Pop culture violence: how influential is it?

"It seems today, all you see, is violence in movies and sex on TV..." - Lois Griffin.

The debate has raged for years: is pop culture too violent? Does that violence inspire real-life violence? I wonder what Spike Lee must have felt after one critic, reviewing Lee's 1989 Black protest film Do the Right Thing, for him implied that the film's target audience could not demonstrate self-control. A decade later, the Columbine High School massacre was widely blamed on the perpetrators' love of violent action films and video games. Then in 2012, a massacre infamously occurred outside a theatre screening The Dark Knight Rises. Pop culture violence can certainly be partly responsible for such tragedies, but does it stop there?

Now, I'll admit immediately I love a lot of violent movies despite considering myself a pacifist. But I'm just one example. Your outlook on or interpretation of one probably does stem from nature or nurture, too. Just considering ones that clearly promote violence for now, there are some I've loved (Kick-Ass, for example, which was never meant to be taken seriously overall anyway) and others I've hated (Fight Club first comes to mind; for me it's the most overrated movie of the '90s). Quentin Tarantino, the Gun Director himself, has said this about the whole issue: "What if a kid goes to school after seeing Kill Bill and starts slicing up other kids? You know, I'll take that chance! Violent films don't turn children into violent people. They may turn them into violent filmmakers but that's another matter altogether." As much as I adore QT and his films, I don't quite agree with that statement.

It's not just Hollywood, or cinema itself either. Bart and Lisa's favourite show on The Simpsons, The Itchy and Scratchy Show, has always been meant as a satirical comedy of children's cartoons like Road Runner that usually end in at least one character being blown up or flattened. These may be funny even to some adults, but children often - not always, but often - have trouble telling fact from fiction and right from wrong. And then we have foreign-language cinema, much of which of is decidedly more gratuitous than Hollywood's output, particularly Asian and Mexican cinema. Now, if you follow this blog you should know by now I have something of a weakness for Asian (particularly Japanese) action flicks, but I thankfully was raised to enjoy such texts without condoning or replicating their content, as many other fans have been.

Do I think pop culture violence can inspire real-life violence, particularly in children? Yes. But violence, sadly, is just in human nature, and our interpretations of and attitudes towards the violence we see, on- AND off-screen, depends on how we were raised to behave. That's the key.