Editor's Note
Why Do We Watch It?
When our Netflix movie arrives, I sometimes wonder if my wife and I will continue to be compatible for another 38 years. Our Netflix queue is a Mulligan stew composed of ingredients drawn from our movie-savvy kids and film-aficionado friends. Fed by church discussion groups and PBS, my wife adds documentaries and morality tales. I am more influenced by popular culture, taking cues from the Academy Awards and newspaper reviews. And that’s where the trouble starts. My wife’s choices are like finely cooked spinach, tasty and usually good for you. Mine are fast-food, frequently gritty, appealing to primal tastes, and, well, violent. As we settle down for an evening of movie watching, if we are viewing one of my choices, I can feel my wife’s attention fade with each screeching car, exploding window, or offed bad guy. Inevitably, her eyes close or she leaves to finish the dishes.
Guilty at worst, introspective at best, I look at my movie selections and ask why I like these films. Is it a guy thing, in my case a holdover from a childhood spent playing with toy guns and watching The Cisco Kid? Or have I been culturally indoctrinated to passively inhale the violence infesting our world, to blandly watch murder after cinematic murder without comment or judgment because movies "read" like the newspaper? And what is that exposure doing to me and everybody else who sees the latest Quentin Tarantino filmand how much verisimilitude is necessary to make a fine movie? One recent weekend, my wife and I saw both The Departed,Martin Scorsese’s Best Picture-winning portrayal of the Boston underworld, and The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of his 1934 film. Both were well-acted and tense. Both depicted violent deaths. Scorsese’s violence was graphic, almost anatomical, and became near comical as the corpses piled up. Hitchcock’s violence was apparent but almost implied as a fleeting-but-clear shot of a knife to the back made the point. Yet both movies provoked fear and tension. Would The Departed have been any less effective with a few less splattered brains? Did we need all of that to know that Jack Nicholson’s character was truly evil? perhaps one of the more violent programs on television. About all I remember from those episodes is Jack Bauer running and shooting. Perhaps I’ll try a bit more spinach in my media diet.
Defenders of contemporary Hollywood fare say that it is a mirror of our society not a molder. Gangland slayings happen not because they are portrayed in the movies but for all the other causes outlined by sociologists and psychologists. Critics counter that susceptible brains processing screen violence can’t help but ape some of that mood or action whether it’s the small push on the playground or the bloody alley shooting that ends up in the emergency room.
Reality is the goal, say filmmakers defending current movie portrayals of violence: Murder and mayhem are prehistoric traits of the human condition, and avoiding their portrayal would leave comedy and fantasy as the only legitimate movie subjects. But there is reality and there is
What all this does to our psyches and whether it contributes to real-life violence are perhaps unanswerable questions, but the violence encountered in clinics and emergency rooms is unquestionable. Suicide, gang murders, child abuse, and intimate partner violence are staples of medical practice in 2009, requiring all of us to rethink, retool, and retrain to address their medical consequences.
An orgy of TV watching this year led me to rethink my attitude toward violence in entertainment. I sat down with an entire season of the series 24, perhaps one of the more violent programs on television. About all I remember from those episodes is Jack Bauer running and shooting. Perhaps I'll try a bit more spinach in my media diet.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief Dr. Meyer can be reached at cmeyer1@fairview.org.