Updated: Saturday, May. 29, 1999 at 20:03 CDT

Cruel intentions?

Maybe you agree with Hollywood that TV, movies and video games are just easy scapegoats for our increasingly violent society. Here's an essay that might change your mind.

Millions of teens have seen the 1996 movie `Scream,' a box-office and home-rental hit. Critics adored the film. `The Washington Post' declared that it deftly "mixes irony, self-reference, and social wry commentary." The `Los Angeles Times' hailed it as "a bravura, provocative sendup."

`Scream' opens with a scene in which a teen-age girl is forced to watch her jock boyfriend tortured and then disemboweled by two fellow students who, it will eventually be learned, want revenge on anyone from high school who crossed them. After jock-boy's stomach is shown cut open and he dies screaming, the killers stab and torture the girl, then cut her throat and hang her body from a tree so that Mom can discover it when she drives up.

A dozen students and teachers are graphically butchered in the film, while the characters make running jokes about murder. At one point, a boy tells a big-breasted friend she'd better be careful because the stacked girls always get it in horror films; in the next scene, she's grabbed, stabbed through the breasts, and murdered. Some provocative sendup, huh?

The movie builds to a finale in which one of the killers announces that he and his accomplice started off by murdering strangers, but then realized it was a lot more fun to kill their friends.

Now that two Colorado high school students have murdered 12 classmates and a teacher -- often, it appears, first taunting their pleading victims, just like celebrity stars do in the movies -- and six students have been shot at their Georgia school, some commentators have dismissed the role of violence in the images shown to the young, pointing out that horrific acts by children existed before celluloid or the movie screen.

That is true. The Leopold-Loeb murder of 1924, for example. But mass murders by the young, once phenomenally rare, are suddenly on the increase. Can it be coincidence that this increase is happening at the same time that Hollywood has begun to market the notion that mass murder is fun?

In cinema's never-ending quest to up the ante on violence, murder as sport is the latest frontier.

Slasher flicks began this trend; most portray carnage from the killer's point of view, showing the victim cowering, begging, screaming as the blade goes in, treating each death as a moment of festivity for the killer. (Many killers seek feelings of power over their victims, criminology finds; by reveling in the pleas of victims, slasher movies promote this base emotion.)

The 1994 movie `Natural Born Killers' depicted slaying the helpless not only as a way to have a grand time but also as a way to become a celebrity; several dozen on-screen murders are shown in that film, along with a discussion of how great it makes you feel to just pick people out at random and kill them. The 1994 movie `Pulp Fiction' presented hit men as glamour figures having loads of interesting fun; the actors were mainstream stars like John Travolta.

The 1995 movie `Seven,' starring Brad Pitt, portrayed a sort of contest to murder in unusually grotesque ways. (Screenwriters now actually discuss, and critics comment on, which film's killings are most amusing.) The 1995 movie `The Basketball Diaries' contains an extended dream sequence in which the protagonist, played by teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, methodically guns down whimpering, pleading classmates at his high school. A rock soundtrack pulses, and the character smiles as he kills.

The new Hollywood tack of portraying random murder as a form of recreation does not come from schlock-houses. Disney's Miramax division, the same mainstream studio that produced `Shakespeare in Love,' is responsible for `Scream' and `Pulp Fiction.'

Time-Warner is to blame for `Natural Born Killers' and actually ran television ads promoting this film as "delirious, daredevil fun." (After it was criticized for calling murder "fun," Time-Warner tried to justify `Killers' as social commentary; if you believe that, you believe `Godzilla' was really about biodiversity protection.)

Praise and publicity for gratuitously violent movies come from the big media conglomerates, including the newspapers and networks that profit from advertising for films that glorify murder.

Disney, now one of the leading promoters of violent images in American culture, even feels that what little kids need is more violence. Its Christmas 1998 children's movie `Mighty Joe Young' begins with an 8-year-old girl watching her mother being murdered. By the movie's end, it is 20 years later, and the killer has returned to stalk the grown daughter, pointing a gun in her face and announcing, "Now join your mother in hell." A Disney movie.

One reason Hollywood keeps reaching more obscene levels of killing is that it must compete with television, which today routinely airs the kind of violence once considered shocking in theaters. According to studies conducted at Temple University, prime-time network (non-news) shows now average up to five violent acts per hour.

In February, NBC ran in prime time the movie `Eraser,' not editing out an extremely graphic scene in which a killer pulls a gun on a bystander and blasts away.

The latest TV movie based on `The Rockford Files,' which aired on CBS the night of the Colorado murders, opened with a scene of an 11-year-old girl in short-shorts being stalked by a man in a black hood, grabbed, and dragged off, screaming.

Combining television and movies, studies indicate the typical American boy or girl will observe a stunning 40,000 dramatizations of killing by age 18. In the days after the Colorado slaughter, discussion of violent images in American culture was dominated by the canned positions of the anti-Hollywood right and the mammon-is-our-God film lobby.

Important points missed

The debate missed three vital points: the distinction between what adults should be allowed to see (anything) and what the developing minds of children and adolescents should see; the way in which important liberal battles to win free expression in art and literature have been perverted into an excuse for anti-social video brutality produced by cynical capitalists; and the difference between censorship and voluntary acts of responsibility.

The day after the Colorado shootings, Mike De Luca, an executive of New Line Cinema, maker of `The Basketball Diaries,' told `USA Today' that when kids kill, "bad home life, bad parenting, having guns in the home" are "more of a factor than what we put out there for entertainment."

Setting aside the disclosure that Hollywood now categorizes scenes of movie stars gunning down the innocent as "entertainment," De Luca is correct: Studies do show that upbringing is more determinant of violent behavior than any other factor.

But research also clearly shows that the viewing of violence can cause aggression and crime. So the question is, in a society already plagued by poor parenting and unlimited gun sales, why does the entertainment industry feel privileged to make violence even more prevalent?

Even when researchers factor out other influences such as parental attention, many peer-reviewed studies have found causal links between viewing phony violence and engaging in actual violence. A 1971 surgeon general's report asserted a broad relationship between the two.

Studies by Brandon Centerwall, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin, have shown that the postwar murder rise in the United States began roughly a decade after TV viewing became common. Centerwall also found that, in South Africa, where television was not generally available until 1975, national murder rates started rising about a decade later. Violent computer games have not existed long enough to be the subject of many controlled studies, but experts expect it will be shown that playing such games in youth also correlates with destructive behavior.

There's an eerie likelihood that violent movies and violent games amplify one another, the film and television images placing thoughts of carnage into the psyche while the games condition the trigger finger to act on those impulses.

Leonard Eron, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, has been tracking video violence and actual violence for almost four decades. His initial studies, in 1960, found that even the occasional violence depicted in 1950s television -- to which every parent would gladly return today -- caused increased aggression among 8-year-olds.

By the adult years, Eron's studies find, those who watched the most TV and movies in childhood were much more likely to have been arrested for, or convicted of, violent felonies. Eron believes that 10 percent of U.S. violent crime is caused by exposure to images of violence, meaning that 90 percent is not but that a 10 percent national reduction in violence might be achieved merely by moderating the content of television and movies.

"Kids learn by observation," Eron says. "If what they observe is violent, that's what they learn." To cite a minor but telling example, the introduction of vulgar language into American public discourse traces, Eron thinks, largely to the point at which stars like Clark Gable began to swear on screen, and kids then imitated swearing as normative.

The free-speech excuse

Defenders of bloodshed in film, television and writing often argue that depictions of killing don't incite real violence because no one is really affected by what they see or read; it's all just water off a duck's back. At heart, this is an argument against free expression. The whole reason to have a First Amendment is that people are influenced by what they see and hear: Words and images do change minds, so there must be free competition among them. If what we say, write, or show has no consequences, why bother to have free speech?

Defenders of Hollywood bloodshed also employ the argument that, because millions of people watch screen mayhem and shrug, feigned violence has no causal relation to actual violence. After a horrific 1992 case in which a British gang acted out a scene from the slasher movie `Child's Play 3,' torturing a girl to death as the movie had shown, novelist Martin Amis wrote dismissively in `The New Yorker' that he had rented `Child's Play 3' and watched the film, and it hadn't made him want to kill anyone, so what was the problem?

But Amis isn't homicidal or unbalanced. For those on the psychological borderline, the calculus is different. There have, for example, been at least two instances of real-world shootings in which the guilty imitated scenes in `Natural Born Killers.'

Most telling, Amis wasn't affected by watching a slasher movie because Amis is not young. Except for the unbalanced, exposure to violence in video "is not so important for adults; adults can watch anything they want," Eron says. Younger minds are a different story. Children who don't yet understand the difference between illusion and reality may be highly affected by video violence.

Between the ages of 2 and 8, hours of viewing violent TV programs and movies correlates closely to felonies later in life; the child comes to see hitting, stabbing and shooting as normative acts. The link between watching violence and engaging in violence continues up to about the age of 19, Eron finds, after which most people's characters have been formed, and video mayhem no longer correlates to destructive behavior.

The role of guns

Trends in gun availability do not appear to explain the rise in murder rates in the past few decades that has coincided with television and violent films. Research by John Lott Jr., of the University of Chicago Law School, shows that the percentage of homes with guns has changed little throughout the postwar era. What appears to have changed is the willingness of people to fire their guns at one another.

Are adolescents now willing to use guns because violent images make killing seem acceptable or even cool? Following the Colorado slaughter, `The New York Times' ran a recounting of other postwar mass murders committed by the young, such as the 1966 Texas tower killings (Charles Whitman was 25), and noted that they all happened before the advent of the Internet or shock rock, which seemed to the `Times' to absolve the modern media.

But all the mass killings by the young occurred after 1950 -- after it became common to watch violence on television.

When horrific murders occur, the film and television industries routinely attempt to transfer criticism to the weapons used. Just after the Colorado shootings, for instance, TV talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell called for a constitutional amendment banning all firearms. How strange that O'Donnell didn't call instead for a boycott of Sony or its production company, Columbia Tristar -- a film studio from which she has received generous paychecks and whose current offerings include `8MM,' which glamorizes the sexual murder of young women, and `The Replacement Killers,' whose hero is a hit man and which depicts dozens of fatal shootings. Handguns should be licensed, but that hardly excuses the convenient sanctimony of blaming the crime on the weapon, rather than on what resides in the human mind.

And, when it comes to promoting adoration of guns, Hollywood might as well be the NRA's marketing arm. An ever-increasing share of film and television depicts the firearm as something the virile must have and use, if not an outright sexual aid. Check the theater section of any newspaper, and you will find an ever-higher percentage of movie ads in which the stars are prominently holding guns. Keanu Reeves, Uma Thurman, Laurence Fishburne, Geena Davis, Woody Harrelson and Mark Wahlberg are just a few of the hip stars who have posed with guns for movie advertising.

Violence's box-office appeal

Hollywood endlessly congratulates itself for reducing the depiction of cigarettes in movies and movie ads. Cigarettes had to go, the film industry admitted, because glamorizing them gives the wrong idea to kids. But the glamorization of firearms, which is far more dangerous, continues. Today, even female stars who otherwise consider themselves politically aware will model in sexualized poses with guns. Ads for the new movie `Goodbye Lover' show star Patricia Arquette nearly nude, with very little between her and the viewer but her handgun.

But doesn't video violence merely depict a stark reality against which the young need be warned?

American society is far too violent, yet the forms of brutality highlighted in the movies and on television -- prominently "thrill" killings and serial murders -- are pure distortion. Nearly 99 percent of real murders result from robberies, drug deals and domestic disputes; figures from research affiliated with the FBI's behavioral sciences division show an average of only about 30 serial or "thrill" murders nationally per year.

Thirty is plenty horrifying enough, but at this point, each of the major networks and movie studios alone depicts more "thrill" and serial murders annually than that. By endlessly exploiting the notion of the "thrill" murder, Hollywood and television present to the young an entirely imaginary image of a society in which killing for pleasure is a common event. The publishing industry, including some advertisers in `The New Republic,' also distorts for profit the frequency of "thrill" murders.

The profitability of violent cinema is broadly dependent on the "down-rating" of films -- movies containing extreme violence being rated only R instead of NC-17 (the new name for X) -- and the lax enforcement of age restrictions regarding movies. Teens are the best market segment for Hollywood; when moviemakers claim their violent movies are not meant to appeal to teens, they are simply lying. The millionaire status of actors, directors, and studio heads -- and the returns of the mutual funds that invest in movie companies -- depends on not restricting teen access to theaters or film rentals.

Studios in effect control the movie ratings board and endlessly lobby it not to label extreme violence with an NC-17, the only form of rating that is actually enforced. `Natural Born Killers,' for example, received an R following Time-Warner lobbying, despite its repeated close-up murders and one charming scene in which the stars kidnap a high school girl and argue about whether it would be more fun to kill her before or after raping her.

Since its inception, the movie ratings board has put its most restrictive rating on any realistic representation of lovemaking, while sanctioning ever-more-graphic depictions of murder and torture. In economic terms, the board's pro-violence bias gives studios an incentive to present more death and mayhem, confident that ratings officials will smile with approval.

Commentary vs. trash

When R and X battles were first fought, intellectual sentiment regarded the ratings system as a way of blocking the young from seeing films with political content, such as `Easy Rider,' or discouraging depictions of sexuality; ratings were perceived as the rubes' counterattack against cinematic sophistication.

But in the 1960s and early '70s, murder after murder after murder was not standard cinema fare. The most controversial violent film of that era, `A Clockwork Orange,' depicted a total of one killing, which was heard but not on-camera. `(A Clockwork Orange' also had genuine political content, unlike most of today's big studio movies.)

In an era of runaway screen violence, the '60s ideal that the young should be allowed to see what they want has been corrupted. In this, trends in video mirror the misuse of liberal ideals generally.

Anti-censorship battles of this century were fought on firm ground, advocating the right of films to tackle social and sexual issues (the 1930s Hays office forbade, among other things, cinematic mention of cohabitation) and free access to works of literature such as `Ulysses,' `Story of O,' and the original version of Norman Mailer's `The Naked and the Dead.'

Struggles against censors established that suppression of film or writing is wrong. But to say that nothing should be censored is very different from saying that everything should be shown. Today, Hollywood and television have twisted the First Amendment concept that occasional repulsive or worthless expression must be protected, so as to guarantee freedom for works of genuine political content or artistic merit, into a new standard in which constitutional freedoms are employed mainly to safeguard works that make no pretense of merit.

In the new standard, the bulk of what's being protected is repulsive or worthless, with the meritorious work the rare exception. Not only is there profit for the performers, producers, management and shareholders of firms that glorify violence, so, too, is there profit for politicians. Many conservative or Republican politicians who denounce Hollywood eagerly accept its lucre.

Bob Dole's 1995 anti-Hollywood speech was not followed up by any anti-Hollywood legislation or campaign-funds strategy. After the Colorado murders, President Clinton declared, "Parents should take this moment to ask what else they can do to shield children from violent images and experiences that warp young perceptions." But Clinton was careful to avoid criticizing Hollywood, one of the top sources of public backing and campaign contributions for him and his would-be successor, Vice President Al Gore. The president had nothing specific to propose on film violence -- only that parents should try to figure out what to do.

When television producers say it is the parents' obligation to keep children away from the tube, they reach the self-satire point of warning that their own product is unsuitable for consumption. The situation will improve somewhat beginning in 2000, by which time all new TVs must be sold with the "V chip" -- supported by Clinton and Gore -- which will allow parents to block violent shows. But it will be at least a decade before the majority of the nation's sets include the chip, and who knows how adept young minds will prove at defeating it?

Lessons from the porn industry

Rather than relying on a technical fix that will take many years to achieve an effect, TV producers could simply stop churning out the gratuitous violence. Television could dramatically reduce its output of scenes of killing and still depict violence in news broadcasts, documentaries and the occasional show in which the horrible is genuinely relevant. Reduction in violence is not censorship; it is placing social responsibility before profit.

The movie industry could practice the same kind of restraint without sacrificing profitability. In this regard, the big Hollywood studios, including Disney, look craven and exploitative compared with, of all things, the porn-video industry. Repulsive material occurs in underground porn, but, in the products sold by the mainstream triple-X distributors such as Vivid Video (the MGM of the erotica business), violence is never, ever, ever depicted -- because that would be irresponsible.

Women and men perform every conceivable explicit act in today's mainstream porn, but what is shown is always consensual and almost sunnily friendly. Scenes of rape or sexual menace never occur, and scenes of sexual murder are an absolute taboo.

It is beyond irony that today Sony and Time-Warner eagerly market explicit depictions of women being raped, sexually assaulted and sexually murdered, while the mainstream porn industry would never dream of doing so. If money is all that matters, the point here is that mainstream porn is violence-free and yet risque and highly profitable. Surely this shows that Hollywood could voluntarily step back from the abyss of glorifying violence and still retain its edge and its income.

Following the Colorado massacre, Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer declared to a campaign audience, "In the America I want, all of these producers and directors, they would not be able to show their faces in public" because fingers "would be pointing at them and saying, `Shame, shame.' "

The statement sent chills through anyone fearing right-wing thought-control. But Bauer's final clause is correct. Hollywood and television do need to hear the words "shame, shame." The cause of the shame should be removed voluntarily, not to stave off censorship, but because it is the responsible thing to do.

Put it this way. The day after a teenager guns down the sons and daughters of studio executives in a high school in Bel Air or Westwood, Calif., Disney and Time-Warner will stop glamorizing murder. Do we have to wait until that day?

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