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Shortly after my last post on tv vio­lence, a friend emailed me with some use­ful com­ments on the mat­ter. Her best two points, I think, were about whether or not por­tray­als of vio­lent sit­u­a­tions are real­is­tic, and the impor­tance of the viewer iden­ti­fy­ing with the right party to the violence.

I really should have men­tioned orig­i­nally that I think that tv vio­lence is only morally valu­able when it’s some­what real­is­tic. My friend is absolutely right that the way fic­tional char­ac­ters rou­tinely sur­vive shoot­ings, car acci­dents, beat­ings, etc. must mis­lead many chil­dren into think­ing that vio­lence is not as seri­ous as it is in real­ity. This is prob­a­bly exac­er­bated by the typ­i­cal path of human devel­op­ment. For exam­ple, it has been well-documented that, at cer­tain ages, most chil­dren do not under­stand that death is per­ma­nent. So yes, unre­al­is­tic vio­lence is, at best, not morally objec­tion­able and at worst, quite morally mis­lead­ing. (Pos­si­ble hard cases here could be sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries, in which crea­tures share some but not all qual­i­ties with humans. For instance, if the crea­tures can be res­ur­rected Cylon-style, then the vio­lence would prob­a­bly be unre­al­is­tic to chil­dren. But, if the only dif­fer­ence is that the crea­tures are much more intel­li­gent than humans, then the vio­lence amongst them could be quite real­is­tic.)

A stick­ier issue is that of how to ensure that the audi­ence mem­bers will iden­tify with the “good guy” in vio­lent scenes. Pos­si­ble trou­ble­some exam­ples my friend men­tioned include the tv show Dex­ter, in which a ser­ial killer chan­nels his mur­der­ous incli­na­tions for good by killing only other, osten­si­bly worse ser­ial killers, and shows or movies fea­tur­ing vigilante-style jus­tice, in which our sym­pa­thies are often engaged by the vig­i­lante (maybe this would include Dirty Harry; while the pro­tag­o­nist is a real cop, he dra­mat­i­cally over­steps the bound­aries of insti­tu­tional justice).

I sus­pect that the prob­lem here is that there is often an inverse cor­re­la­tion between how grip­ping a story is and how obvi­ous it is which party is the “good guy” with whom one is sup­posed to iden­tify. Children’s tales usu­ally fea­ture morally good pro­tag­o­nists who ulti­mately pre­vail, or flawed pro­tag­o­nists who change their ways (think ani­mated movies: The Lit­tle Mer­maid, Toy Story, Cin­derella, Aladdin, Cars, Beauty and the Beast, etc etc). While these sto­ries may be enter­tain­ing to adults, they don’t really offer much oppor­tu­nity to exer­cise your moral imag­i­na­tion. The morals of these sto­ries are trite: treat oth­ers as you would like to be treated, if you try hard enough then your dreams can come true, and the like. It’s obvi­ous to the kids who the good guy is, and they might learn some­thing. But, to adults, the point is overly obvious.

More inter­est­ing to adults are “grey area” sto­ries, wherein it is not quite clear who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and why, or movies that lack gen­uine good and bad guys alto­gether. These sto­ries have real moral value because they encour­age the viewer to work through their resul­tant moral emo­tions and judg­ments and, if nec­es­sary, to reassess prior moral com­mit­ments in light of them. How­ever, the “greyer” the story, the more likely it is that the viewer might ulti­mately come to iden­tify with the wrong party. So, you might become overly sym­pa­thetic to Dex­ter and kind of approve of his mur­der­ing ways, or you might become overly sym­pa­thetic to Dirty Harry, and thereby approve of cops every­where who aren’t afraid to get their hands a lit­tle messy in the name of jus­tice. But maybe even this sub­op­ti­mal out­come is bet­ter than if those grey area fic­tions never existed. A sen­si­tive per­son who thinks seri­ously about these sto­ries will be at least morally uncom­fort­able with the killing and tor­ture por­trayed in them, even if they ulti­mately approve of those actions, and I think that’s morally healthy. It’s anal­o­gous to the wag­ing of a just war: even if a leader is wholly con­vinced that a par­tic­u­lar war is a just one, he or she ought to remain sen­si­tive to the vio­lence that accom­pa­nies war, and human­ity of it all. So there might be moral value in watch­ing grey area vio­lent tv, even if ulti­mately your result­ing moral con­vic­tion is a thought­ful but mis­taken one. But, in any case, these kinds of shows are not appro­pri­ate for chil­dren, because they are not yet morally capa­ble of rec­og­niz­ing and work­ing through the moral sub­tleties. They are likely to uncrit­i­cally iden­tify with a Dirty Harry, which might be detri­men­tal to the devel­op­ment of moral matu­rity and sen­si­tiv­ity in the future.

I’ll wrap up with a related story. One sum­mer when I was maybe ten or twelve, my mom took my younger brother and me to a the­atri­cal pro­duc­tion of West Side Story at the Fox The­atre in Atlanta, my home­town. It was a mat­inée, and much of the audi­ence was com­prised of what appeared to be under­priv­i­leged chil­dren par­tic­i­pat­ing in some kind of sum­mer camp pro­gram. In case you didn’t know, West Side Story is a kind of updated Romeo & Juliet; the main char­ac­ters are Tony & Maria instead, the set­ting is urban, and the theme involves alot of gang vio­lence. Towards the end of the play, there is a cli­mac­tic scene when a mem­ber of a rival gang shoots and kills Tony. Imme­di­ately after the shot rang out into the the­atre, basi­cally all of the sum­mer camp chil­dren broke out into laugh­ter. I don’t recall think­ing much of it at the time, but my mom was hor­ri­fied. To her, it was a glar­ing exam­ple of the desen­si­ti­za­tion of the chil­dren to vio­lence. The scene in the play was com­pletely real­is­tic, but for what­ever rea­son the chil­dren still found it hilar­i­ous. Maybe it’s wish­ful think­ing, but I sup­pose it could have been a case in which one kid laughed and it became infec­tious. It’s pos­si­ble that by now all those kids have real­ized that guns are no joke. I really hope that no one had to learn the hard way.