Viewing Violence

I think Benjamin's post raises some good questions. I must admit that I watched the video for "Stress," not once but twice. The first time I grimaced. The second time, I was more intrigued. Of course it helped that between viewings I read a blurb or two about the video and discovered that it was directed with actors. (To the director's credit, I thought it had looked very authentic, especially after watching the video that Jason posted.) But still, I think this video does raise the question of how we should respond to extreme violence. At my high school, which was run by the Assemblies of God, I was continually subjected to debates on stupid question, "Is it okay to watch 'R' rated movies?" If you're curious, the leadership and those deemed pious answered "no." (Jason, you saw your first R movie at Princeton, didn't you?) Having sworn off the fundamentalist subculture, I have been tempted to give myself carte blanche in what I watch and what I listen to. Everything, after all, can provide some sort of instruction, whether it be in how to live or how not to live. I don't know that that's a satisfactory answer, though.

Alan Jacobs wrote on the fad of Discovery Chanel animal carnage shows in his 1997 article, "In on the Kill." We're not talking about animals, per se, but I think the article is helpful in sorting out some of the same issues. Here's a couple passages:

Such shows are, I believe, the modern equivalent of bear-baiting, or the educated middle-class counterpart to cock-fighting, only with several insulating layers between modern viewers and the violence they endorse:

1. We're just watching what others have filmed; 2. They're just filming what the animals are doing; 3. The animals are just following their instincts. This kind of argument is made possible by what Stanley Milgram called "the fragmentation of the total human act." Milgram's famous experiments on obedience revealed that people can justify participating in the most dreadful deeds if an authority commands their involvement and if they can understand themselves as caught in a chain of events over which they have no control. It seems to me that the modern display of nature's pornography is analogous: since we are neither the ones who kill nor the ones who film the killing, we have no moral stake in the events we watch. But by watching such programs we endorse what happens in them and bear a certain responsibility for them. We have not simply failed to turn off the TV; our sin is not merely one of omission. By watching we will the continuation of such shows and hence, inevitably, the acts represented in them.

Dante understood this peculiarity of human character perfectly well. In the eighth circle of Hell, he and his guide Virgil meet the Falsifiers- among them a thirteenth-century counterfeiter named Master Adam and the infamous Greek Sinon, who tricked the Trojans into allowing the fatal wooden horse into their city. Dante watches as Master Adam and Sinon fall into a bitter exchange of insults and vituperation. For thirty lines of verse they snarl at one another. Then Virgil, the personification of human Reason, turns to Dante and says, "Now keep on looking a little longer and I quarrel with you." Why is he troubled? Because, as he later explains, "the wish to hear such baseness is degrading." There are certain events and actions, Virgil seems to say, toward which the only proper response is to avert one's eyes. This need not be a denial of reality; in fact, it is an acceptance that reality is often terrible. Predation is of course unlike the bitter recriminations of Sinon and Master Adam in that there is no sin in it. But I cannot think of it as a good thing that some creatures live only by the dying of other creatures; and still less can I think a fascination with such killing good.

and later:

There may at times be reasons for us to force ourselves to look at the killing and eating of animals by other animals (just as there may be, and indeed are, good reasons for forcing ourselves to watch films of the Nazi concentration camps). But if we do not have to force ourselves, if we look upon such scenes with pleasure and fascination, something is terribly wrong.

The difference between the two videos, then, is that the Russian Neo-Nazi video serves an educational purpose. Or, there is a good reason for watching it. The Justice video, "Stress," serves a primarily aesthetic purpose. And certainly it's goal, at least on some level, must be to inspire delight?

Jacobs's response, though, seems to be suitable only in the Christian context. I am curious as to how one might take an ethical stance against such videos outside of a religious framework.


Benjamin also raises the question of the medium being the message. While I initially cringed while watching both videos—and the Russian video I could not bear to even finish—I don't think that I would have been particularly shocked if I had read about what I saw. Text, what McLuhan would call a "cold medium," cannot so easily cut me. The same, I think, can be said for music.

DM