Graphic Violence

Illustrated Theories About Violence, Popular Media, and Our Social Lives

Emily Edwards, Tristan Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351112499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

Graphic Violence provides an innovative introduction to the relationship between violence and visual media, discussing how media consumers and producers can think critically about and interact with violent visual content. It comprehensively surveys predominant theories of media violence and the research supporting and challenging them, addressing issues ranging from social learning, to representations of war and terrorism, to gender and hyper-masculinity. Each chapter features original artwork presenting a story in the style of a graphic novel to demonstrate the concepts at hand. Truly unique in its approach to the subject and medium, this volume is an excellent resource for undergraduate students of communication and media theory as well as anyone interested in understanding the causes and effects of violence in media.

1
The Characteristics of Story

Conflict, Chronicle, and Violence

Ask any news editor, screenwriter, movie producer, journalist, drama instructor, or graphic novelist for the essence of story and these people will likely tell you that the core of any story is a character in conflict. Most stories involve a protagonist (the main character) with a goal and the conflicts encountered when something or someone prevents the protagonist from achieving that ambition. Without conflict, a storyteller cannot build the necessary tension to create plot. Media professionals have additionally embraced the notion that if conflicts are not externalized into action, the story becomes static and talky, rather than dramatic, visual, and emotionally compelling. Dramatic conflict is heightened with urgency. “If a character desperately wants to achieve a goal, and some obstacle is thrown in the way, the dramatic tension heightens in direct proportion to that emotional intensity” (Blum, 1995, p. 82). Time-honored advice for development of screenplays has been to recognize that conflict has primal power for stories, so a good writer will fan all the possible flames of conflict (Armer, 1993). Conflict may not always lead to violence. However, conflict is the root from which violence can grow. As the centerpiece of storytelling, understanding conflicts and their resolutions are key to understanding story violence.

We can all identify with conflict; it is a part of life. An argument with a family member, disagreements with coworkers, disputes with neighbors, a fight with city council, the road rage of motorists, the rejection of a lover: the list of potential conflicts can get quite long. Happily, not every conflict rises to the level of violence, but all too often media stories demonstrate violent methods for conflict resolution. While violence often has a starring role in popular media stories, violence was also central to mythology, drama, fairy tales, and folklore long before it was championed in modern media. Violence was the “go to” resolution in stories told generations before arrival of film, television, computer games, internet, and social media.

You will notice that I frequently substitute the word “story” where media theories have historically used the phrases “media message” or “media contents.” “Story” is useful because it emphasizes the often dramatic nature of cultural messages and makes the human construction of media contents more evident. Some might question this substitution, asking, “Where is the ‘story’ in a recipe or instruction manual? Where is the protagonist? Where is the conflict?” The story may not always be obvious but is often implied. In the case of a cake recipe, the protagonists are the readers, imagining all that needs to be accomplished as they embark on the journey of making a cake, encountering the series of tasks to be completed and complications to overcome before that final triumphant or disastrous moment when cakes come out of the oven. Admittedly, some stories are more clearly dramatic. Story is not synonymous with lie, which is a deliberate departure from fact in an effort to mislead. My use of the word story simply acknowledges that people must choose how to explain the world they experience. All the narratives people tell are fabrications. They are human creations that might lead to a better understanding of events—or make them incomprehensible. Media stories can be as short as a headline, a single photo, or a one-sentence flash fiction tale. Longer form stories are typically threads of many smaller stories woven into a larger media tapestry. Stories may be as long as a feature film, a multi-season television series, a feature documentary, a continuing computer game, or a novel franchise.

Though stories are human constructions, some media theories we will examine suggest it is the other way around, too. Stories help construct the human psyche and it is the violent stories that leave the largest dents.

Defining Violence

The literature about popular media influence on social violence is extensive. While there may be disagreement in the research, one point of consensus is that American media circulate a lot of violent stories to a vast, worldwide audience. However, scholars have varying definitions for the media violence we observe and the social violence we experience. In some cases, research limits media violence to depictions of overt physical human aggression that maims or kills others. Many studies have widened this definition to include threat, so media violence is defined as “the depiction of overt physical action that hurts or kills or threatens to do so” (Signorelli … Gerbner, 1988, p. xi). The three-year National Television Violence Study (NTVS) defined violence as “any overt depiction of a credible threat of physical force or the actual use of such force intended to physically harm an animate being or group of such beings” (Anderson et al., 2003, p. 81). The British Broadcasting Corporation’s definition of violence is “any action of physical force, with or without a weapon, used against oneself or another person, where there is an intent to harm, whether carried through or merely attempted and whether the action caused injury or not” (BBC, Broadcasting Standards Commission … Independent Television Commission, 2002).

Many researchers agree that depictions of violence involve the willful human intent to cause harm to another person or people; some will also include cruel human violence against animals, but generally stop short of including animal predators killing other animals for food or survival. Even animal violence is problematic when considering the brutality in movies like Jaws (1975), Jurassic Park (1993), Jurassic World (2015), and the various versions of King Kong (1933, 1976, 2005) when monster-sized creatures annihilate human victims and each other with what seems like bloody delight. We can argue that this violence appeals to the blood lust of human audiences whose ancestors staged vicious events like dog fighting, cock fighting, and bear baiting for entertainment. The human-created and genetically manipulated dinosaurs envisioned for Jurassic Park and its sequels are not purely a scientific fascination of the movie’s characters about extinct creatures but include an attraction to the thrill of primeval danger. When the ancient threat of dinosaurs no longer seems exciting enough for theme park visitors in Jurassic World, the film’s scientists depart from “nature’s design” to genetically manipulate DNA, manufacturing bigger, meaner, more ruthless creatures that never existed in nature. Indominus, the gigantic dinosaur created as the star attraction for Jurassic World, had a mysterious genetic mixture that included the cunning of Velociraptors (raptors), giving Indominus the drive to hunt and kill for pleasure as well as problem-solving skills and aspirations for vengeance. Indominus functions as a massive and vicious “Other” that the film’s human characters can destroy without guilt.

Another definition describes violence as any behavior intended to cause severe physical harm to another person who does not want to be harmed (Bushman … Huesmann, 2010). This definition would not consider sadomasochistic acts such as those suggested in the film Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) as violent when both partners seek out this behavior and seem to enjoy the experience. If a masochist does not want to avoid pain but invites it, then the sadomasochistic sex-play depicted in the film is not violent, unless the “fun” develops into an agony-filled situation the masochist cannot manage and does not want.

Early researchers additionally struggled with whether or not cartoon violence or slapstick should be included in a definition of media violence. Some believed that when one of The Three Stooges (1934–1946) clouts his friend on the head or pokes him in the eye, this rough clowning hardly constitutes violence. In cartoons such as Tom and Jerry (1940–1958), the animated anthropomorphized cat-and-mouse rivalry between the title characters often results in bashed cartoon skulls and battered cartoon limbs, events that would definitely be considered violent had they been live action. When researcher George Gerbner studied television violence in the 1970s, he included cartoon violence, explaining that “scenes of violence occur an average three to five times per hour in prime-time dramatic fiction, and between 20 and 25 times per hour in cartoons” (p. 340). Other researchers argued that the improbable exaggeration and intended comedy of the action should make cartoons exempt. Writing in 1989, media critic James B. Twitchell defined violence as a force directed against a victim, “usually a human being.” He described violent entertainment in media as “preposterous violence,” scenes so exaggerated that most of the audience will understand that they are watching “make-believe” (p. 3). Popular media brought “preposterous violence” to eager audiences as a dependable cultural bedtime fantasy. Some definitions list examples, such as “images of fighting, bloodshed, war, and gunplay produced for the purpose of entertainment, recreation, or leisure” (Goldstein, 1998, p. 2). The problem with lists is that they may not be all-inclusive. This particular list seems limited to entertainment, but news broadcasts and documentaries also depict violent acts.

News outlets have a responsibility to alert audiences about the violence in their communities, but when audiences use news broadcasts to gape at tragedy, news might become a digital form of “rubber-necking” or recognition that deadly tragedy captures eager audience attention. Not all news is the reporting of violence, but violence can give a news story weight and precedence in the lineup. Most definitions of media violence don’t eliminate violence in news stories from research consideration and some research has shown that news reports about crime and violence can have negative effects on viewers (Williams & Dickinson, 1993).

The implication in these definitions is that violence is a human endeavor. Though weather forecasters may speak about a “violent storm” and people can be maimed and killed as a result of a hurricane, a catastrophic storm or any other violent natural disaster does not have human intention behind its destructive path. These tragedies of nature fall outside the definitions. Media stories about unintentional accidents, such as a wreck on a highway, are also omitted from the research definition of violence. Violence needs human objectives and motivation. The concern is to create a definition of violence that brings disturbing actions into sharp focus without being so broad as to be meaningless.

Graphic violence suggests that some depictions may be more visually explicit and brutal than others. As the title for this book, the phrase evokes the nature of violence in visual media such as film, television, videos, computer games, comic books, and graphic novels as well as the descriptive qualities of media using words, sound effects, and music to create vivid, “graphic” imagery in the imagination. The phrase also refers to the sequential art used as narrative examples throughout this book. Pictures can be more explicit and relatable for some readers, which is a powerful advantage of pictures.

Though not a definition of violence often encountered in social science research, some groups, such as the Poor People’s Campaign (1968–), ask us to consider public policy that disenfranchises people to the point of physical and emotional harm or death to be considered a form of institutional violence (Reverend Dr. William J. Barber, III, Poor People’s Campaign Rally; New Light Baptist Church, Greensboro, NC, October 29, 2018). Examples of this violence include economic systems that allow: a hungry child to starve, a person with a treatable illness to die without health care, or an industry to dump toxic wastes in low-income neighborhoods.

Aggression and Violence

Researchers define aggression as behavior intended to harm a person who does not want to be hurt (Baron & Richardson, 1994). This harm can be psychological or physical. The person who intentionally and forcefully shoves someone aside to get at the front of a line is behaving aggressively, but if there was no serious physical harm, (no murder, aggravated assault, or rape) then the action is aggressive but not violent. Aggression may be manifested in destructive and even attacking behavior. It may arise from innate drives, as a response to frustration or hostility, as a reaction to hindering, or as encouragement from others. Aggression may also be a self-expressive drive toward mastery. Though there is a distinction between violence and aggression, sometimes people treat these words as synonyms. Others see violence as the extreme form of aggression. Violence might be defined as aggressive physical actions where an assailant makes or attempts to make physical contact that causes injury or death (Bushman, 2017).

Though there are differences between the definitions of aggression and violence, media research generally measures aggressive acts as opposed to violent ones. The Institutional Review Boards that oversee research projects involving human subjects want to ensure there are no abuses or risks to subjects. Because of these ethical concerns, media research involving experiments with people will measure aggression not violence. For example, researchers wanting to see if violent video games provoke aggressive behaviors might measure the number or intensity of electric shocks players are willing to give another person after they had played a violent game. Subjects in this experiment may believe they are punishing another person with shocks that are painful but not destructive. The eagerness with which a subject applies intense shocks to another person would be considered aggressive but not violent. Researchers use similar measures to calculate aggression after exposure to other violent media. A subject’s willingness to blast a person with a loud noise or enthusiasm for putting large amounts of hot sauce in another person’s food are considered reliable measures of aggression (Lieberman, Solomon, Greenberg, & McGregor, 1999).

Good Reasons for Violent Depictions

Not all violent depictions in popular media are gratuitous or unnecessary. Producers may want to call attention to a problem, arouse sympathy for victims, and perhaps move a concerned public toward political action in the hope of righting a wrong or preventing future harm. One example from the art world involved Pablo Picasso’s reaction to news about the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The horror of combat inspired Picasso’s mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair. Art critics declared this mural to be one of the most unsettling indictments of war in the last century. Some believed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Characteristics of Story: Conflict, Chronicle, and Violence
• 2 The Journeys of Brutal Stories
• 3 Helpless Audiences and the Magic Bullet
• 4 Obstinate Violence
• 5 Learning Violence: The Drama of Aggression
• 6 Mean Worlds and Remorseless Strangers With Guns
• 7 What an Audience Wants: Selection, Gratification, and Violence
• 8 Gender, Hyper-Masculinity, and the Violent Story
• 9 Terrorism, War, and Media Systems
• 10 The Violent Aesthetic
• Index