Violence In Movies Essay Research Paper Politics — страница 2

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survey of almost 140,000 schoolkids. Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association was ridiculed for mentioning some of these statistics in his congressional testimony, but his numbers went unchallenged. One of them is particularly striking: The percentage of the under-18 population arrested in 1997 for violent crimes hit a five-year low of 0.41 percent. This is Lieberman’s “culture of carnage.” Well, maybe the kids have stopped killing each other and begun acting like bunny rabbits instead. In her Hill testimony last week, Cheney asked the following ominous question: “What is the entertainment industry doing to our children when they create a culture in which children are viewed this way, when they make it seem as though early adolescents are sexual objects, that early

adolescents should be expected to take drugs and have sex…?” The answer to her question is readily available to anyone with a Web browser and an open mind. In the wake of gangsta rap, Internet porn, and movies like Kids and American Pie, the teenage birthrate has hit a 60-year low, falling 20 percent since 1991. Teen abortions have dropped one-third since the mid-’80s, falling for each of the last seven years. Drugs? Compared to the 1970s, we live in a strikingly sober time. Some studies show an increase in pot-smoking among teens this decade (could this be a hidden contributor to the simultaneous decline in teen violence?), but most anti-social substances have shown stable or falling rates of teenage use in the last few years. There are three ways to interpret these

numbers. Kulturkampfers like Bennett and Lieberman might argue that crime rates would have dropped even faster if Hollywood had cleaned up its act. If every 13-year-old boy had been encouraged to watch Shakespeare in Love rather than play Doom on his Playstation, they imply, we’d live in a crime-free paradise. Yeah, right. Force teenage boys to sit through Shakespeare in Love and crime rates are liable to go through the roof. Besides, it’s hard to beat a 50 percent decrease in teen crime since the mid-’90s; and no society, except a totalitarian one, is going to eradicate all mischief and violence among 17-year-old boys. That’s what they do. A more plausible interpretation is that popular culture and teen behavior are only loosely connected. Today’s kids may actually be

less impressionable than previous generations, because they’re so overexposed so young. They see entertainment as fantasy and don’t relate it to their lives in any simple way. The third interpretation is the most subversive. It is that the rise of a bawdy, violent popular culture is actually linked to the decline in crime and dysfunction among the young. The key to controlling teenagers, after all, is not repression but distraction. A 14-year-old consumed with murdering mythic gods on his Playstation is not on a street corner making trouble; he’s taking out his aggression on a monitor. Likewise, the comedic parody of violence in professional wrestling may be not an incitement to assault outside the ring but a giant sublimation of the violent urges most young males have a

hard time controlling. I can’t prove this hunch, but it certainly merits further study. And it makes more sense than the hysteria peddled by the Democratic running mate and the Republican running mate’s wife. The question that needs to be answered right now is not what our popular culture has been doing wrong for the last decade or so–but what, in this strange and blessed time, it has actually been doing right. 32c