15.

Many challenge the catharsis theory, and not for the same reason Kael does (it’s confusion, not purgation, that draws us to horror). A popular argument against the idea goes like this: Watching violence doesn’t cleanse us of destructive impulses at all, but actually exacerbates them. Certain reformers, usually right-leaning espousers of “family values,” are of course in love with this notion, since it justifies their projects to clean up our smut-filled and violence-ridden society (going to hell in a handbasket) through censorship laws.

Some studies have shown that violence in media does indeed cause aggression in “real life.” But the evidence, as we saw in the earlier discussion of Gerard Jones, is far from conclusive. Meanwhile, regardless of scientific data, many humanists and artists continue to take Aristotle seriously, maintaining that the catharsis theory convincingly explains how we experience violent media and why macabre spectacles are valuable.

I put myself in this last category, and not because I’m a fan of Aristotle (really more of a Platonist), and not because I want to close ranks with my fellow humanists (English professors are some of the most tedious people on earth), and not because I’ve never really met a social scientist that I liked (I’m sure the problem’s with me), and not because (am I lying to myself?) I need to ennoble what I like to do anyway: watch horror films.

I’m a defender of the catharsis theory, at least partially, and probably more than I’d like to admit, because I hate Tipper Gore. Not necessarily Tipper in her current form—troubled, I imagine (but maybe relieved), by her separation from Al—but the Tipper of 1985, when she went before Congress to lobby for warning labels on records containing lyrics that might be inappropriate for children.

Though I was only a freshman in college and woefully underinformed about current events, much less free-speech-versus-censorship debates, I took an interest in the hearings because I was obsessed with loathing poor Tipper. Fresh from resigning from West Point in protest of all things self-righteous, and otherwise in a general funk of sullen rebellion against my goody-goody Southern Baptist upbringing, I saw in Tipper everything I hated about the world just then: upright living, positive thinking, the G rating, and sentimentality, not to mention big hair. I also happened to be a fan of her opponents in the debate. First, Twisted Sister’s front man, Dee Snider, with his crazed waist-length blond coif and loud French-whore makeup and deeply guttural passion for not taking shit from anybody. Next, Frank Zappa. I didn’t know his music well but I liked his two children, Dweezil and Moon Unit, mainly for their names, and I liked that Frank said to Tipper, “May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face.”

Watching those hearings on afternoons when I should have been reading Aristotle, I felt a visceral aversion to anything even approaching censorship. I realize that this was a simpleminded view—some things, of course, need censoring, such as child pornography—but it expressed a sensibility I still retain, and that I can now articulate more clearly: rarely, in the human world, can we establish clear causality.

This conviction—and not Tipper, truth be told—is the real reason that I can’t join those scientists who dismiss catharsis and condemn violence in the media. I emphatically agree with Jones, who reminds us that a plethora of factors, some unknown and some graspable, generate any given human event—such as a nine-year-old saying “fuck” or a high school boy, hopped up on Hostel and Saw, committing a violent crime. To try to reduce these or any other societal phenomena to a particular cause—profane lyrics on a rap album or a horror film’s gore—is to ignore the world’s complexities, nuances, and contradictions. It’s also, this reductive thinking, a kind of puritanism, whether it’s applied to profanity, sex, or violence, since puritanical logic, in a general sense, is the narrow-minded attribution of evil to a set number of causes a little too well defined.

And so, now, twenty-five years after Tipper the good mother went head-to-head with Zappa, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, I continue to have a personal aversion toward people—be they social scientists or ministers or strict parents or conservative pundits—who claim that cinematic violence is responsible for some of our culture’s ills. And now I’m prone, of course, to lean the other way: morbid curiosity arises from heterogeneous and complicated factors, and is quite possibly of value to society, either as a catalyst for purgation of aggression or the incorporation of the shadow.

Say that this view is an example of my immaturity, that I’m letting teen petulance inform adult views. Say that I’m narrow-minded in my unwillingness to engage the sophisticated research of social scientists. Call me perversely contrarian, someone who needs to counter mainstream sentiment in order to get attention. Say whatever you want: I’ll stick with Hitch and Stephen King and claim that violence in cinema isn’t such a bad thing and might well be good for you. (Though I must admit that I’m a bit uncomfortable finding myself on the side of Dee Snider again; he’s traded heavy metal for the horror film, writing and starring in the 1998 release Strangeland, about a sadist named Captain Howdy [Snider’s character] who kidnaps teens and subjects them to gruesome body modification rituals.)