Violence in media

"As John Frasier argues in ‘’Violence in the Arts’’, the complexity of mediated violence is immense, and it can and has fulfilled numerous and varied functions: ‘violence as release, violence as communication, violence as play, violence as self-affirmation, or self-defense, or self-discovery, or self-destruction, violence as a a flight from reality, violence as the truest sanity in a particular situation, and so on’ (1974: 9). That is essentially Martin Barker’s argument when he writes, ‘There simply isn’t a “thing” called “violence in the media”’ (199: 10). Barker has further noted that the expression ‘media violence’ is ‘one of the most commonly repeated, and one of the most ill-informed, of all time…’’There simply is no category “media violence” which can be researched’ (1997: 27-28; emphasis in original), which is why Barker argues that seventy years of social-scientific effects research has been largely useless: It has been constructed on the faulty logic that there is some such all-encompassing category as ‘media violence’ that can contain everything from movies, to television shows, to comic books, to newspaper photographs, to video games, to televised news reports and documentary footage."

"There are no charts, no words, that can convey what these photographs can," argued prosecutor Brian Kelberg in a regent dispute over whether photos of the slashed murder victims could be shown to O.J. Simpsons jurors. The defense had argued that the photos were too distressing and sickening, and should not be shown. Charts and diagrams were suggested as an alternative. But the judge allowed the photos."

"The implied semantic equivalency in using the term ‘’violence’’ to describe both actual events and their mediated representations suggests an inherent connection, and some would argue that film violence is a form of actual violence in that it can cause psychological distress and even act directly upon the body, causing revulsion, involuntary muscle spasms and even physical illness. Many of the most infamous violent films are associated with stories, mostly exaggerated, about initial audience members’ extreme physical responses. For example, when Sam Pechinpah’s ‘’The Wild Bunch’’ (1969) first screened in a 190-minute rough cut in Kansas City, it was reported that members of the audience left in revulsion and one or two of them vomited in the alleyway behind the theatre (see Harmetz 1969). While I recognize the overlapping of real and re-enacted violence and do not wish to make any overly ‘tidy distinctions’ between the two, it is also important for our purposes here to draw distinctions in order to maintain some semblance of clarity. Fictional film violence in complicated enough."

"Violent media has often been blamed for severe violent acts. Following recent findings that violence in movies has increased substantially over the last few decades, this research examined whether such increases were related to trends in severe acts of violence. Annual rates of movie violence and gun violence in movies were compared to homicide and aggravated assault rates between the years of 1960 and 2012. Time series analyses found that violent films were negatively, although nonsignificantly, related to homicides and aggravated assaults. These nonsignificant negative relations remained present even after controlling for various extraneous variables. Results suggest that caution is warranted when generalizing violent media research, conducted primarily in laboratories and via questionnaires, to societal trends in violent behavior."

"Originally, studies on violence in the cinema were connected to particular genres or filmmakers. This scholarship often investigated the patterns and tropes of violence as it was identified with genres, such as the western, the gangster film, and horror—or filmmakers such as Sam Peckinpah or Arthur Penn. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, there was a wave of new scholarship on violence in the cinema that often focused on how the form of violence created meaning. And since then, there has been steady publication of new scholarship every year investigating violence in the cinema. This bibliography is organized to represent the different paths of investigation that scholars have taken. A certain segment of the scholarship is still concerned with figuring out the relationship of violent spectacle to the narrative structure, while others investigate how violence impacts racial or gender identities. Still other scholarship considers the aesthetic qualities of violence in “ultraviolence,” specifically depicted in war films and apocalyptic films. Recent scholarship has also been addressing the rise in a new abundance of torture scenes in film often linking them to post-9/11 fears and issues. This contemporary scholarship has also led to some reinvestigations of genre, the Production Code, and various filmmakers associated with violence, all interpreted through this new lens concerning the aesthetics and structural impact of violence itself."

"An alternative perspective on the relationship between anxious and pleasant arousal may be derived from the general aggression model extended by Carnagey et al. (2007), to include desensitization. They argued that because repeated exposure to media violence reduces the anxiety reaction to violence, new presentations of violence “instigate different cognitive and affective reactions than would have occurred in the absence of desensitization” (p. 491). One such affective reaction may be a positive response to violence that would otherwise have been inhibited by anxious arousal. Huesmann and Kirwil (2007) have called this process sensitization. They argued that, for some individuals, watching violence is enjoyable, and, whereas it may provoke anger, it does not produce anxious arousal. On the contrary, the more such individuals watch violence, the more they like watching it. They are experiencing a “sensitization” of positive feelings. Because finding violence pleasant is incompatible with experiencing anxious arousal, increased pleasant arousal to depictions of violence in individuals with a high exposure to media violence would constitute indirect evidence of desensitization of “negative feelings” about violence. On the basis of this line of reasoning, we propose that anxious arousal by violent media stimuli is negatively related to pleasant arousal and that habitual exposure to media violence should both decrease negative emotional reactions and increase positive emotional reactions to violence, though the increase in positive emotions may occur for only a subset of individuals. For example, in a recent study of young adults in Poland, Kirwil (2008) found that proactively aggressive individuals tended to respond to violent media stimuli with a reduction in anxious arousal, whereas reactively aggressive individuals tended to respond with an increase in enjoyment."