Violence in Entertainment
[In
response to the recent slate of gun violence, I offer three essays on violence
in our culture and entertainment. This is the first of the series. It is a
consideration of the topic.]
Is
our entertainment making us more violent? After Sandy Hook, Aurora and so many
other massacres, we’re looking for someone/something to blame. The list of
usual suspects (movies, music, video games, drugs and guns) are quickly rounded
up and put on the trial of public opinion and the 24 hour news cycle.
Violence
has always been part of entertainment. Violence and passionate love are the
extremes of being human, when we are most alive. Plays and films, the forms of entertainment
that are most life-like, are drawn to these heightened experiences. Every
dramatic work ends or begins with violence or sex. They make good
entertainment.[i]
One
of my teachers (someone at Shakespeare & Company, either Tina Packer or
Kevin Coleman) taught that it is no surprise that theatre expanded from acting
out stories around the fireside to a full blown entertainment at the same time
we started to live in cities. To live in close proximity with so many others
and strangers, we needed to control our impulses and large emotions. Otherwise,
our cities would be torn apart by violence. To enjoy the benefits of City
living, we had to trade a part of our humanity.
Every great human innovation requires a loss of some vital part of
humanity.[ii]
As
a consolation prize for limiting our full range of emotional expression, we got
theatre. Watching actors in the throes of simulated life having the full and
raw emotional experience of humanity replaced and settled our own need to have
these large emotions. We modulated our response to experience. In exchange, we
got theatre and entertainment. The actor’s responsibility is to feel all that
we do not allow ourselves to feel, to be the extreme and raw experience. Watching/
Hearing/ Experiencing theater allows us to touch this extremity without going
through the full experience ourselves.
Theater
also helped to socialize the populace and teach them how to live (and how not
to live) in society. Entertainment is intended to be instructive.[iii]
In
Ancient Greece, theatre grew to be a community experience. It was large and epic.
At the start, the violence was kept off stage. It was reported and spoken. The
actors expressed the full experience of the violence and its impact on their
lives, but the act of violence was not seen. They didn’t see Agamemnon being
stabbed in his bath nor do they see Oedipus gouge out his eyes. Slowly, the
violence began to creep onto the stage. By the time the theatre of the Greeks
transitioned to Rome, the violence had crept onstage. With the excesses of the Roman
Empire, came greater violence as part of the Roman tragedies. It is reported
that it grew in excess to the point there were “snuff plays” where actors were
actually killed onstage. It’s no surprise since theatre was competing with the
Gladiator contests at the local Coliseum.[iv]
What
happens to a society when the acts of violence are portrayed in the entertainment?
What is happening in a society that needs to continually increase the extremity
of the violence in their entertainment? There must be a correlation.
When
popular theater resurged again in the Renaissance, violence was initially kept
off the stage.[v]
They had read their Aristotle. Though in time, the violent acts began to creep
onto the stage. As Elizabethan theatre gave way to the Jacobean Era the
portrayal of violence expanded and became more explicit. As one part of the
culture became more liberal and permissive of all extremes, a conservative
backlash grew until the King lost his head, the theaters were closed and the
country edged toward a theocracy. Was this caused by the explicit violence in
the theaters and the adjoining bear baiting arenas where animals were torn
apart for sport?
Soon
after motion pictures began at the beginning of last century, there was a movement
to force restraint and limit explicit violence and sex. (i.e., the Hayes Code).
These restraints began to fall off in the sixties and seventies. Filmmakers began
to explore and add more vivid portrayals of violence. It was done to express
realism, but it devolved in time for titillation and commerce. They knew and
exploited the fact that violence sells. It fed something in our culture.
At
this point in my argument, I might be expected to advocate for less violence in
entertainment, that the showing of violence in entertainment is a degradation
of the culture. However, as I thought about this trend from the violence being
kept offstage to being brought onto the stage/screen, I noticed a trend in each
of the cultures: the elevation in violence often coincided with a lack of wars
in the countries and to the populace. This is not to say the Romans,
Elizabethans or Americans weren’t engaging in wars or colonization during the
Pax Romana, the Elizabethan Golden Age or America in the later twentieth
century. The difference is that the stability and strength of the country meant
that the wars did not happen in the country nor was the full populace at war.
Could
it be that the expression of violence in entertainment is in direct
relationship with the violence in the culture? Some people will argue that the United
States in the 2013 is a violence culture, look at the number of gun
deaths. I would argue that most
Americans have very little exposure to violence. There are certainly violent
sections of every city and a sub-section of the populace is regularly
confronted by violence. For most Americans real violence is reported on the
television and on our smart phones, it is not something we actually
encounter. Is this why we need the
placebo of violent entertainment? Is it making up for something we
intrinsically need as humans?
We
haven’t been “civilized” for very long in the grand evolutionary scheme. Primitive life contained a greater daily
threat to violence, disease and death than we Moderns experience. The only real
daily threat I feel is driving on the freeway in Los Angeles and it is
mitigated by my own skill and the “armored” Jeep that protects me.
If
we really want to reduce violence in entertainment, perhaps we should have the
Civil War that is being threatened by our divisiveness. If we Americans were
truly confronted with the risk of violence or death, we might not crave
violence in our entertainment.
The
biggest problem with this increase in entertainment violence is some in the
culture can’t handle it. On one side of the spectrum there are those who are sensitive
to violence due to past trauma or their heightened sense of empathy.
Experiencing an act of violence for them is like it is happening to them.[vi]
On the other side of the spectrum are people, usually young men, who no longer
see or feel the violence happening to others.
This disassociation from shared humanity disconnects them from their
actions and the impact on others. In a
few sick young men, their inability to differentiate between media and real
violence allows them to massacre others.
Is
the violence in our entertainment still helping to socialize our culture? Or
has it expanded to nullify and numb any and all emotional response? Is it
keeping us from experiencing our lives? Are the people who are becoming
increasingly hyper-sensitive to violence coupled with those who have become
immune and disassociated from the violence a sign that we are putting ourselves
in danger? Are these folks on the edges are proverbial canaries in our coal
mine?
Follow this link to the next part of the series When Entertainment Violence Works.
[i] I’m writing about violence in
entertainment. Sex and Nudity in
entertainment will need to wait for another essay. Discussing violence in the
States is a walk in the woods compared to slogging through the swamp of our
culture’s relationship with sex.
[ii] While I speak of a living in a
city, I’m not just talking about places with a population over a million. For
tens of thousands of years humans lived in large tribes where everyone knew
each other and was in some way related. When the towns grew to the size where
you no longer knew everyone in town, then you had challenges.
[iii] The two chief definitions of the
word entertain is to amuse and to consider.
Our entertainment should embody both aspects at the same time.
[iv] I wrote this footnote for the
Teeter Totter of the Brain Series. I like the idea and wanted to share it
again: When the Romans took over a
city, they were quick to build three specific buildings: The Amphitheatre (or
Hippodrome) for the horse/chariot races and wagering; the Coliseum for the
blood sports, and the Theaters for cultural instruction and comedy. These three
different venues for entertainment were important because they helped distract
and civilize the citizens. The races or athletic competitions fed the desire
for competition. There were four teams designated by color throughout the
Empire. If you were a Green, you’d root for the Greens wherever you were. Think
of this as the sports entertainment that fills our TVs today. The Blood Sports
of the Gladiators offered the cathartic experience. This allowed for the
release of the basest and most violent instincts. This pacified and distracted
the mob. We currently get this from our movies and football. The Theater was
built for both tragic and comic plays. This entertainment taught the new
populace what it was to be living in their time as members of the Empire. It
was also the place that allowed a place to make fun of and ridicule the
leaders.
[v] There was theater between the
Romans and the Renaissance. I can discuss the full transition in detail, but
most people would quit reading. I’m working with bold strokes. If you want more
details, write me. As one colleague once said, “Go ask Carey, he’ll tell you
more than you want to know.”
[vi] There is a lot of writing on this.
The simplest introduction is to the research by Elaine Aron, PhD. Her writing on the Highly Sensitive Person or
Sensory Processing Sensitivity is accessible and not to technical. High Sensitivity Persons. Jung coined the phrase “Innate Sensitiveness”
in 1913.
[vii] The Los Angeles Times did a great
series on Violence in Culture this past Sunday. This link will take you to the
lead story and links to the rest of the articles: LA Times Series on Violence in Entertainment.
