VIOLENCE IN AMERICA

After the recent Newtown school attack a lot of attention has been focused on guns as the cause of violence and mass-killings in America. Mass-killings is a phenomena my generation did not grow up with.  I am still not sure why someone needs an AK 47 or an Uzi, but I don't think guns are the real problem.

This afternoon I went to the theater to watch "Lincoln."  Before it began there were a number of the usual previews. 

The first preview was for "Gangster Land" which deals with Mickey Cohen's gangster activities in Los Angeles sometime before the 1960s. The film previews showed extensive gratuitous violence and people being shot in cold blood.  It got me thinking about the old black & white gangster movies I saw on TV as a teenager with Eliot Ness chasing Chicago gangsters and the later 1960s television program "The Untouchables" starring Robert Stack.  In those movies guns were fired and the bad guys died, but I never recall seeing gratuitous violence and the vivid depiction of gruesome death or killing.  And then I saw a preview of "Jack Reacher" starring Tom Cruise and more violence.  And in 2013 a remake of the "Lone Ranger" starring Johnny Depp is coming. . .but in the short preview it appears that it, too, is a far cry from the original Lone Ranger's fight against bad guys (most of whom were arrested and taken to jail).

I forget the other previews, but only one seemed to be non-violent and that was "Parental Guidance."  So out of 6 or so previews, only one seemed not to contain some kind of experiential excitement with death and violence. 

As I thought more about the movies of my younger and even college years and I just do not recall the blood and gore that I saw in today's movie previews.  Sure there were cowboy movies and bad guys got killed, but it was not done in a way that glorified the process of killing and dying.  And the good guys did not seem to get some kind of gruesome satisfaction about the whole process.  And even old monster movies did not dwell on the excitement of mass killing with the gore and blood that followed.  There was terror but the focus was not on watching the process of killing or dying. These movies may seem hokey today (they do to me), but killing did not create an adrenalin rush.

All this has cause me to consider holding Hollywood accountable for the violence in America today.  There were no gun laws to my knowledge until sometime in the 1990s, yet as I have said I don't recall the level of violence that I see today.  So are guns really the major problem?  If what I saw today is typical of Hollywood, shouldn't its violence be part of the media discussion.  Or is Hollywood producers just giving American audiences what they want?  If so, the problem goes deep into the American soul.

But as I watched "Lincoln" I saw a movie focused on the human struggle of Lincoln and others to deal with racial justice and civil war.  While battle scenes were graphically portrayed the focus was not on the process of killing, but the results of the horrors of war.  Violence is portrayed as something destructive, not something to create emotional excitement. I would hope one would leave the movie thinking about deeper issues of humanity than being titillated by the gruesome process of killing and psychopathic destruction.