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The reel story
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That violence on screen triggers violence in real life is the general perception. But researchers say the relationship is far more complex, as RAKESH MEHAR finds out
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NO DIRECT RELATIONSHIP Most studies account for the highly diverse set of factors that contributes to violence
The link between reel violence and real world violence is in the spotlight again, this time thanks to a “freakonomics”— style paper recently presented at the American Economic Association. The study, authored by economists Gordon Da
hl and Stefano DellaVigna argues that violent movies help to check violent crime in the short term by keeping would-be assailants cloistered for hours in an alcohol-free environment. The paper backs the statement, say media reports, by correlating a decade of crime data from across the U.S. with cinema ratings and movie audience data.
Many researchers look askance at the study for what they say is essentially empiricism. However, the study presents an opportunity to flip the debate around and examine what some media observers say is an over-simplification of the relationship between onscreen and off-screen violence. While there are numerous studies that support the generally accepted conclusion that violence on screen increases aggression in real life, researchers caution that the relationship between the two is far more complex. A direct, causal link, typically the basis for censorship of the media, fails to account for the highly diverse set of factors that contribute to violence, and hence exaggerate the role on-screen violence plays.
One of the primary problems with theories of media impact such as the “bullet theory” is that they are based on a shaky premise of the relationship between the reader and the text. “Many of these theories originated in the 1950s, as a response to the hyper reality of modern media,” says Lawrence Liang, a researcher with the Alternative Law Forum. “But subsequent authorship has shown that it is impossible to arrive on a universal theory of spectatorship.” For example, Lawrence points to a study on homeless men in the U.S. by John Fiske, where Fiske finds that a group of 20 men watching the popular action film “Die Hard” read the film in a manner that is exactly opposite of what is expected. For these men, at a time when Japanese takeovers of American companies were having a profound effect on the American job market, it was more pleasurable to identify with the terrorists who kill the Japanese CEO, explains Lawrence. “The question of subjectivity is vital. You can never say that the image has only one meaning.”
A range of factors
While admitting that cinema is an important form that shapes the conscious, Lawrence counters that the image is only one part of a range of factors that affect one’s tendency towards violence, and prioritising the influence of media over other experiences in everyday life is problematic.
This viewpoint is echoed by filmmaker, teacher and researcher Shohini Ghosh in an essay titled “Looking in Horror and Fascination: Sex, Violence and Spectatorship in India”, which appeared as part of “Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia” by Sage Publications. In the essay, Shohini points to the Surgeon General’s Workshop on Pornography in 1986, which “listed among the methodological limitations the inability to isolate specific effects of the variable being considered (that is, exposing to pornography) from other potentially influential variables.” S.V. Srinivas, a fellow at the Centre for Study of Culture and Society who specialises in popular cinema, points out that the claim of a corrupting influence is brought about by almost every new entertainment medium. “When the romances first appeared some centuries ago, there was a lot of anxiety about their effect on young women who, it was believed, were incapable of thinking for themselves.” Fortunately, he says, humans are more complex creatures whose behaviour is not so easily controlled by the image. Another element to notice in most theories of media impact, points out Lawrence, is the “othering” of the subjects of study. Most such studies, he explains, assume that the impact occurs on a different class or group of people: children, members of lower classes and so on. “It doesn’t happen to you or me. The argument is that such people are emotionally or intellectually immature and hence succumb to the false appeals of cinema and television.”
There is also a practical difficulty associated with the assumption of a direct causal relationship and the practice of censoring violent images that arises from it.
As film and book reviewer Jai Arjun Singh, points out, with the proliferation of the Internet, thorough censorship is next to impossible. “You just cannot ensure that a 10-year-old has no access to violence or pornography,” he says. The key to critiquing on-screen violence, says Lawrence, is to engage with it in a more creative manner. “There are no unproblematic images. But the question is how to critique violence. You have to engage seriously with the medium,” explains Lawrence.
Not everyone believes that such an argument holds water, however. Shekhar Seshadri, specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry at NIMHANS, for instance, says that while this argument may have intellectual merit, such an argument is not a responsible stance. The question is not so much one of regulatory censorship, he counters, as one of responsible behaviour of the media. “What is the percentage of images shown that deals with compassionate, constructive conflict resolution? If the media believes in its social responsibility, it should also depict the counterpoint. After all, there are other realities, stories of compassion, integrity and so on that can also be shown.”
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