Why do we watch violent movies?

It seems that these days a large percentage of movies (50%?) released have vilolence in them. I must admit i watch lots of movies with violence in them, and this is something i would like to change.
I think i have become decencitized to seeing violence in movies. And now much to my shame, when i see violence in the news such murders, the Iraq War etc it doesnt seem to phase me that much. is that the case with any of you?

I have a few question i'd like to ask everyone.
why do we as humans (i dont think its a western culture thing as im sure people in non western countries watch violent movies as well) like to watch violent movies?
is there a part of us that is drawn to watching violence?

i'm thinking maybe the violence we see so prevalently in movies is just a mirror of society and therefore ourselves. anyone agree?

i just find it so odd that we as humans can watch people get killed in movies and watch it as if watching a romantic comedy, eg it just doesnt phase us. and i think its very disturbing how movies, in recent years have become a lot more violent, dark and disturbing, as if showing a sinister side of humanity that hadnt been explored yet. examples of this that come to mind are the Saw and Hostel movies.

i think its sad that Hollywood makes so many violent movies and then sends them off to all four corners of the world.

the ONLY reason i can think of that violent movies have been made since movies were invented is because we as humans like watching them.

we live in a very violent world. it seems so many people die at the hands of other people rather than living a long life and dying of old age (which i think every human being on this planet has the right to do). im just wondering what role violence in movies as well as other entertainment mediums such as music and video games plays in all this violence. a case in point is all the school shootings that have happened in America. now im guessing these young people (and its just a guess) filled thir heads with violence from movies, music and video games. i just cant picture these young teenage boys watching romantic comedies and listening to kenny g. quite the opposite. im thinkiing they listened to 'dark' music and watched lots of movies with violence in them.

im no brain surgeon or anything but i have a feeling being exposed to so much violence from one or all 3 entertainment mediums MUST have an effect on the brain, even if it, like i said earlier, decencetizes us to violence in real life.


what does everyone else think.
i would very much like it if other people could add thier thoughts to what i think is a VERY important issue.

I don't know. There are many reasons why violence has been raised in modern movies. Actually, before the Hays Code kicked in in 1934, there were many violent films, with blood, bullet holes, gore, bodies rotting, flies on corpses, etc. But when the Code kicked it, that was all anathema.

Later on, with films like Bonnie and Clyde trying to push the envelope, the U.S. system had to somehow address the sex, violence, and swearing which had been allowed in other countries for years. So, Jack Valenti, a former employee of the Federal Government (!!) took charge of the MPAA.

Anyway, I agree with those who believe the powers that be are far more scared of sex than they are of violence. Sex may be a sin to some, but on the other hand, it can definitely be a form of love, when applied the way that certain people want it applied. The problem IS!!! that sex is no longer accepted as a synonym for love. Now, I'll be the first to agree that it may not be anymore, but I'll tell you something else YOU already know: Violence always stands for violence, The fact that it is "apparently healthier" to endorse violence over sex and/or love is repugnant to me. Whatever you want to blame Europeans for, I don't think you can blame them for sex; sure, the acceptance of sex as healthy and something to be examined, but c'mon, already. You really believe the French do it more than the Americans? HA!

Sorry, but I believe this is 100% on-topic.

__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

What does any of that jibberish have to do with what i talked about. If you want to talk about sex in movies start your own thread.

I was talking about violence, Einstein.

Wow, looks like somebody forgot to take their Ritalin.

Regardless, I think we watch violent movies because violence is intriguing. I think most people have a bit of innate curiousity about it, and most of us don't actually see much violence in day to day life, anyway.

I think there's a degree to which violence is incidental to other things we like, such as action, excitement, or drama. Violence and death are often tied into these things in general. Even people who don't specifically desire to see violence, then, may still find themselves watching a lot of it.

None of this really worries me, personally. Being desensitized to seeing violence may not be a great thing, but unless it somehow carries over and causes people to engage in more of it, it doesn't strike me as a huge concern.

Besides, it's not as if people are watching actual deaths on screen (at least, not generally). I'm not sure why it's supposed to be disturbing or sad that we can watch violence "as if watching a romantic comedy" given that most of the violence is just as fictional as those romantic comedies.

I don't think moviegoers are taking violence lightly, so much as they've learned to separate real violence from pretend violence. In my experience, most people react appropriately to violence in films based on real-life events, like Black Hawk Down or Saving Private Ryan. People aren't necessarily desensitized to violence, so much as they've learned to make a distinction between reality and fiction, and generally opt not to take the latter too seriously.

I don't know how I missed this discussion 5 months ago, because I agree it's worth discussing if we can separate the objective facts from our subjective impressions.

Let's start with a couple of the quotes above: "We live in a very violent world" and "movies . . . mirror society and therefore ourselves." How violent is your world, really? How many times a week do you witness a fatal car wreck on your way to work, or see two guys fighting on the street or stumble across a dead body in a back alley or even hear gunshots in the distance? I suspect such things rarely happen to most of us. You may see such things on the 6 o'clock news and know that such things do occur in your town, but how often do you actually encounter such events yourself? I suspect that if movies really reflected our society, the films generally would be extremely dull because most people's lives are pretty dull. Get up, go to work, go to school, come home, do chores, watch TV, sleep, and get up and do it all again tomorrow.
So does the violence we see in movies and even on the evening TV news really "reflect" society? Or is it instead a condensed review of the worst features of our society? I think the latter, especially TV news. There's a standing joke among print reporters about TV news--"if it bleeds, it leads." Meaning that car wrecks and house fires and robberies and shootings are usually the lead items on the evening newscasts simply because such stories are more visual and therefore easier to report. A camerman can always get an interesting shot of crumpled cars, people being loaded into ambulances, firemen entering smokey buildings, or yellow crime scene ribbons put up by the police. Those pictures have the bright emergency lights and sounds of sirens and other exciting things that will grab the viewer's attention. So that's what you see at the start of a news program, rather than the front-page story in your evening newspaper about the city council that day voting to raise local taxes or to put up cameras to catch people running stoplights at intersections. The only pictures for those stories are dull shots of dull city council members in dull discussions.

As for people's seeming indifference to deaths of others by the hundreds or thousands, Kirk Douglas had the best evaluation of that in the film "Ace in the Hole." Veteran journalist Douglas tells a cub reporter, "You have 500, 5,000, or 5 million people dead, and readers can't get their head around such numbers. But if you have one man in danger, people want to know all about it--who is he, what's he like, what's he doing, what's he thinking." That fact has always been true.

Of course, campfire tales and books also featured tales of unusual adventures and violence. Your average ancient Greek was no Jason in search of the golden fleece and your average Middle East or Asian villager was no Sinbad the sailor, but they enjoyed the stories. One of the first motion pictures, a story of a western train robbery, opened with the view of an outlaw on screen discharging his pistols at the audience. That scene looks mild to us today, but it drove audiences screaming from the theater, back when some of those people had actually witnessed robberies and shootings and rode with posses. So right from the start, movies had an eye for what would excite audiences and stimulate talk about new films. There were lots of nudity and violence in those early films until some codes of conduct were developed to tone down some of the "worst" aspects. Still, Hollywood accomplished a lot with killings occuring offscreen (check out the original Scarface with Paul Muni and Public Enemy, the gangster film that made Cagney a star).

The 1930s-1940s were the heyday of the old movie studio system with most Americans going to the movies at least twice a week. But then came the 1950s and the spread of television that entertained people in their homes for "free," and the movies had to come up with something to win back audiences. Some of it was with new technology, 3-D, Cinemescope, technicolor. But some of it was to give "adult" audiences something they could never see on santitized black-and-white TV, like quick flashes of nude Brigette Bardot, "adult" language and themes, and increased violence. So in the 1960s movies developed anti-hero heroes like James Bond who disarms and then shoots an enemy agent and beds all the women just for the fun of it, or Eastwood's man with no name who shoots down 4 gunfighters for laughing at his mule. More important, I think, was the colored TV news coverage of the war in Vietnam that brought dead bodies and burning villages into our homes as we sat down for dinner. I think the combination of violent movies and the real violence of our first televised war went a long way in desensitizing both the media and its viewers to violence, which we have been escalating ever since.

The main difference between then and the 21st century is that Hollywood has become very good at marketing violence to young audiences. The biggest danger IMHO, however, are the extremely violent video games now being marketed where racking up body counts is the way you keep score. The US Army changed its training programs after World War II to get young men accustomed to the battlefield through the use of human-shaped targets that pop up and get knocked down when shot, a far cry from shooting at bull's-eye targets under the old system. The Army also developed simulators for tanks and planes and helicopters to train those crews to react immediately to physical stimuli. And the video game industry has taken those same principles to develop some ultra violent games for adolescents that hone their reaction skills to quickly pick off opponents among the realistic sounds and sights of battle. The games don't necessarily make a normal kid prone to violence (although the study of its effects on a disturbed teen would likely be interesting). But it does get him accustomed to the automatic physical action of picking up a gun and firing at a human-like target, which means that under certain conditions he's more prone to take such action without even thinking about it.

I agree. Watching something violent is more interesting than watching two people hug for an hour and a half.

__________________

The totally awesome and soul consuming TFH One a Day Reviews.

It's just entertaining. Why do you think action movies make so much at the box office.

Ok...so, a few points I'd like to make:

I watch way more violence than the vast majority of people, and I'm not violent at all. And that's how most of the world is. Just because we see it on tv doesn't mean we're going to do it. Please give humanity a little credit.

I'm not saying humans arent violent. In fact a lot of the violence in films are inspired by, and sometimes can not even compare to, some of the things humans have done to each other throughout history. So obviously, violent movies are not where all our problems started.

If you feel that you can watch someone be killed but movies have numbed you so much that you wouldn't really care, there may be a problem. Otherwise, numbing yourself to violence is normal.

Being fascinated with mortality is completely understandable. Humans are pretty much obssessed with death and loss, so it makes sense that we'd be attractd to movies that center around darker subject matter.

Violent movies are a relatively healthy way to get in touch with your primitive side. In my opinion, modern life is getting so cushy people are just looking for ways to get out all of their primitive desires and pent up frustrations. Movies are a good way to satisfy lust for aggression without acting out in a deconstructive way.

Plus it's fun to watch things go boom.

I think that we desentisize ourselves to fictional violence. Yes, we watch it in movies and it dosen't bother us because somewhere in our subconscious we know that the person is still alive and will see another day.

Meanwhile if I were to see someone being struck and killed by a car in real life. I know I would probabily need at least a couple of months of intensive psychatric help.

In movies, we know that the violence is fake and we numb ourselves to that. But when in came down to real life, I don't think that we could get over it that easily.

actually, i don't find this odd at all.

i think that when you're watching a very violent scene in a movie and it just doesn't phase you, it's more because you know that it isn't real. i think that's why gorefests [like Saw and Hostel as you mentioned], don't leave people with that feeling of general badness or shame. films like that are just so ridiculously over the top that it just doesn't affect us.

that's why, at least for me [and from a lot of people, i think], movies that depict human suffering in other ways [ie, something psychological rather than physical], or even just something that can or actually is based on truth is much, much more disturbing. things like Hostel and Saw are purely fiction and it's more of a joke than anything. stuff like Schindlers List, Hotel Rwanda, Requiem for a Dream, or The Magdalene Sisters had much more of an affect on me, and the violence in those movies is minimal compared to the former.

but to answer your question more directly, i think we as humans tend to be drawn to movies like that because we just want to watch something that makes us feel something. afterall, we watch movies like Casablanca or It's a Wonderful Life to feel joy and romance; why is it so odd to want to watch movies that make us feel something else? i think sometimes, people become so raw and numb of feeling anything just from day to day living, that movies can be a wonderful utility to escape reality and really feel something.

films really are therapy.

__________________
letterboxd

Some interesting points made here.

I believe most humans are not phased, or varying degrees of reaction; because this is a psychological defense mechanism, not to overreact & protect the human psyche. The brain just can't cope with a ceaseless onslaught of violence, so as to protect we become indifferent.

Morbid curiosity comes from the fact that MAN is the only creature on earth that knows it will die. Being able to contemplate our own death, can be said to have brought about religion & faith in the unknown.

Also taking a look at sex roles (traditionally) females are nesters & while males are hunter gathers. I believe the old brain kicks in here & can explain men's passion for violence. I've also heard this said before, "Because men cannot give birth, the closest they can come, is to destroy life."

Take Care
RR

__________________
If I felt any better I'd be sick!
Envy is mental theft. If you covet another mans possessions, then you should be willing to take on his responsibilities, heartaches, and troubles, along with his money. D. Koontz

OK, I generally agree that most people, even young inexperienced people with limited knowledge of the realities of life and death, can watch violence without feeling a need to commit violence just as they can watch pornography without then going out and raping women and molesting children. On the other hand, I read a study about people who have shot up schools or malls or fast-food joints, killing and wounding multiple victims that said a common thread among those incidents is that the shooters were in the habit of watching violent films and hearing violent songs. So it would seem that such input has some influence on unbalanced minds, but to what degree?

Now I'm probably the opposite of you in that I'm sure I watch ultra-violent films--I mean slasher films in which the whole plot is one bloody killing after another, vs. a violent but not deadly film like Raging Bull--much less than the average movie-goer. Part of that is generational--I was born in 1943, completed high school and joined the Army in 1961, long before Hollywood was producing anything like chainsaw massacres or Freddy or Jason or school-girl slasher films, so I never developed an interest in such movies. Moreover, between my 3 years in the Army and my 30+ years as a newspaper reporter I have seen many, many dead and dying people. I've seen and smelled burning flesh and I've walked into a room where three people were shot in the head and the carpet was so bloody that it squished up on your shoes with each step. Having seen things like that, I had no desire to see fake blood billowing around a fake shark in Jaws.

Moreover, with what I've read about the history of the Holocaust and having visited that memorial in Israel, I don't watch films like Schindler's List. I just can't take man's inhumanity to man on such a massive scale.

It's not that I can't stand scenes of blood and violence at all--I can watch a film like Glory or Gods and Generals with its presentations of real life Civil War battles because that's all from the distant past. And I can watch futuristic stuff like Alien, although a creature bursting out of someone's chest was rather off-putting. Or violent fairy tales like Lord of the Rings. But I don't watch films about Vietnam or Charles Starkweather or Charles Watson the University of Texas sniper because I remember when all of that was happening and I have no interest in reliving it again.

I think that, having come of age and developed my taste in movies back before computer graphics were available to punch up explosions and other violence, I just never developed a taste for things going boom on a grand scale--White Heat is boom eough for me.

I have to disagree with you here. I think most people never give a thought about their mortality, certainly not on a daily, weekly, or any regular basis. Especially young people--teenagers think they're 10-ft tall and bullet-proof and are going to live for ever. It reminds me of what an ol' blues singer once said in explaining the nature of the blues--"a man goes along for years thinking his life is all right, and then one day he goes to a friend's funeral." It's that sudden brush with the reality of one's mortality that brings you up short and causes you to reconsider your accomplishments and your goals.

That's something you just can't get from watching slasher movies.

I think this is why action movies are so popular. It isn't the violence, it is the invincible hero who can dodge bullets and save the day. It's wish fulfilment. Think Die Hard or James Bond or The Matrix.

Well, to the first part of this, I'd just like to point that it's a classic chicken vs egg arguement. Maybe people who are already destined to be violent are attracted to violence in media. It doesn't necessarily add to their violent tendencies.

In regards to the second part, I guess i was a little hasty in making that generalization. At 17 I judge the world based more off of what I know about myself and a few things I've picked up from my immediate souroundings, which may not reflect the world very accurately. In your experiences, you have much more insight into the true nature of humanity than me and I certainly respect your opinion. I would like to point out that by "obsessed" I wasn't saying that we dwell on our mortality, but that the threat of loss and death serves as our greatest, and maybe only true, motivation. Poor phrasing on my part. Would you still disagree with that? And tell me if you want me to elaborate, cause I'm not having a very articulate week and I'm still not sure if what I'm saying is very clear...

i don't see it like that at all. everyone has all kinds of mediums of art, music, and film at their fingertips, but everyone chooses their own habits based on what interests them. i'm sure as a child, most are exposed to happy-go-lucky cartoons, Teletubbies, Thomas the Train, Dora the Explorer, and Elmo, right? in other words, it would make more sense that people that already have violent streaks instilled within them are drawn to violence, and would therefore seek it out of their own accord. an already rage-ridden person at heart that watches a violent movie may get "ingenious" ideas from said film, but i don't think they are the basis for any persona. it's like that quote, "movies don't create psycho's, movie's make psycho's more creative."

i actually find it sort of infuriating when people try to blame musicians like Marilyn Manson for the core of school shootings; this is obviously just another way to pass the buck, and it's ridiculous. Marilyn Manson is no more at fault for violence then Mickey Mouse.

Ha, I was literally just thinking "hey it's like that quote from Scream..." then you said it and it was perfect

This:


says it all--in a nutshell, king_of_movies. It's absolutely spot-on.

I know Marilyn Manson's name but am not familar with his work and have never personally heard any thing pro or con about him and his music. Nor have I ever heard anyone seriously suggest that there is any one single cause of violence in society. I did cite one study that indicated that many mass murderers shared an interest in movies and songs about violence, particularly those with high body counts among essentially defenseless victims. There also have been studies that indicate teenage suicides often had a preference for films and songs about death. Such studies suggest a possible link of some sort between certain individuals' behavior and this kind of movie and music, but like you, I very much doubt it was the sole cause. Perhaps it contributes in some way to a troubled person's view of society and of himself; but IMHO it's more likely that a person who has thoughts of killing himself or others would naturally be interested in movies and songs about death and killing, the same way that a person with aspirations to join the US Army's Special Forces might have recordings of both The Green Berets song and film or a wanna-be astronaut is drawn to films like The Right Stuff.

Personally, I think a much better clue to a possible future mass murderer is that such killers often have childhood histories of torturing and killing animals. That's a common factor in police profiles of such killers.

Although I'm not a fan and thus am not familar with the degree of violence that may (or may not) exist in songs by Mason and various gangsta rap, I doubt if it's any more "bloody" than some of the old English madrigals like Barbree Allen (who poisons her lover) or old US folk songs about the bloody feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, or more modern tunes like Frankie and Johnny, Stagger Lee (fatal shootings), Bad Leroy Brown (death by razor), Tom Dooley and The Long Black Veil (the hanging of innocent men), or The Last Kiss (teens killed in car wrecks). When it comes to violence on a large scale, no one can beat Shakespeare's MacBeth or King Richard. And there is nothing more cut-your-throat depressing than Poe's poem The Raven. I don't have the stomach today for Saw or Hell-Raiser, but as a kid I enjoyed the bloody stories and gruesome drawings of Tales from the Crypt and other such "comic" books. (One of the stories that I still remember involved children asking their parents about newspaper coverage of a man who kidnaps and kills a little girl, is captured, tried, and eventually executed. The kids then proceed to do the same thing to one of their playmates who had broken a little girl's doll. Another was about a little girl who is upset because her mom cuts flowers from the garden and arranges them in displays in the house. In the final scene, the little girl is arranging in a vase a "bouquet" of human arms and legs.)

Oh, you are quite articulate, but as with most email discussions, we seldom define our terms so "obsessed" means one thing to you and something else to me.

As for the "threat of loss and death" being "our greatest and maybe only true motivation," I don't think that's true. I'm 65, overweight, have a few heath problems, yet seldom am concious of the fact that by all odds I'm closer to the end of my life than the beginning of it. I honestly cannot ever remember deciding on whether to do one thing or another based on whether I would live through the event. There were much different motivations that inspired me as a teenager to climb the town water tower with one hand tied behind me (trying to "prove" I was "tough") and in later years to run around with married women, even after being found out and threatened by three husbands. As humans, we know we will die someday, but there's not a single one of us who believes it will be this day.