[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img]When I was a kid, I played with Transformers, fascinated with the ability to transform a car or plan into a robot and back again. But unlike my best bud at the time, I was rather particular about which Transformers I’d collect: only the good guys, the Autobots. And so it was with just about everything I played, even with video games. I simply had no interest to inhabit, even in fantastical sense, the role of a villain. So I can’t quite relate to the fascination with villainy that underlines many crime movies, horror movies or even video games like Grand Theft Auto IV, which is currently breaking sales records. I struggle with the idea of games in which one can murder cops, run over pedestrians, and so on, just as I struggle with the notion of being entertained by violence in films.
Style sells Content
Entertainment is, to a large extent, a key purpose of style in the media arts. As any marketing professional will tell you, a compelling, attractive style will sell the content. Films like Sin City present violence in a hyper-stylized, visually attractive style, whereas films like The Bourne Supremacy favour a brute realism. Similarly, games like GTA IV offer great gameplay (so the game critics say) and content that is all about violence towards others. If you present violence attractively, you sell it whether that is the intention or not. Of course, I’m not saying that violence doesn’t have a place in the stories we tell through various media. The world contains violence and our stories, quite naturally, reflect an attempt to deal with that. But unless a film or game is willing to take the morality of its violence into account – like The Bourne Supremacy, for example – it all comes across as mere Sin City-like exploitation. Take James Bond, the quintessential action movie hero. We cheer him on because he fights the bad guys. Yet the glamour with which he is portrayed glosses over moral difficulties that, in a small-than-life character, would never pass muster. He womanizes, but never seems to leave a trail of pregnant women behind. It can hardly be case that while his Walther PPK fires live ammunition, his other gun is firing blanks. Or can it? Who knows? Bond movies, as entertaining as they are, don’t really possess complex moral dimensions. The same applies to the often excessive, high collateral-damage methods Bond uses to achieve his goals. Neither the character nor the universe he inhabits seems willing to be self-critical.
Does this mean that video game or movie violence makes players and viewers violent? I don’t think so. As far I know, no conclusive link has been demonstrated. Yet, when trying to answer the question as to why violence is entertaining, those who support and even encourage that violence can’t do better than point to the difference between fantasy and reality as a defense. It’s not real violence being done to real people, they say, and thus not subject to moral condemnation. This suggests an interesting thought experiment: what happens if a person can’t tell whether the violence shown on screen is staged or a recording of something that actually happened? Think Faces of Death, albeit with more contemporary effects technology. How do you consider morals in such an instance? The answer is that appeals to morality ultimately owe more to metaphysics than physics. The difference between fantasy and reality is largely a red herring.
I suspect that however much any given individual may not be violent despite consuming violent content or playing as violent criminals in video games, the pervasiveness of violence in our entertainment does have an overall negative effect. Not necessarily on an individual level, but a cultural and social one. Simultaneously a reflection of violence in our culture and a quasi-Pavlovian reinforcement of violence as a method to affect change, violence as entertainment goes back to time immemorial and is deeply ingrained. The choices we make, the way we interpret the world around us, exist in a context that legitimizes violence. For proof, consider how difficult it is for a non-violent resister to persuade the mainstream of how effective and morally desirable non-violence resistance can be if correctly and comprehensively implemented.
Taking Violence for Granted
We take revelations of torture for granted. We take war in foreign countries for granted. We take a lot of things for granted. I certainly did when playing violent first-person shooters in which the nobility of the outcome (saving the world, or some such thing) belied the violent methods (killing everything) of achieving that outcome.
My question, then, is this: When we can’t even ask moral questions of our entertainment, what does that say about our capacity for skepticism in regards to politics and policy?
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