My first reaction was emotional: sadness. It makes me sad that this sort of horrific violence, this vicarious delight in cruelty has become so mainstream that I saw kids in the theater that could not have been older than ten. As I periodically do, I think (can’t remember what I post where), I like to recommend the book Viewing Violence. As it states in the review “Graphic, gratuitous depictions of violence on television and in the
movies, she concludes, encourage young viewers to act more aggressively,
desensitizes them to real-world violence and instills a distorted,
pessimistic worldview. Media violence also makes children more restless,
more fearful and less creative.”
Or take this summary, a bit longer, from here:
We now know a lot about the effects of media violence. Study after
study has found that children often behave more violently after watching
media violence. The violence they engage in ranges from trivial
aggressive play to injurious behavior with serious medical consequences.
Children also show higher levels of hostility after viewing violence,
and the effects of this hostility range from being in a nasty mood to an
increased tendency to interpret a neutral comment or action as an
attack. In addition, children can be desensitized by media violence,
becoming less distressed by real violence and less likely to sympathize
with victims. Finally, media violence makes children fearful, and these
effects range from a general sense that the world is dangerous, to
full-blown anxieties, nightmares, sleep disturbances, and other trauma
symptoms.The evidence about these effects of media violence has accumulated
over the last few decades. Meta-analyses, which statistically combine
all the findings in a particular area, demonstrate that there is a
consensus on the negative effects of media violence. They also show that
the effects are strong – stronger than the well-known relationship
between children’s exposure to lead and low I.Q. scores, for example.
These effects cannot be ignored as inconclusive or inconsequential.Even more alarming, recent research confirms that these effects are
long lasting. A study from the University of Michigan shows that TV
viewing between the ages of 6 and 10 predicts antisocial behavior as a
young adult. In this study, both males and females who were heavy
TV-violence viewers as children were significantly more likely to engage
in serious physical aggression and criminal behavior later in life; in
addition, the heavy violence viewers were twice as likely as the others
to engage in spousal abuse when they became adults. This analysis
controlled for other potential contributors to antisocial behavior,
including socioeconomic status and parenting practices.”
Now, I want to be clear: I have mentioned this to both my children, neither of whom is particularly fond of violent movies, but both of whose friends routinely watch movies like 300, Halloween, and who knows what else. Both my kids reacted by stating that they would not go out and hurt someone as a result of watching the movies. I don’t doubt this, and feel it obvious that this applies to the overwhelming majority of kids out there.
That is not the point. The point is that subtle but real and important psychological changes come about from becoming inured to the emotional pain the psycholocially normal feel in empathy for those in pain on the screen. This is our natural inheritance, and a valuable one at that.
It is GOOD to be sensitized. There is no value in learning not to react when some horrific act is performed on some other human being. And learning to laugh, to find humor in horror, is literally training evil.
Take the teenaged kids who formed the pack in the movie. They were laughing at the deaths of others. They found killing FUN. Obviously, they were portrayed as bad guys, there, but are they not there as potential role models nonetheless? Does it seem so unlikely that some kids, perhaps from abusive and/or emotional frozen homes, could not watch the sadistic violence on there and wish they could kill someone?
Read the plot to Hostel 3, or as much as you can stomach. They call this torture porn. It is literally teaching people to react to cruelty with pleasure. You could not create a worse cultural pattern if your actual goal was to generalize emotional alienation and fragmentation.
My youngest child, in junior high, has been assigned a book in which not only are the original Grimm’s fairy tales told accurately, but the book is filled with commentary on how exciting and wonderful the blood soaked pages are. Two children have their heads cut off by their father. A young girl has her soul pulled from her throat and imprisoned to die in a cage, and her body is hacked into pieces and eaten. This is the sort of thing they are assigning young teenagers.
It’s too much. Did they really have to kill that beautiful young black girl, Rue? Did they have to show it on screen? Teenagers killing teenagers, and teenagers not just watching it, but participating in it vicariously.
You see, there is a very thin psychological line between watching people watching people dying, and simply being the people watching. We all have learned to consume media. We have seen Big Brother, and any number of other reality shows where people are followed everywhere but the bathroom. (and I had not thought about it, but there’s no reason the Games viewers would not also have seen the kids answering the call of nature). We are used to it.
What the violent Panem culture did was in principle not different than what we have already learned to do: consume the lives of others, live through others.
Panem et Circenses: the dominant culture already had bread, did it not? The Games were not just a means of distraction, but amounted to the sacred center of the entire culture. The Games location, the killing fields, was the locus, the epicenter of a post-cultural elite, whose ritual of violence sustained them in their morbid, sick lives.
I spent some time in graduate school studying sacrifice (sacre fice: act of the sacred). My conclusion was that sacrifice, per se, was ENTIRELY cultural. It is in fact the outcome of religions that do NOT value the truly sacred, the truly spiritual. They are, rather, the outcome of inefficient meaning systems, which is to say violence dispersion systems, which is to say ways of reaching love, contentment, joy and connection.
We intuitively sense sacrifice as Satanic in some way. We forget, of course, that the Jews for a very long time ritually killed actual animals on shines which must have always smelt of blood. Christ, himself, has in received theology been compared to such animals, as if an omnipotent being needed blood to sustain himself or forgive anyone. I will say this: that interpretation of Christ’s sacrifice is entirely wrong, in my own view. I have argued this at some length in my Grand Inquisitor piece.
I have defined Goodness as taking pleasure in the successes and happiness of others, and the ability to live happily oneself. You must be capable of generating your own sense of meaning and place and purpose and joy, and you should be capable of sharing that of others.
If you cannot generate your own happiness, you are bound, are you not? You are stuck. You cannot move, and remaining still is painful. This is the root of the dialectic of the demonic crowd and the sacrificial victim. Their pain, they cannot feel, so they feel it through the pain of others, and that releases them, for a time. I have said this many times. I can see it so clearly.
In a very real sense, though, the victim exists for a time FIRST. Your emotions are tied to theirs. The crowds at the Panem circus wanted to get to know the lives of their victims, making the necessary fact of the deaths of most of them all the more objectionable, but necessary, given their cultural system.
In this sense, I found the symbol of the mockingbird interesting. She creates a sound, then it echoes. She goes first. She sets the pattern. Others can only follow. All eyes were on her, and not in places of conscious freedom. The author must have intuited some element of this, even if it was not placed in words.
Are we modern Romans? Are we ready for Coliseums, mass pandemonium, and ritual death?
I honestly don’t know. I wish I did. I will keep at it; that is all I can do.