For millennia, symbolic violence held a noble and accepted place in human culture. Rage, cataclysm, and irreconcilable conflict, both external and internal, were once taken for granted as elements of the human condition, and violence stood as a symbol of them in every kind of narrative. The keynote of Classical literature is sounded in the opening phrase of The Iliad: “Menîn aide Thea,” “Of rage sing, Goddess,” an invocation of poetic power to express the divine but destructive passion of Achilles. Every body of sacred lore is woven of conflicts and murders and bloody devourings. Even pacifist traditions are transmitted through metaphors of violence; Jesus brought not peace but a sword, and if we meet the Buddha in the road we are urged to kill him. Until the last few decades, all our civic myths, all our entreaties to collective action, were written in war and martyrdom. Generations of children were soothed to sleep with the witch-torturing, limb-severing, child-devouring horror of fairy tales. Across every social and philosophical stratum, children were expected to carry toy weapons and gleefully reenact the stories of murderous pirates, monsters, and heroes.
Now we tell kids to stop playing war. We’ve turned history class into a series of quaint reenactments of daily life. By the deftest bowd-lerizations we’ve cut the images of slaughter from the background of the Christmas and Passover stories. The narratives we consider good for them are devoid not only of bloody violence but nearly all physical conflict. We leave the telling of violent stories to the commercial entertainment industry–and then spend considerable intellectual and political resources trying to demonstrate that they’re harmful.
What changed?
The rise of science and rationality in the eighteenth century brought the belief that reason and planning had the power to change human behavior. During the nineteenth century, the strains of industrialization put a premium on the reduction of civil conflict and the promulgation of polite values. Then the development of modern weaponry steadily raised the stakes of war, until the threat of nuclear holocaust made thoughts of violence more horrifying than ever before. Those forces have brought us to a profound, unprecedented questioning of the role and rightness of violence in every form. Every society has condemned violence that threatened order. Many have cherished ideals of a lost age or a coming salvation marked by absolute peace. But even those accepted violence as inevitable in this world and celebrated it unquestioningly when it served the group. Some small, isolated groups may have eschewed violence, but no large society has ever attempted a thoroughgoing reconsideration of violence as such–until the modern, industrialized world.
Our renunciation of violence is still far from complete. Every nation continues to use it in law enforcement, and many use it in foreign policy. America, in particular, tolerates forms of violence–capital punishment, individual gun use–that have been rejected by most other nations in the industrialized world. But we are deep in the same process of reconsideration. Even our responses to the terrorism of 2001, both governmental and popular, were tempered by a remarkable restraint, compassion, and questioning of the value of force.
We have internalized our abhorrence of violence to such an extent that it often feels like second nature, and we forget how new these views are to human history. Until the twentieth century, no large cultural mainstream had ever called into question the basic rightness of capital punishment, corporeal punishment for children, the settling of disputes with fists, or warfare. No culture had ever fostered a popular belief that violence might be banished through education, child rearing, science, or other human efforts. We’ve entered new ground. We’ve set ourselves the heroic mission of creating a nonviolent world, but we don’t know what one looks like. We’re left with as many questions as answers, and among the most vexing is this: What is the place of imaginary violence in a world that denounces violence in reality?
The question isn’t new. Plato, in imagining his ideal Republic, said he would ban entertainers because their stories would give the citizens improper ideas. His student Aristotle, less concerned with ideals than with comprehending the present reality, argued that drama was helpful to society because it provided a katharsis, a release of dangerous emotions. For a long time, that argument was mainly philosophical. But in the culture of antiviolence, it’s become a very real matter of public policy and child rearing.
When imaginary violence was more widely accepted, so was real violence. Only a century ago, lynching was a common tool of social control in much of America. A president could chortle over a “splendid little war.”Domestic violence was taken for granted in all but the most educated classes (and usually politely overlooked even there). The boyhood described in nineteenth-century popular fiction was an endless parade of beatings, bullyings, and rock-throwing battles. My grandfather used to chuckle over stories of growing up in the 1890s that chilled me.“Oh, there were some naughty boys, all right,” he said of a group of friends who chopped off the tails of mice and laughed as they scurried in agony. Although crime rates weren’t yet systematically calculated, the evidence of court records and social histories strongly suggests that murder, rape, and grievous assaults were considerably more common then than now. As Michael Lesy demonstrated in his harrowing Wisconsin Death Trip, an economic depression in the relatively placid agricultural heartland in the 1890s sparked a wave of homicides, suicides, arsons, and assaults that, had it happened today, would dominate the headlines. No one much noticed it then. That was life.
And no one doubted the connection between the imaginary and the real. During the buildup to the First World War, Kaiser Wilhelm berated a Berlin toyseller for not stocking toy submarines. The German people, he said, must be taught the importance of the submarine in their nation’s future wars, and they must be taught in the nursery. A few years later, when that war was under way, a reviewer for the Baltimore Sun urged his readers to rush to a movie called My Four Years in Germany “if you want the loose ends of your hatred of German militarism gathered together and concentrated in a steady resolve for war until the beast is brought cowering and whining to earth–as beasts do when they find their masters–and if you want to enjoy thoroughly the process of concentration of hate.” Societies have always used games and stories to teach people who to hate and how to fight.
It seemed obvious, then, that one step toward teaching future generations a new way to live was to change the games and stories on which they were raised. By the 1960s, teachers, pediatricians, psychologists, politicians, and millions of concerned parents joined together to sweep violence from the education and culture of children. Surely if children weren’t indoctrinated with violence, they wouldn’t learn it.
The problem was, they wanted it. And as we removed violence from their officially sanctioned culture–from the classroom, from bedtime stories, from adult-approved play–they were left with no source for it but the commercial entertainment industry. That industry can be contained by public sentiment and political pressure up to a point, but ultimately its purpose is to discover popular appetites and fill them for profit. The popular appetite for fantasy violence turned out to be bigger than ever. Violence with a heroic bent was selling fairly well in movies by the 1970s, even though filmmakers presented it with ugly realism and a nauseating ambivalence: Billy Jack, Dirty Harry, Death Wish. Then, in 1977, Star Wars announced that fantasy violence should be fun. This was fantasy joyfully removed from the glorified violence against real political and social groups that had made Westerns, war epics, and crime dramas unpalatable to most modern Americans; there were no Indians, Communists, or urban poor here, only aliens representing the simplest and most archetypal “other.” Its mayhem was liberating and triumphant, but it was also huge and brutal. A planet is cruelly destroyed and Obi Wan Kenobi hears the psychic screams of dying billions. An alien’s hand is sliced off in a bar fight. Justice is restored by the colossal explosion of the Death Star and its countless inhabitants. Instantly, Star Wars seized the youth audience as no movie ever had and became the most profitable entertainment product ever.
The more the adult world condemned violence, the more young people seemed to want it. The action movie became a juggernaut in the 1980s on the appetites of people raised in the 1970s heyday of antiviolent parenting. Rambo, Indiana Jones, Lethal Weapon, Terminator, Jurassic Park–violence of varying contexts and styles, but all intense, visceral, glorified, and utterly unapologetic–became the greatest commercial franchises in entertainment history. With them came the intensification of violence on television, the auditory violence of heavy metal, the explosion of video games, action figures, and a souped-up new generation of toy weapons. And it wasn’t just the aggressive, unenlightened kids who wanted that make-believe violence, either. The best-raised, most peaceful, most socially aware of them were lining up for those movies, too.
Nor was it only American kids. We sometimes think that our popular culture is far more violent than that of Europe, because what we produce is so much more violent. In fact, Hollywood’s action movies dominate the European market. The European movies we see are usually produced with government support as conscious alternatives to Hollywood products, and they often enjoy as much commercial success here as at home. Cable television now brings Europe as much small-screen violence as it brings us. Nintendo and Play Station and their often-violent software sell as well in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia as in the United States. In Japan, meanwhile, young people not only gobble up Hollywood action fantasies but support a huge domestic pop culture that is more intensely and explicitly violent than our own. Even in those nations with enviably low crime rates and seemingly more civilized citizenry, young people’s appetite for fantasy violence is enormous.
The result has been an ideological war. And the first casualty of any war is truth. Medical and psychological establishments join with politicians in demonizing fantasy violence and accusing the soulless entertainment industry of knowingly wreaking havoc on children and society for the sake of a buck. The entertainment industry hides behind disingenuous evasions and stomps off muttering about censorship. As Christopher Perrius of the University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center put it, “The industry has to pretend that its products have no effect on society at all, and the psychological establishment has to pretend that violence can be completely removed without violence to the psyche.”
The war has been going on for more than a century, but neither side has ever won a real victory. The critics prove their points to their own satisfaction, the entertainment industry retreats a little, then a few years later the industry surges back as violent as ever and the cycle begins again. The politicians get their votes, the researchers get their funding, the producers sell their tickets, and everyone is happy–except the parents, teachers, and children who are left with the fear and anger the war produces. As long as we’re caught in the mentality of conflict (one must be wrong, one must be right), we’ll never be able to break the cycle. One way out is to look back at past battles and see what it is that’s really being fought over.
The first great modern conflict between the moral leaders of American society and mass entertainment was fought over the “dime novels” that exploded into popularity among young people in the wake of the Civil War. They were Westerns, crime stories, and romances, floridly written and filled with gunplay, danger, and mad passion, fantasies of violent conflict and individual power that thrilled the young people of an increasingly industrialized America who were spending more and more of their time in factories, offices, and schools. But to two very different groups these books looked dangerous. The religious reformer Anthony Comstock declared in 1884 that their editors were “willingly or unwillingly, Satan’s efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young.” Educators, librarians, and physicians, of a more progressive and scientific bent, accused them of overexciting youthful appetites, which they believed would contribute to a number of physical and behavioral maladies. Both the conservative religious critics and the progressive scientific critics blamed the dime novels for leading young men to crime and young women to immorality.
The terror inspired by dime novels is hard to comprehend from our distance. Their morality was simple: virtue was always triumphant, innocence was rewarded, and the unthinkable was averted. They lacked any explicit details that would offend Victorian society. But they posed two challenges to that society: they were a new medium, and they were in bad taste.
Books were an old medium, but they had always been expensive–a middle-class, adult preserve. With the spread of universal literacy and changes in methods of publication and distribution there was suddenly a body of literature that anyone could afford. Commercial storytellers were able, for the first time, to transmit stories directly to masses of young people, including less-educated young people of the working class. At the same time, the leaders of society were very anxious about the future. America was in a turmoil of change. Industrialization, urbanization, rapid expansion, Civil War and emancipation, vast dislocations of people, tidal waves of immigration were forming a world unlike any seen before. The durability of the new industrial society hadn’t been proven yet, and the fear of utter social collapse underlay every discussion of society. Taming the young was of the utmost importance. Then, as now, adolescents were viewed by educators and physicians as being in a state of ongoing crisis. Every young male was viewed as a potential criminal, and stories of juvenile crime filled the newspapers far out of proportion to reality. That the minds of young people were being influenced by hack writers who thought of nothing but exploiting their appetites for cash was profoundly threatening.
The proof of the novels’ danger, however, was their sensationalistic rejection of Victorian restraint. Their morality was conventional, but they described violence and villainy with a fervid, detailed, overwritten enthusiasm that flew in the face of every middle-class standard of good taste. Today we speak of “taste” as an individual idiosyncrasy or a marketing demographic, but in the nineteenth century it was a powerful concept. The spiritual and intellectual leaders of America were mostly of the educated middle class and believed deeply in the civilizing powers of middle-class values: restraint of emotions, constraint of expression, and educated taste. They saw around them a roiling, violent world driven by greed and split by class conflicts, striving for new heights of civilization but always threatening to plunge into barbarism. Even the most progressive advocates of the poor called them “the dangerous classes.”Violations of middle-class propriety were perceived as real threats. When the Atlantic Monthly noted that dime novels were “almost exclusively for the use of the lower classes,” it was enough to signal their danger. That a new medium of unpredictable influence was exciting young people with raw, working-class tastes raised fears of an impending social collapse.
Legal restrictions were placed on dime novels, and the furor died down. After a time of towing the line, of course, the publishing industry tested the boundaries again and was soon able to exceed them. By the early twentieth century, the new “pulp” magazines were far more lurid than the dime novels ever had been. By then, however, literary offenses to good taste were old hat, and no one paid them much mind. The motion picture had become the new nexus of conflict between those who wanted to improve society and those who wanted to entertain it.
This was a medium dramatically unlike any other, and it drew heat from the beginning. Some educators and clergymen warned that the medium itself, regardless of content, led to indolence, unrest, prostitution, and ignorance. The protests didn’t really coalesce, however, until the 1920s. Things were changing: the World War, Prohibition, the automobile, the contraceptive diaphragm, and countless other factors had launched a cultural and moral revolution. Hollywood, meanwhile, brought the feature film to its pinnacle of visual power and popularity, added the potent medium of recorded sound, and used its power to exploit every aspect of the cultural revolution with risqué comedies, adulterous melodramas, glamorous criminals, short skirts, flimsy gowns, and blazing guns–spurred on by millions of eager ticket buyers.
As the film historian Jeanine Basinger pointed out in A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960, those movies offered very contained fantasies to an American public whose lives were mostly narrow and predictable. Women got to work at glamorous jobs, cheat on husbands, abandon children, shoot seducers, and wear fabulous clothes for an hour of fantasy, then were eased back to reality by endings in which the heroines suffered for their sins and rediscovered virtue. Gangster movies allowed men to strut, preen, fire machine guns, and slap their women around before they died in the final scene. But even as millions of Americans–especially the young–lined up for tickets, many others began to voice fears of what those glamorizations of passion and violence were doing to our children.
Organizations such as the Catholic Legion of Decency had been protesting movie immorality all through the 1920s to little effect. But in 1929 a group of sociologists, psychologists, and physicians formed the Motion Picture Research Council and, with funding from the progressive Payne Trust, launched the first wide-ranging studies of the impact of mass entertainment on children–studies that laid the groundwork for the media-effects research of the next seventy years. The Payne Trust studies asserted that movies inspired crime, aggression, sexual license, hysteria, and neurological damage in children. When the studies were released in 1933, they sparked a public furor. Soon senators, congressmen, and the Roosevelt administration were demanding new movie standards. Once again the combination of a new medium and assaults on conventional taste alarmed both conservative religious reformers and the science-minded liberals of the educated classes. Once again, their combined arguments that such entertainment harmed children focused parental anxieties. And once again, it occurred at a moment of high anxiety about the future, when the Depression and its resulting social and political turmoil had amplified the public’s already high anxiety about social change.
Many of the claims of the Payne Trust studies look absurd in retrospect. That a young man from a bad neighborhood could be inspired to crime by Little Caesar is certainly plausible, but the idea that the thrills of The Phantom of the Opera affected children in the same way that shell shock affected soldiers, or that Tarzan of the Apes excited such morbidly violent feelings that even the healthiest child’s neurological and physical health might be impaired, seems an almost lunatic overreaction. Yet such claims were made in a public document by respected physicians and professors at America’s most august universities, and then treated with serious alarm by the press, the informed public, and the highest elected officials. Fear is a powerful distorter of thought.
“When you’re going through a time like that, it feels like the end of the world,” said Mick LaSalle, a movie reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle through the 1980s and 1990s who later wrote Complicated Women and Dangerous Men, books about portrayals of power and morality in early 1930s Hollywood movies.“And the world was ending in some ways, at least the world that people had known before war, revolutions, Depression. Nobody knew what was coming–chaos, fascism, communism. It was easy to read the headlines and then go to the movies and feel like it was all part of the same crisis, that it wouldn’t end unless somebody did something.”
LaSalle said that he could understand the feeling. “As a reviewer, around 1993 and 1994 it felt like the end of the world to me. Everywhere you turned in the movies all you could see was mayhem. Not just summer blockbusters, but even supposedly serious projects like Natural Born Killers.The art houses were taken over by Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. And the news was full of crime. It seemed like there was no way out, like it was only going to get worse until the world fell apart.”
Times of change are always terrifying. Times of change in which we also want profound improvement are even more terrifying, because we’re not content just to survive and exploit the new situation as best we can. We see in every event a sign that we’re making progress or sliding into disaster. The anxiety of not knowing which way we’re heading makes us especially vigilant toward children. We try to see the future in them, and so we may see every change, fad, and statistical trend as evidence that something terrible is coming.
Entering unknown territory inspires contradictory emotions: anxiety and eagerness. Imagine stepping off a train into a teeming foreign city you know nothing about. Part of you wants to stay at the station, gather your bags close about you, watch carefully for thieves. Part of you wants to plunge down strange streets and see what this new world is. Our anxious vigilance is heightened, which makes us want to maintain tight control. But our enthusiasm for novelty and adventure is heightened, too. That’s the conflict our society has been trying to negotiate for more than a century as we’ve hurtled through staggering changes but tried to make our world safer and more civilized at the same time.
Defenders of commercial entertainment often speak of the “unholy alliance” of liberal social reformers and religious conservatives arrayed against them, but they really aren’t such strange bedfellows. They are all idealists who yearn to make something better of humankind. They believe in self-restraint and vigilance against one’s own unhealthy emotions, they distrust untrained appetites and fantasies, and they feel that society needs some educated controls in order to progress in the right direction. Because they are idealists, they tend toward Plato’s desire to keep dangerous stories out of the ideal Republic. Because they are teachers, they believe deeply in the literal power of stories, and they want entertainment to teach the lessons that will improve us.
One of the authors of the Payne Trust studies, Professor Edgar Dale of Ohio State University, vividly expressed the values that still underlie criticisms of the entertainment industry:
It is apparent that children will rarely secure from the films goals of the type that have animated men like Jenner, Lister, Koch, Pasteur, Thomas Aquinas, Jesus Christ, Aristotle, Norman Thomas . . . and others. We ought to expect the cinema to show a better way of living than the average find outside the cinema. . . .We need to see the screen portraying more of the type of social goals which ought to be characteristic of a decent civilization. We need more often to catch a glimpse of the immortality of great characters who have sacrificed opportunities for personal aggrandizement in order that the larger community might have a fuller measure of life.
People who feel more invested in the established order and values–including teachers, social scientists, clergy, politicians, and a lot of parents–tend to respond to unpredictable change with a desire for more control. People who feel more invested in the future–including young people–respond with eagerness for novelty and adventure. The two groups’ reactions feed on each other. Movies were alarming because they spoke directly and powerfully to masses of children, teenagers, poor people, and immigrants who hadn’t been fully educated in society’s loftier values. But the fear expressed by established cultural leaders made the movies even more exciting and adventurous to those young people and outsiders.
The more a medium threatens our control, the more we’ll expect to see danger in it. Dime novels, movies, and the comic books accused of contributing to juvenile delinquency in the 1950s were threatening because they were readily available to everyone. Television was more threatening than any of them because it beamed its contents directly into our living rooms. A parent could prevent a child from going to a movie or newsstand, but with a TV in the house the only hope of control was constant supervision. So, even though its content was kept quite tame by a conservative FCC for decades, television from the beginning attracted unparalleled criticism.
New media anxiety sends us looking for negative effects. Young people, however, love new media, and they love media that bring entertainment to them easily and without adult screening. Making such media their own, separating it from our control, is part of how they plunge into the future and master it. And the more we fight to take control of it, the more powerful they know it must be.
Even now, our anxieties are triggered when a mass medium sells entertainment to the young and uneducated that challenges established taste. Those of us in the educated middle classes may have rejected the ideological underpinnings of the Victorian faith in taste, but it still shapes our preconceptions. Children from polite, educated homes still grow up hearing their parents speak agitatedly when some lowest-common-denominator, bad-taste entertainment achieves mass success. We still worry that the polite center of civilization will unravel if the impressionable and uneducated are encouraged to reject the rules, constraints, and standards we establish for public expression. The thought of children buying Ren and Stimpy dolls that make “authentic underleg noises” fills us not only with disgust but with a vague alarm. University researchers look for harmful effects in movies, comic books, professional wrestling, and video games, but never in books, plays, or even smart TV like The Sopranos. When mass entertainment assaults our taste with ghetto obscenities or raw gore, we see danger.
Media criticism of the past twenty years has been compounded by all these anxieties. There have been new media (computers and video games), developments of old media that made public vigilance over young people’s entertainment more difficult (cable TV, VCRs, personal stereos), new entertainment forms (gangsta rap, special-effects blockbusters, mature-viewers TV), and unprecedented assaults on taste (obscene lyrics, mutilation, killing games, racism, misogyny, “Cop Killer,” graphic sex, vomiting, farting, South Park). And although we haven’t experienced turmoil comparable to that of the 1930s, we’ve been struggling through changes in work and family, crime waves, educational erosion–and now terrorism, war, and frightening economic news. It’s no wonder that our anxieties about children, entertainment, and violence are high.
In 1982, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said of a then-new medium, “Video games may be the leading cause of domestic violence in America today. It’s reached the point where something’s been done to one child and another child won’t do a thing.” Although the comment is only twenty years old, it now feels almost as peculiar as those from the Payne Trust studies. Certainly no evidence has emerged that domestic violence increased with the advent of video games, nor that it is more frequent in homes with video games. And it’s difficult, in hindsight, to accept the idea that the video games of 1982–Centipede, Pac Man, Space Invaders–could have wreaked such havoc on American family life.
The Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on Children, of July 2000, stated, “Although less research has been done on the impact of violent interactive entertainment (video games and other interactive media) on young people, preliminary studies indicate that the negative impact may be significantly more severe than that wrought by television, movies, or music.” That “may” is important. Some studies do suggest that possibility, but others, such as the 2000 University of Inverness study, suggest that video games may have much less of an impact than any of the other media. Our anxiety makes it easy to imagine, or expect, or even half hope that the new form will prove more dangerous than the old.
As those anxieties intensify, entertainers and their audience become more contentious. Kids–and the more puerile members of the entertainment industry–want to prove that they won’t be beaten down by a humorless, meddlesome parental world. The market for defiant, intentionally provocative bad taste increases. In the 1990s, the willful pursuit of offensive violence hit a peak in the video game industry. Mortal Kombat allowed a player to rip the spine out of his opponent’s body. Duke Nukem added a misogynistic twist, as it featured women only as bound captives and strippers, and when the player shot them they exploded into showers of blood and gold. At a panel at the 1997 Game Designers’ Expo in Santa Clara, California, I heard a young video game producer respond angrily to criticism of that game with, “What kinds of games are we supposed to play? Duke Huggem? I don’t need my fun to make these parent groups and teachers feel all squishy inside. I’m going to sit down at my game and say, what do you think of this? ”
Offensive violence has many functions: it can express hostility, put scary thoughts in perspective, intensify a power fantasy, test machismo, and provide an exciting shock. In our permissive popular culture, it’s also one of the few sources remaining to young people of truly, shockingly bad taste. And bad taste is a way to accelerate, test, and take some control of the process of social change. In blatantly presenting what was previously forbidden, offensive entertainment says that the old ways are breaking down. It sets kids apart from their parents’ values and connects them with them peers, shows them that they’re plunging into new territory. The more it appalls the adult world, the more exciting it is: this is their turf, the world they’re making whether we like it or not. (And bloody violence is one thing that today’s adult world is almost guaranteed not to like.) Then comes the relief: they break into the new territory and discover it’s safe. The forbidden deed is done, adults are shocked, everyone gets used to it and moves on. Their parents are still there, and the world still works as well as it ever did. Periodic assaults on established taste help people play with change and be reassured that it’ll be okay.
Entertainment relying on bad taste becomes boring quickly. Duke Nukem was dead in the marketplace before the arguments about it had died down. But every successful assault on taste changes standards. Longer-lived shooter games succeed on their complexity and suspense, but for many of them, overstated gore is now part of the package. What was once offensive becomes accepted. The cost of that is a coarsening of popular culture. Entertainment becomes less deft, less graceful, less subtle. Those of us who prefer more polite and suggestive aesthetics find less to like and more to steel ourselves against.
The gain, however, is that we are reminded what really matters. Our world isn’t kept out of barbarism by concealing ugly realities or suppressing shocking images. The bonds that hold us together are empathy, acceptance, and a mutual desire to make the real world better, not a fragile web of constraints and controls.
Anxiety blocks empathy. When we view a new form that opposes the values that make us comfortable, we see only its outer shape–its apparent, literal meaning–and we can’t feel what it means to the people who created it and the people who love it. In The Uses of Enchantment, the psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim argued eloquently for the value of fairy tales for children’s emotional development, even with–sometimes because of–their violence, gore, and terror. But he was unwilling to extend that value to any popular children’s culture of his own time. All modern children’s literature, he said, was vapid, lacking in imagination, and useless to children’s development.
Once a group of parents and teachers asked Bettelheim about Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a children’s book with a nightmarish quality reminiscent of fairy tales. He hadn’t read it, but based on a plot description he denounced it as not only valueless but probably harmful: Max’s mother is a bad parent for sending him to his room without supper, and children hearing that will be disturbed. That was precisely the sort of literalistic criticism that fairy tales had been subjected to for decades and that Bettelheim argued so passionately against. Bettelheim, however, was a product of the intellectual elite of prewar Austria, with an antipathy for the modern industrialized world forged by World War II and the Holocaust. America’s mass, commercialized kid culture was alien and threatening to him; he couldn’t empathize with it as fantasy and viewed it with anxious literalism. One mother asked him, “But if it’s harmful, why do children love it so much?” Bettelheim had no reply.
Those parents and teachers understood what Sendak’s young fans were experiencing. Even they, however, may not have understood all of American children’s culture. Reviewing the parenting magazines and library journals from the same period, I found denunciation after denunciation of commercial children’s television. It’s true that Where the Wild Things Are is alive in a way that ratings-driven, formulaic kids’TV never is–and it’s completely free of candy commercials. But the question that mother asked Bettelheim can be asked of cartoons, too: if it’s harmful, why do children love it so much?
Angry, frightened public debate doesn’t help us understand what our children are experiencing. It stands in our way by trapping us self-protectively within our own perceptions and preventing us from opening up to their perceptions. At the peak of the dime novel furor, in 1883, a young teacher and literary critic named Brander Matthews expressed the anger and fear of the moment: “The dreadful damage wrought to-day in every city, town, and village . . . by the horrible and hideous stuff set before the boys and girls of America by the villainous sheets which pander greedily and viciously to the natural taste of young readers for excitement, the irreparable wrong done by these vile publications, is hidden from no one.”
Forty years later, that same Brander Matthews looked back from an America that hadn’t gone completely to hell after all and remembered this: “The saffron-backed Dime Novels of the late Mr. Beadle, ill-famed among the ignorant who are unaware of their ultra-Puritan purity . . . began to appear in the early years of the Civil War; and when I was a boy in a dismal boarding school at Sing Sing . . . I reveled in their thrilling and innocuous record of innocent and imminent danger.” Removed from the anxieties of the moment, he could remember who he had been as a child.
When we’re struggling to control our children’s world, commercial entertainment looks like an enemy. More quickly than we can educate the violence out of children’s heads it comes pouring in more. But when we look at entertainment’s greatest powers, it turns out that it may be doing just what it’s supposed to. An old actors’ legend holds that the Devil created the modern theater: when medieval churches couldn’t find locals willing to play the role, they had to hire ne’er-do-wells from other villages, and so was born the professional actor. The Devil soon became the most popular character in the plays, because he allowed people to look at their baser desires and experience a forbidden defiance to propriety without risk. When the church banned the plays, the actors went off on their own–and ever since, the professional entertainer has played a necessary devil to society, always at odds with those who want to improve us, but always beloved because he affirms us as the flawed creatures we are.
We ask commercial entertainment to teach the lessons that we want the world to learn, and sometimes it does, but that’s not its strength. It’s a sloppy teacher, and it’s likely to bore us or lose our trust when it tries to instruct. The real value of commercial entertainment, from the most demanding films to the most simpleminded arcade games, is that it provides fantasy. By telling passionate stories unfettered by our standards of who we should be, it allows us to feel the emotions and experience the imaginary lives that reality doesn’t allow. It gives us a relief from the pressure of always having to be good. Indulging in unapproved passions helps us to accept our imperfections. Sharing those passions with millions of peers through mass entertainment reassures us that no one else is perfect either. And that makes reality a bit less onerous when we return to it, so that being good is just a little easier. The greatest power of commercial entertainment has always been to give people exactly what our better natures say we can’t have. It fills the emotional gaps that open between our ideals and our reality.
Family therapist Diane Stern described her son Sam as a highly conscientious, rule-conscious boy who could be very hard on himself when he didn’t meet the teacher’s expectations or his own. He was also extremely sensitive to others’ pain and kept his own emotions in check. Only once in his childhood did he ever come close to hitting his little brother in anger, and then he caught himself and was genuinely shaken:“Mom, I could have hurt Gabe!” But the entertainment he loved presented the exact opposite.
“I’ll admit,” said Stern, “that my husband and I had some serious doubts about letting him listen to Eminem or Limp Bizkit in fifth grade. But we could see in his face and his body what a pure, relaxed pleasure they brought him. It’s like he was floating on a cloud. I thought about what it must be like to be such a responsible young boy, standing there patiently in the lunch line, nodding attentively to the teacher no matter how much he’d rather be elsewhere, doing homework instead of playing–and what a tremendous relief it must be just to feel that tremendous wave of lyrics–all that anger and confrontation and willingness just to tell the world to go to hell–obscenely, even–just wash over you.”
That devil can be dangerous. The excitement of those unapproved passions may encourage some people to question the validity of the ideals they’ve been holding on to. A few people, those who feel very angry at or cut off from the larger society, may act out what they’ve seen. But for our progress in general, it plays a vital role.
The key is to notice that general progress and not only the alarming anomalies. One of the pitfalls of fear is that we see only danger signs. When we’re afraid of the future we become afraid for our children. We also, however, become afraid of our children. During the early 1930s, the common opinion expressed in the popular press and the journals of educators and doctors was that the young generation was the most damaged and troubled of modern times. Children and teenagers were widely seen as “nervous, neurotic, chronically ill, alienated, and prone to delinquency.” Those kids, of course, grew up to be Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation,” the generation of “civics” who conquered the Depression, won World War II, built the orderly society of the 1950s, and raised the Baby Boom.
It was my father’s generation. Born in 1921, fatherless and dirt poor before the New Deal, neglected by a profoundly depressed mother, raised by his peers on the streets of Oakland, California, his family kicked out of their house by the sheriff, growing up a strong and relentlessly law-abiding man, savior of several shipmates when his cruiser was sunk off Guadalcanal, putting himself through college on the GI Bill, a dedicated high school teacher, steadfast husband and father who rescued spiders from the bathtub and never raised his hand in violence, loyal caretaker to his dying wife even as his own eighty-year-old body and mind broke down–his is a story almost as common as it is powerful.
Among the bonds I found with him as a child and find with him now in his old age is the violent popular culture of his youth. He can still vividly describe how the Shadow of the pulp magazines would blow villains off their feet with his twin .45s, how King Kong ripped open the Tyrannosaurus’s jaw with a sickening noise and a stream of blood, how the body of Jimmy Cagney toppled forward horribly at the end of The Public Enemy. He can still remember cheering at Tarzan and shrieking at The Phantom of the Opera, just like the kids the Payne Trust studies warned about. His only criminal behavior as a child was sneaking into movies that he couldn’t afford.
“Why did you love them so much?” I asked him once.
“Hell,” he said, “they were my only way out! ”
And they helped him to get out literally. The Flagg and Quirt military comedies made him want to be a Marine. The Mask of Fu-Manchu made him want to see other lands. A radio play of “The Most Dangerous Game” made him want to read fiction. A lot of his peers were lining up for jobs on the General Motors assembly line, but my father’s dreams wouldn’t let him: dreams that only violent entertainment could have made exciting to a frustrated kid with the whole world against him.
I believe the current generation of young people will be much like my father’s. They’ll be fretted over by nervous adults for their entire youth and then surprise us all with how well they turn out. I also believe that these young people are considerably less violent in their behavior and values than generations before them. There are still violent children, troubled children. Because we don’t value them enough in our public policy, there are far too many of them. But most young people, whether we notice it or not, are making exactly the changes in the world that we hoped they would.
I see their progress toward nonviolence every day in myriad little ways. I remember going to a park in the Sierras as a kid where the lake was full of bullfrogs. Dozens of excited kids had discovered the frogs, and most had responded by slaughtering them. The shore of the lake was strewn with the carcasses of frogs that had been stomped on, slammed on rocks, flung into the air and let drop. I was sickened at the sight, but I didn’t say anything. The bulk of my peers were against me. That’s just what boys did with frogs in 1965.
Thirty-five years later, Nicky and I went to another lake in the same area. This one was also full of frogs, and dozens of excited kids were catching these, too. But nearly all of them were putting them in buckets, looking at them, and letting them go. When a few kids started throwing them into the water, other kids yelled: “Don’t do that! You’ll hurt them!” I didn’t see a single dead frog in the days we were there, and I only saw one adult rebuke a kid for being rough. The kids themselves were enforcing the rules.
The strain of enforcing their own rules is hard, however. It requires a constant battle with their own impulses. Sometimes they need relief from their vigilance.
Right before our trip to the Sierras, Nicky and I had watched Lost World: Jurassic Park 2 on tape, and Nicky was still chattering happily about it during the trip. One afternoon, not long after he’d been brought to tears by the intensity of his insistence that two older boys stop swinging their nets so hard at the frogs, I caught him smiling about something. “What is it?” I asked. “I was just thinking about that scene where the two Tyrannosaurs tear that guy in half,” he said. “That was so cool! ”
That devil of entertainment brings a compensatory power. Nicky has learned to be so empathetic and tender, to find a frog’s injury so agonizing, that he finds a huge relief in being able to enjoy and endorse the brutality of his reptilian self. The teaching of nonviolence is going well and we need to continue it. We need to keep that ideal of nonviolence in front of us. Along the way, we also need to allow our children and ourselves the fantasies that permit us to be just the opposite. They’ll help give us the courage we need to go on changing our world.