Red Acts

Slasher flicks, COPS, "M" rated video games, and seven Harry Potter books: all contain violence and millions have experienced them. I've personally seen guts fly on-screen and countless people maimed in my imagination. Magazines and papers hold my attention with violent headlines and photos. I've been shocked and awed by these bombardments of torture, blood, and pain, but guess what? So have you. Violence is everywhere, invading on all fronts, pages, soundtracks, and channels. As a result, questions are being asked. Is this healthy? Do we all crave total immersion in violence? Is this a new and nasty thing, our apparent affinity for pain? Or have we always, simply, as a species, needed to satiate such a deviant appetite? I don't know, but I do know that violence has always existed, and that our collective media-driven mass has certain frames of mind for violence to meet in the twenty-first century.

Violence has happened since before we were born, since before any contemporary technologies were even inklings. Such large-scale events as the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and Napoleon's conquest jarred people just fine without a YouTube link. There were also more intimate actions, and still are. Killings, murders, vendettas gone bloodily awry, serial killers ala Jack the Ripper, and domestic abuse. Then there were always the group think mobs, and those plain accidents, those negligent drivers backing over their neighbor's kids. These were smaller, but no less real, situations that escalated and ultimately ended in acts of red.

All of these things still see the light of day. The only difference is that now you can be in your pajamas when you find out about them. Just click on the evening news, open some Cheetos, and learn who killed whom. It's like a global game of Clue, only the talking boxes and magazine pages have already figured it out. We just get to kick back and let it wash down.

Just how much has violence infiltrated modern media? For a fact, if a kid watches two to four hours of television a day, by the time he or she enters middle school, he or she will have witnessed over 8,000 murders and at least 100,000 other acts of violence. Even G-rated films have an average of ten minutes of scenes depicting violence in some form (Rathus 179). Does this say something about our natural gravitation towards violence? Do we all watch too much television? Of course. Clearly, all kids kill other kids. Don't you watch the news?

No. I can't answer those questions. The point is that humans have always been around violence and have always, in turn, caused it. We react to real acts of red in raw ways, ways wholly separate than viewing silent movie shootouts. Many disagree. Some say we've become complacent towards such brutality. The mental problems and subsequent actions of a reckless few have solidified that claim into many critics' minds. By their logic, events such as the shootings at Columbine, or the desperate suicides of the World Trade Center bombers, might just have easily happened thanks to John Rambo or songs by Marylin Manson. It's extreme to accuse such character transformation and action as stemming from glamour violence. The real world counts, too, more than Hollywood cares to negotiate with.

It isn't bad, really, hearing about and reacting to violence. Violence isn't new and our reactions aren't new. It didn't spawn when the camera was invented. It's just broader in all these mediums. What is a true damaging effect of distributed violence today is how it's morphing to always be lowest common denominator. Every time you watch the news, morbid and curdling stories take center stage. Yet this isn't changing us into blood-lusting maniacs. It just sells. Before television, I'm sure word of a stabbing would have made the village rounds in record flight. CNN didn't create mankind's fascination with pain and struggle. I guess we do have some imbedded yearning for violence, after all. It probably has something to do with our mortality.

Furthermore, violence does not just happen of its own accord. There are emotional precursors and connotations that arrive with violence to any social soiree. Wingmen like grief, guilt, tragedy, remorse, withdrawal, and terror, if only to name a handful. These feelings overwhelm us when violence actually happens. They remind us what's real, what real red does.

If you don't believe me, ask a mother who's lost her child to a kidnapper's knife if the ordeal reminded her of an episode of 24. Talk to a grown man who's still in therapy for the ways his father assaulted him, and see if he eats popcorn as he relives his story. People don't want violence, and we certainly don't want other people telling us that we can't tell the difference. We can escape to worlds of fantasy killings, cinema slaughter where the blood is ketchup and dye, and still walk out unchanged, with no necessity to hurt a living thing. It happens daily.

Why? I think it's because we naturally know what real violence is. Seeing it through pixels and quick cuts does not trick our instincts. Instead, it makes us more intent to act and react to real and unfortunate events. If we see someone in true pain, before our own eyes, something primal kicks in. We think of survival. We think of fear. If technological or media violence makes us sloths to the real thing, why are there shell-shock victims and hotlines for abused children? Can't they just shrug their experiences off like a character they've read about or watched?

It is that distinction, between the screens that show violence without consequences, and the real world where it all layers, that makes such arguments futile. Even when violence is exposed to masses, the majority of that mass is full of mentally ripe individuals who all know the real pain of red acts, not apocalyptic killers who run through crowds with chainsaws. Violence is ancient, only now it's being digitized. None of us crave violence because we all truly know it.

Works Cited:

Rathus, Spencer A. Psychology in the New Millennium (Eight Edition). Orlando: Harcourt College Publishers, 2002.