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Sissela Bok's "Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment" - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E++T A L K When you play games with your children, do you let them win? Discuss the balance between praise and overindulgence in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Uxorious M is for the many ways she lost it ... Drowning in fairness Where the gals are Young, black and too white BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINKARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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VIOLENCE OR ENTERTAINMENT? | PAGE 2 OF 2
Are our children becoming desensitized to violence? I think so. I don't always like the word "desensitize," although it's one I use too. I think it can numb them -- it can bring a kind of coldness of the heart. To some extent it's very natural. We all shield ourselves against extremes of violence or anything else, and children do too. But when they get used to seeing so many murders, rapes and forms of torture, they can end up being more callous. What's different now from even five or six years ago is that, because children also have all these video games that are extremely graphic and very violent, they can replay the most violent experiences. And what this means is that they can expose themselves, the ones that want to, to a lot more violence than kids could even five or 10 years ago. Let me ask about movies. When it comes to film violence, directors like to say: "People know that what's on the screen is fake." Isn't this true? Or is your argument that it's different for kids? I was out in Los Angeles recently, and I was having a debate with Oliver Stone, the director of "Natural Born Killers." He specifically said, "Parents have got to teach their children that movies are not real." He said it over and over. And I had to argue that small children simply cannot make that distinction. It's not something that parents can just "teach" their children. In fact, a lot of adolescents -- and a lot of adults -- have trouble sometimes distinguishing movies and reality. We really need to try to understand the difference, but we can't expect children to be able to make that distinction. To what degree should filmmakers -- and Oliver Stone is a perfect example -- be held responsible for acts of violence committed in the wake of their films? I'm talking here about copycat violence. The responsibility, I think, is something they should feel themselves. I don't think we should point to them and say that a particular murder, for instance, would not have taken place if it hadn't been for their movie or their poem or anything else. I often think of the 18th century German writer Goethe, who wrote "The Sorrows of Young Werther." Young Werther committed suicide, and there was an epidemic of suicides across Europe by readers of that novel. The very idea of trying to eliminate that work just goes to show why we mustn't try. I've been very interested in a comment by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. He was writing about Northern Ireland, and he said that for writers there it was very important to exercise responsibility, because things they write can unleash more violence. He specifically asked, "How can you be socially responsible and creatively free?" I think that a great artist can do that. It's harder for others. You draw a distinction between catharsis in art and lingering on violence for its own sake. Do those lines ever cross? We all, certainly, need to see works that are violent. We need, for example, to think about the "Iliad" or Shakespearean plays, and there are so many other works of art that can help us deal with violence. "Schindler's List" is another. That is very different from saying that we want to see the killing and the torture and the murder for the thrill or the enjoyment that it gives us. I don't think anyone goes to "Schindler's List" to enjoy the violence. Or at least they shouldn't. I say that because I read in the newspapers that some adolescents did think it was very funny. And that was a problem with them, not with the film. But again, that goes to show that one should not expose these things to people who are not ready. Children, for instance, shouldn't go to that film. Steven Spielberg himself said in an interview that he wouldn't want his small children to see it, but he hoped that by the time they came into junior high that they would be more capable of dealing with it. How much should a society worry about its art being unpalatable for children? Don't parents have the responsibility to keep their kids away from things they shouldn't see? Are you calling for a kind of preemptive censorship on the part of artists? I don't think we can have recourse to censorship in our society. I think it's wrong in every way. I also think it won't work anymore, in the day of the Internet and so many other channels. This does mean that people have to exercise more responsibility. And I think there's a movement afoot among those in the entertainment industry to ask, "What kind of responsibility should we exercise?" But it is up to viewers themselves to be selective, and for parents to be selective for their children. The V-chip is only one of many new technologies that are going to be useful, I think, for consumers to make that kind of choice. Can irony work as a shield in movies, to underscore the notion that the violence isn't real? I'm thinking about a filmmaker like Tarantino. Well, the people who enjoy his films definitely say that they can enjoy them because of the irony and distance. I don't think that works for a lot of people, and I think that striving for ironic distance with respect to seeing human suffering can itself be numbing and desensitizing. It is something we have to watch out for whether we're grown-ups or children. We all have too little sympathy as it is for other human beings. Another thing artists say, when accused of producing very violent work, is: "I'm just reflecting what's out there. Why pick on me, when you should focus on curing society's ills?" The question of whether films reflect society or the reverse is important, and certainly some very great films do. I don't think that the most sadistic films do, and I would say that "Natural Born Killers" is a film that does not reflect society the way it is. When Oliver Stone talks about that film he says that it was meant as a satire on society -- not so much just reflecting it. I also would argue, however, that it is important to work at the underlying social problems. Some films do that very well, whether they are talking about child abduction or child abuse -- they do reflect social problems we need to think about. There are other films that really are there to make us more or less enjoy what's going on. And I think that's very different. At the end of your book you talk about a few societies you think are making progress on some of these issues, specifically Canada and Norway. What are they doing that we should emulate? All over the world now, because of the spread of media, there are people who are quite concerned about what's going on. I chose to talk in my book about two societies, Canada and Norway, where they've had a much more serious public debate -- there's much more focus on the parents, the teachers, the journalists, and on how the entertainment industry and the government can work together in terms of figuring out ways in which you can preserve every liberty for artists and actors and others and at the same time be much more concerned with the public and with children. For instance, many countries now have what they call "watershed hours," where the industry itself decides they're not going to have certain kinds of violence before, say, 9 o'clock. In some countries, the government decides that. But it is important for parents to have a way of knowing that they can let their children watch at a particular time and that the most grotesque things will not come on then. I also think that the new technologies that we are seeing will matter a lot. One thing that I mention in my book is that, because of the Internet, there are now Web sites for people who are concerned about these issues, so that parents, teachers and others can link up as they never could before to put up a much more united front. In the past, consumers were more or less victimized by quite a united front of producers of violence. Now the consumers themselves can take a stand collectively. I think that will make a difference. Since you brought it up, does the Internet raise new issues in terms of violent entertainment? Well, the Internet certainly does raise concerns for parents. At the same time, the Internet is very liberating because of all the access it provides for people to seek out ways to control their own life. You can have all kinds of screening programs for the Internet -- whatever it is that you don't particularly want to see, it's going to be possible for you to shut out. Let's say you don't want to see anything about some totally innocuous thing like stamp collecting. Well, you don't have to see that. At the same time, the Internet now brings predators into the home. Children obviously have to be taught from the very beginning that you don't just talk to anyone you encounter on the Internet. That's new. Ten years ago, that's one thing that parents didn't have to tell kids. Now they do. You describe parents as being more fearful for their children, and children are fearful, too, because of all the violence they've seen. They think the world's a scary place. Has it become a vicious circle -- parents are keeping their kids inside to protect them, and so the kids are watching more TV and simply getting more frightened? It is a vicious circle to some extent. Because all the violence on
the screen contributes to making people much more afraid than they
really need to be. Life is not that scary. A lot of parents tell
their children to stay in, especially if there's nobody at home. As I
understand it, there are 5 million latchkey children in America --
children who come home from school with no adult there. So parents
naturally say, "Stay at home." They're not there to see what the
children watch, so the children can watch anything they want. If they
watch a lot of violence then they will be more fearful and it can be a
kind of vicious circle. More media violence, more fear. You stay indoors
more, watch more, still greater fear, more media violence.
Making
sense of Jonesboro Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint says the
shooters are to blame, but our violent society isn't making it easy
to be a kid.
Rising
Body Count "Natural Born Killers" has a grisly legacy that
continues to grow.
Ratings
today, censorship tomorrow The technology that will help parents keep their
kids away from porn can also help anyone censor anything.
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