Movies and Violence
Violence in the media is a problem; the people exposed to this media violence are mostly teenagers. Violence on the silver screen has been an issue that has plagued man from the day it was invented. Numerous movies depict violent acts such as rape, murder, and other such acts that many people consider inappropriate for adolescents, to be a normal everyday event, that happens inevitably, so we might as well go with the flow.
The question is whether this violence on television and in movies is leading to a rise in violence in society, or if it is the violence in society that is leading to an accurate portrayal in movies? This is a spin cycle from which no one has accurately proven responsible.
Hinson says that as a culture, we like violent art. Yet this is not something that is new to today's culture. The ancient Greeks perfected the genre of tragedy with a use of violence. According to Hinson, they believed that "while violence in life is destructive, violence in art need not be; that art provides a healthy channel for the natural aggressive forces within us" (Hinson 585). Even with all this violence on both the small and big screen, Hinson makes a clear statement that real-life violence is the problem, not movie violence. He feels that people fear screen violence because they fear we might become what is depicted on the screen. Hinson believes that to enjoy violence, one must be able to distinguish between what is real and what is not (Hinson 587).
Violence in general is always on the every day news, now to be updated on an hourly basis, and quicker on the internet, so as a theory, until the real violence we see on the news is diminished, then it is senseless to diminish that in Hollywood.
Movies and Pornography/ Sex.
Forms of mass media, specifically movies and television programs containing pornography and violence have been heavily criticized. The underlining concept to be debated here is that society is negatively influenced, specifically, by these images of pornography and the result is increased violence against women.
What movies do is that they concentrate on what sells: sex, violence and disaster. As viewers and natural born critics, we expect a movie to contain all these things…and usually if it does not, we consider it boring, tedious, and might even call it a failure, that it did not enter the box office with more than 20 million dollars in the first week.
The continuity of Movie-Making
So we remain to contradict ourselves, we refuse morally to watch girls getting raped or scenes of strong sexual content or heads being sliced off, and when censors will cut out these scenes, we call them old fashioned and stupid, and we get frustrated. So we go to the top of the list and wonder why make the movies in the first place? Everything today goes by supply and demand, you demand the movie I will supply it, you supply the scenes and I will demand it. There is nothing being filmed with out a reason, and for as long as directors have cinema goers watching their films, they will keep making them. The last five years have seen an increase in the stand on violence in movies. As action movies with their big stars are taken to new heights every year, more people seem to argue that the violence is influencing our country’s youth. Yet, each year, the amount of viewers also increases.
