former model and director of the documentary Cover Girl Culture: Awakening the Media Generation:
Quentin Tarantino seems to believe he is magically disconnected from the human race. Somehow everything he creates has no impact on us? He’s not the only director or movie producer who denies any negative effect from their work. But ask any of these producers or directors if they think films can have a positive effect on society, and they will instantly say yes.
While directors and their detractors may never reach détente on this issue, some academic observers believe that the reality of media’s influence cannot be denied—even if a strict cause-and-effect correlation can’t always be absolutely established.
Iowa State University professor Douglas A. Gentile, who’s researched and written extensively about the influence of video games in particular, told Fox News:
All artists, whether they work in visual, film, television, video games, or other media understand that they have the potential to affect viewers—in fact, they want it. All viewers want to be affected by media. In fact, if the media doesn’t affect us, we call them boring. Humans are amazing learners, we can learn just from seeing something once. So it is no surprise that we can learn from the media, especially if the media are particularly exciting or interesting.
As our culture continues to grapple with such gut-wrenching violence against innocents, then, the question of what entertainment media is teaching those who consume it remains as urgent as ever.
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