Sign in or register
for additional privileges

Flows of Reading

Engaging with Texts

Erin Reilly, Ritesh Mehta, Henry Jenkins, Authors
Negotiating Cultural Spaces, page 12 of 15
Previous page on path     Next page on path

 

You appear to be using an older verion of Internet Explorer. For the best experience please upgrade your IE version or switch to a another web browser.

3.12 The Cultural Value of Violence

We will now move from discussions of sub-cultures and race to the issue of violence in literary and media texts. Here, we will discern what is the valuable for educators to account for texts that contain violent themes and episodes. Earlier in this path, we discussed specific points of view, i.e., subcultures. For the rest of this path, we will look at multiple points of view in order to understand an issue as troubling—and educational—as violence in cultural texts.

At least since the school shootings of the late 1990s, teachers, parents, and educational institutions have been concerned with whether representations of violence in films or video games cause real-world violence. We have examined warning signs to understand "the monsters next door," as one of the national news magazines labeled the Columbine shooters. Our research has concluded that fantasies and representations of violence make young people more aggressive and antisocial. Teachers and counselors are required to keep track of violent themes in children's art and creative writing projects to identify early symptoms of impulses that might turn destructive. A national anxiety of and preoccupation with violence has been shaped by our assumptions of the "media effects" of violence on our students. In Flows of Reading, we will start with a different assumption—that to understand media's relationship to violence we should focus on understanding meanings rather than effects.

Media reformers believe effects emerge spontaneously, with little conscious effort, and are not accessible to self-examination. Meanings emerge through an active process of interpretation; they reflect our conscious engagement. They can be articulated, and they can be critically examined. New meanings take shape from what we already know and what we already think; thus, different readers will respond in diametrically different ways to the same depiction of violence.

A concern with media effects is an appropriate topic for a social science classroom where teachers and students can account for violenced based on proven scientific methodologies and evidence. A focus on meanings, on the other hand, offers a role for English or Art teachers, where representations of violence can be read in the context of the cultural stories that document trauma, loss, and aggression in creative ways. To understand the cultural imperatives that affect depictions of violence in the arts, we ask you to consider new critical perspectives of literary and media texts.

Violence in the real world is meaningless to us. We cannot comprehend the violent event, and we cannot understand the reasons why someone purpetrated the event. Nothing about the experience makes sense to us. Violence in fiction, however, is meaningful. Violence plays important roles in shaping the story or providing insight into the characters. The power of art is that it can transform a tragedy into a source of meaning. In doing so, it gives us a way to resolve conflicts sparked by real-world violence, even if far removed from our everyday lives. Art offer a way to symbolically exert control over the deep passions and disturbing emotions sparked by actual violence.

Consider this video blog produced by a college student, Lauren Bird, in response to the 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colorado during a screening of the film, The Dark Knight Rises. She describes what some saw as strong parallels between the shooter's persona and motives and the figure of the Joker in the Batman movies. She explores the value of stories in a culture to elucidate violence, and on meaning. 

Some Basic Assumptions

Let's start with an intentionally provocative statement. There is no such thing as media violence. That is to say, media violence does not exists outside a specific cultural and social context. We cannot eliminate media violence from art and popular culture. A study endorsed by The American Academy of Pediatrics reported that 100 percent of feature length cartoons released in America between 1937 and 1999 contained images of violence. For this statement to be true, violence must be defined broadly so that it includes the poisoned apple in Snow White to the hunter who shoots Bambi's mother, from Captain Hook's hook to the cobra that threatens to crush Mowgli in The Jungle Book—and that's just within the Disney canon. The definition must include not only physical violence but threats of violence, implied violence, and psychological/emotional violence. 

In our daily lives, no one operates on a definition of violence that broad. We make value judgments about the kinds of violence that applies to us, judgments based on meanings derived from specific representations of it. Church groups allow young children to watch Jesus beaten in The Passion of the Christ. Games reformers censure first-person shooters but not World War II simulation games. 

Why is violence so persistent in our popular culture? Because violence has been persistent across storytelling media of all kinds. A thorough account of violence in media would include: fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, oral epics such as Homer's Iliad, the staged violence of Shakespeare's tragedies, paintings of the Rape of the Sabine Women, and stained glass window representations of St. Sebastian shot through with arrows, or talk show conversations about the causes of school shootings. Violence is fundamental to media because aggression and conflict are core aspects of the human experience. Art provides moral order; it allows us to sort through our feelings, to move beyond easy answers and to ask hard questions.

Consider the example of Hansel and Gretel. The cultural historian Robert Darnton has traced the evolution of classic fairy tales from stories peasants told to reflect the brute realities of their everyday lives but are stripped of adult imagery and made appropriate for children's consumption. Consider two recent versions of the story for the screen. The Fractured Fairytale version of Hansel and Gretel avoids any direct depiction of violence, stripping away the mother's desire to send the children out in the woods to die, the threat that the witch might put the children into the oven, and the actions Gretel takes to dispatch the witch. While part of the pleasure is taken from the imaginative ways the story is retold, the narrative choices have made a gruesome story appropriate for Saturday morning television. By contrast, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) adapted the folk tale for a contemporary action film, including scenes of violence and portraying the bloodthirsty protagonist dispatch witches with multiple weapons. Part of the intended pleasure was to imply how the film takes a story associated with the nursery room and retells it with adult content. 

Our current framing of media violence assumes that such ruthless images attract us and inspire immitation. However, from the story of Cain and Able, representations of violence have always been considered morally instructive, and serve as warnings to violent transgressors. Many lives of saints, for example, identify with the sufferer of violence and not the committer of violence. Stories and parables of violence provoke empathy and make moral lessons memorable.

Moral reformers rarely concemn banal representations of violence, though formulaic violence is pervasive in our culture. Often, they denouce works that are acclaimed as art—the works of Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino. As this interview suggests, Tarantino thinks deeply about the kinds of stories he tells. Here, he delineates the different "brands" of violence in Django Unchained (2012), the extent to which violence affects the audience's responses to characters who commit violent acts, and his own attitudes about historical events noted for violence and social critics who attack his references to them. As this trailer suggests, Tarantino contrasts violence associated with slavery (the use of the whip, the staging of fights between men) with violence associated with vengeance and empowerment. His goal, in addition to entertaining, is to provoke reflections about the history of racialized violence in the United States.

For some, this provocation focuses attention on the moral consequences of violence. For others, however, who condemn the work. the film has little power to raise their consiousnes of violence in our own world. The study of literature offers a remarkable opportunity to engage young people in conversations about this issue through examination of stories about violence. the classroom offers a controlled environment for introducing them to works that encourage reflection about the human consequences of revenge and aggression, and for broadening the range of meanings they attach to such representations.

In the video below, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley discusses the choices he made in representing acts of violence and revenge in his play, Moby-Dick: Then and Now. He focuses on the emotional and psychological context of gang violence and its connections to Melville's representation of whaling as an act of physical violence directed against the whale. Pitts-Wiley, like Melville before him, uses representations of violence in art to encourage us to think about its place in real life.

Comment on this page
  • Local Discussion
    •
  • Popout
    •
 

Discussion of "3.12 The Cultural Value of Violence"

Add your voice to this discussion.

Checking your signed in status ...

Previous page on path Negotiating Cultural Spaces, page 12 of 15 Next page on path