The myth of media violence

Schechter knows what you're thinking: At least those kids were reading, and as reprehensible by our standards as those books may have been, there's really no comparison between the printed page and the "hyperkinetic visuals of movies and computer games." The only answer to this is maybe and maybe not; critics of pop culture always assume that new technologies have rendered kids incapable of telling the difference between reality and fantasy, and so far they've always been wrong. Schechter writes that for children who had never seen a movie or a video game, "the printed page was a PlayStation, and penny dreadfuls were state-of-the-art escapism, capable of eliciting a shudder or thrill every bit as intense as the kind induced by today's high-tech entertainment." The relativist position that each generation is equally affected by the media available to it is supported by ample historical evidence, from the way that the audiences at early film screenings rose in panic when on-screen trains bore down upon them to the wildly Dionysian effect of that hypersexual, morals-corroding music, swing.

If Sen. Clinton might prefer an outdoor family activity in the sunny American heartland, there's always the example of Owensboro, Ky., where on Aug. 14, 1936, some 20,000 citizens of all ages crowded into the courthouse square. It was a "jolly holiday," according to newspaper reports. Hot dogs, popcorn and soft drinks were sold, and there was a mixture of cheers and catcalls -- but no general disorder, as the local paper angrily insisted -- when sheriff's deputies brought a man named Rainey Bethea out to the scaffold, where he was hanged.

The Bethea execution, with its clear subtext of white supremacy (Bethea was a black man convicted of raping a white woman, and the crowd of onlookers was entirely white, except for the undertakers commissioned to retrieve his body), caused a national scandal, and pretty much brought an end to one of the Western world's most enduring entertainment traditions. In medieval and early modern Europe, public executions were major carnival attractions, and high-profile criminals were dispatched with loving sadism and a truly diabolical degree of invention.

Schechter cites the infamous opening pages of Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish," which recount the horrible tortures inflicted in 1757 on Robert François Damiens, the attempted assassin of Louis XV. In 1305 in London, Scottish rebel William Wallace was hanged and revived, castrated and disemboweled while still alive, and finally decapitated and dismembered, with the pieces coated in boiling tar and strung up in various public places. (When Mel Gibson played Wallace in "Braveheart," we saw none of that.) Sometimes it's the little things that tell the story: During the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France, children were given 2-foot-tall toy guillotines they could use to behead birds and mice.

Schechter doesn't bring up the Bethea execution to paint white Kentuckians of the Depression as depraved rubes; his point is that we actually have come a long way in seven decades. We're free to regard violent movies and video games as loathsome, but we also have to admit they reflect at least a partially successful sublimation of what William James called "our aboriginal capacity for murderous excitement." Few of us are eager for the return of public executions (except perhaps the programming executives at Fox) and no real cops or prostitutes were harmed during the creation of "Grand Theft Auto." Although a few juveniles charged with murder, or their victims' families, have argued that video games were responsible for murder, kids who play video-game shooters aren't outside gunning down the neighbors, possibly because that would mean getting off their butts and leaving behind the overlit universe of their TV or computer screen.

As Schechter says, there are two linked assumptions that underpin all the hysteria about purported media-influenced violence in the last 20 years, if not longer. Assumption No. 1 is that we live in an especially violent time in human history, surrounded by serial killers, hardened teenage "superpredators," genocidal atrocities and all sorts of amoral mayhem. Assumption No. 2 is that our popular entertainment is far more violent than the entertainment of the past, and presents that violence in more graphic and bloodthirsty detail. For critics of media violence, from the Clintons to Dave Grossman to the leadership of the child-psychiatry establishment, these assumptions go essentially unchallenged, and the conclusion they draw is that there is a causal or perhaps circular relationship between these "facts": Media violence breeds real violence, which leads to ever more imaginative media violence, and so on.

A longtime crime buff who has written several books about notorious murderers, Schechter mounts an impressive case in "Savage Pastimes" that, if anything, our pop culture is less bloody-minded than that of the past. Anyone who looks back at the 1950s, when Schechter himself was a child, and remembers only "Leave It to Beaver" and Pat Boone needs to read his discourse on the hugely popular "Davy Crockett" miniseries of 1954, "whose level of carnage," he writes, "remains unsurpassed in the history of televised children's entertainment." This series, with its barrage of "shootings, stabbings, scalpings, stranglings," was broadcast on Wednesday nights at 7:30 p.m., and presented as the acme of wholesome family fare.

In fact, as Schechter demonstrates, '50s TV was profoundly rooted in guns and gunfire, to a degree that would provoke widespread outrage today. But there are factors he doesn't consider, or considers only in passing, that fuel people's perceptions that the past was less violent, both in real and symbolic terms. Those '50s TV shows were mostly westerns, of course, which meant that they presented themselves as instructive fables of American history in its most masculine, individualistic form. They were racially and politically uncomplicated; "Gunsmoke" and "Bonanza" developed a social conscience in the '60s, but the white screen cowboys of the '50s were heroes, and the whites, Indians and Mexicans around them were clearly divided into good guys and bad.

Next Page: We're all scared -- but the world has never been safer

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