A VIOLENT (OR APATHETIC) REACTION!

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Last week I was at dinner with a friend and the topic of gun violence in schools came up. During the course of the conversation, my friend casually mentioned, “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it. These things are just going to happen.” I have to admit I became defensive. Perhaps it’s because I teach at a university and there is a slight vulnerability that I feel. I explained to my friend that his attitude reflected part of the problem. As a society, we have accepted that violence is part of life, but many of us don’t see or understand the ways in which we are complicit. Agreeing to the normality of deplorable aggression is at best apathetic and portrays the population at large as powerless.

HOW WE FEEL ABOUT OURSELVES AND BODY IMAGE

We, as a society, have put our stamp of disapproval on profanity, nudity and sexuality. A quick flash of Janet Jackson’s nipple created a firestorm of censorship that eventually forced people like Howard Stern off of terrestrial radio. At the time, Howard was known for pushing the envelope with discussions involving sexuality.

In our culture, we have forbidden our networks from featuring nudity on our broadcasts. I recall the first time I traveled to London, nearly three decades ago, and saw nudity in a TV skincare commercial. I was stunned. Not only did they have nudity on TV, it was in a commercial. At the time, it never occurred to me this could even be done. But Europeans don’t have the sexual hang ups that we see so frequently here in the U.S. In fact, one of my screenwriting students recently wrote a sex scene that read something like this: “It is indicated they have sex.” I immediately understood this was her own form of censorship because she didn’t want to describe the intimate details of her own story.

 WTF STANDS FOR WHAT?!

As a society, we have also outlawed four letter words. I was miffed recently while watching a reality show. Some of the reality stars were cursing and the network had not only bleeped the language, they had also pixelated the mouths of those delivering the salty words. I suppose their philosophy was, we don’t want you to hear it or see it if you read lips. I must admit I was incredulous. In the U.S., we have huge checks and balances in place to make sure no one sees a nipple, or hears words like shit or fuck. But what are our attitudes on violence? How hard do we work to regulate how much of it audiences see on the big and small screen?

A few years back, I turned on my TV around noon and stumbled onto the movie Thirty Days of Night. The film had already started and one of the characters was being decapitated. Very recently, a new series with Kevin Bacon aired on Fox called The Following. As a professor of film and TV screenwriting, I must admit it is well done. But I also question how responsible the writers are. The level of violence in The Following is extremely high. People are sliced and stabbed, beaten, shot, and set on fire and much of that happens in a single episode. While, on one level, the writing is quite good, I don’t know that I can follow the show because, even as a viewer, I felt assaulted by the amount of violent imagery.

This is why I grew defensive when my friend said, “There’s nothing we can do.” As a society, we have ample servings of violence on TV and in movies. Young children who turn on the TV at noon might see people being shot, stabbed or beheaded. These same young minds also switch on their X-boxes and play video games like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, where the goal is to rape, rob and kill. I don’t play video games, but I’ve seen the commercials promoting them. It seems the majority of them involve the delivery of violence.

How can we feign surprise when fifteen to 20 years later these same kids walk into a school or a movie theatre and begin delivering the same kind of brutality in real life? When we decide, as a culture, that images of violence might be as or perhaps more dangerous than a nipple or the f-word, maybe then we will see its decline. But it’s disingenuous to pretend that we don’t understand how or why these things happen. We are confronted with it almost every time we turn on our TV’s, play a video game or go to a movie.

On a lighter note, I have written a book. THE UNVEILING: 1.0 is a sci-fi/fantasy/adventure that many have compared to The Da Vinci Code (only with psychics and aliens, specifically the Anunnaki of Sumerian Mythology). To check it out, please visit the website: TheUnveilingSeries.com