The social effect of TV violence - 22 October 1993

Twenty-one years after the surgeon general of the United States decided that movie and television violence can provoke violent behaviour, a Senate committee summoned to Washington on Wednesday the president of one of the big three commercial television networks and the chairman of a pay cable network, others will follow.

These hearings, which like all Congressional hearings are held to collect evidence for the purpose of framing new laws, the hearings had been set sometime ago, but two grisly incidents happened during the past week that strengthened the contention of several senators on the panel that the dinning repetition of violence in the movies, even more on television, does provoke violence in life.

The other day, one teenager died and two were critically injured when they imitated a scene in a movie about college football, it's called The Program. And at one point two young Hellions proved their manhood by lying down in the centre of the dividing line of a two-lane highway. This is a rather primitive sort of Russian roulette; the hopeful theory is that cars will go swishing by in opposite directions barely brushing the brave or idiotic prostrate figures. In the movie they made it. In life, one boy was killed and two critically injured.

The other incident was more naive, more chilling still. There is a a TV cartoon series Beavis and Butthead in which one of the characters likes to play with matches. One devotee of this series is a five-year-old boy, his mother's quite certain that he got the idea from the cartoon series. He played with matches long and successfully enough to see his baby brother burn to death. Now oldsters will readily testify that this problem now directed at television shows first came up decades ago with comic strips, newspaper comics. Children with concerned and noticeably austere parents were forbidden to look at the comics, which for very many children were the only part of the newspaper they yearned after.

Anyway, the dreadful incident of the five-year-old arsonist is the first example I can recall of provocation by a cartoon character.

After the comics, radio became the alleged stimulant to wicked or loutish behaviour and in the 1930s I knew several families, parents not much older than me who simply banned radio sets from the house. All I noticed from close observation of their children was that they tended to be not only priggish but alarmingly out of touch with the life around them, that is outside their immediate family. Then there was or perhaps running concurrently with widespread complaints about radio, there was also a grouch spanning the Atlantic about the movies. The big hullabaloo came roaring up in the 1920s before sound, the talkies, came in, so the seducing factor was visual. Moreover, the protest wasn't about screen violence not until sound and the gangster films, but about nudity and S-E-X as we were told to say before the small children.

The first rumblings of family protests in the United States anyway against barely disguised sexual situations on the screen soon coincided with dreadful revelations, which the very popular fan magazines dreaded to publicise but bravely did so, revelations of behaviour among some famous movie stars that we today being determined to avoid all moralising might call "easy going" but which people, ordinary people and families as well as parsons and politicians called downright immoral.

There were in the late '20s and early '30s some very murky divorce suits among the stars, and proved sexual orgies were still a rash of drug deaths, one exotic screen siren and her popular husband star both died of cocaine overdoses. It's odd to think back to it now, cocaine to two or three generations at the beginning of the century, it was a sort of quirky forgivable weakness of Sherlock Holmes. We never heard about it in life until this wave of Hollywood scandals in the '20s, which was mimicked with similar dire results, deaths, suicide in London's Mayfair smart set. Then we never heard about it again until the 1970s and 10 years ago the news of its hold on street gangs and on the first generation of Wall Street yuppies. Somehow, I don't know why, the drug menace, except as a street pest and a provocation to the downfall of pop singers and the like, has generally been used in the movies as a cautionary tale, a warning – not so with guns. And the Senate committee's hearings this week were mostly about guns.

Sex in movies, anything short of the act itself, has long been allowed and on the pornographic television channels there is no limit. Anyway, the Supreme Court along with the judiciaries of all the Western countries I believe all has given up on censoring or restricting pornography and has a rough time trying to define obscenity even.

In this country, the sainted First Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees freedom of speech has been stretched to take in and sanction anything and everything, but the essence of the Senate's concern and its anger is guns. No wonder in a city true too of New York and other cities where one schoolboy in five carries a gun where the London figure of 22 homicides a year is out-blasted by our 1,890 homicides. A country in which the leading cause of death for youths between the ages of 15 and 24 is homicide.

Now to go back to the result of the popular campaign against Hollywood immorality led in the early 1930s to a so-called Legion of Decency, which developed enough clout to force the industry through its ruling body to police itself, which it did with ludicrous primness in the early years misconstruing the idea of morality to the point where bad girls were compelled in the movies always to come to a bad end. Nobody, no married couple, could be seen in bed together except in two-reel farces: it was all right for Laurel and Hardy but not for Mr and Mrs America. And if a man truly, wedded or not, kissed his wife in bed, he had to keep one foot planted firmly on the floor and so on and on till the code was killed by its own absurdity.

When the first protests were heard about the narcotic effect on children of violence on television, the argument was joined between two bodies that expressed themselves firmly, dogmatically as the ruling experts on such things – the churches and the psychiatrists. The churches were as always all for banning explicit violence, the psychiatrists asserted there was no proof that screen or television violence incited to violence in life, rather they assured us screen violence acted as a purge and not a stimulant.

I remember one splendid old codger, a professor of English literature no less, going along with the psychiatrist delightedly applying to Al Capone and the St Bartholomew's Day killings what Aristotle said about Greek tragedy, through pity and terror affecting the proper purgation of these emotions. Mmm.

Well, the psychiatrists held the floor for many years and naturally the movie industry and then the television boys were eager to quote and applaud their testimony but, about a quarter of a century ago at the latest, social scientists, prisons, doctors, posters, began to make studies which resulted in the surgeon general statement, which was both a positive statement and a warning that many people young especially were incited to a particular forms of violence by watching particular programmes and that the spate of gunfire on the telly had played a bit part in either stimulating or frightening ordinary people to buy guns and psychopaths to use them. By this time, I do believe there's no question about the truth of it.

This week, the network chiefs took a verbal beating from two senators but more so from the most important and eloquent witness of the day namely Miss Janet Reno the new Attorney General of the United States. The television chiefs had put up a defence about as persuasive as the tobacco industry's spokesmen when they earnestly declare that more research needs to be done to establish the alleged connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer and emphysema. One executive almost jokingly assured the committee that there's no murder on Monday nights, none on Thursday both evenings mainly given only on his network to sports.

This was too much for Miss Reno, she left her prepared statement and with tears of anger deplored television violence that is ground into us, day in and day out. You have to have been a prosecutor she said, she was the District Attorney of Dade County, Florida, practically a showplace of night time violence in life. You have to have seen the fruits of violence, the broken mother, the scared brothers, the frightened neighbours, the weeping families. You'd never see this after violence on television – guns solve everything. She ended with a warning the television industry, network, cable syndicates had better clean up its act by next January, if it does not, she proposed an action that has so far never been contemplated quote "if immediate voluntary steps are not taken and deadlines established, government should respond, the White House will work with the Congress to make new laws". Whether that can ever happen is a large question. The industry immediately calls censorship, strangling the First Amendment, a police state in the offing. It has been the American experience, so far, even on matters as horrendous as rape and/or extreme fictional violence, that even when a scoundrel claims the protection of the First Amendment he usually gets it.

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