About a decade ago, a friend of mine, after a brutal real-world murder of someone he was close to, wondered if his taste for violent movies made him a bad person. He went to the movies religiously, never missing a horror film or one of Quentin Tarantino's exercises in hard violence and while he was a gentle person, he worried that by helping to create and sustain a market for these kinds of entertainment products he was contributing to the general coarsening of the culture.
I told him I didn't think so, by which I meant I hoped not.
I said something about there having always been a constituency for dark stories, and that our particular American tradition is rife with murder ballads and bloodbaths. Shakespeare wasn't dainty--there is a dark yen in the human animal, a drive for extinction that rivals the urge for sex. And it is from these base and desperate urges that art is made. We make things from bones and blood and the humors of the body, as well as from invisible things that float on air.
And I wouldn't proscribe any artist from making full use of whatever materials he can find.
That doesn't mean that some people aren't suggestible. But sick people will find whatever feeds their sickness. Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley had deeper problems than an unhealthy obsession with Holden Caulfield. John Fowles' The Collector had among its admirers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who kidnapped and murdered between 11 and 25 people. Stephen King allowed Rage, a novel he originally published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, to go out of print after it was associated with five separate instances of high school students taking their classmates hostage in which eight people died.
"I sympathize with the losers of the world and to some degree understand the blind hormonal rage and ratlike panic which sets in as one senses the corridor of choice growing ever narrower, until violence seems like the only possible response to the pain," King said in a speech at the Vermont Library Conference's annual meeting in 1999.
But he went on to say he that while a novel like Rage could "act as an accelerant on a troubled mind," he withdrew the novel with "relief rather than regret."
"If . . . you were to ask me if the presence of potentially unstable or homicidal persons makes it immoral to write a novel or make a movie in which violence plays a part, I would say absolutely not," King said. "In most cases, I have no patience with such reasoning. I reject it as both bad thinking and bad morals. Like it or not, violence is a part of life and a unique part of American life. If accused of being part of the problem, my response is the time-honored reporter's answer: 'Hey, man, I don't make the news, I just report it.'... Sometimes the truth of how we live is just ugly, that's all. But to turn aside from these truths out of some perceived delicacy, or to give in to the idea that writing about violence causes violence, is to embrace hypocrisy. In Washington, hypocrisy breeds politicians. In the arts, it breeds pornography."
There is a danger in driving the purveyors of stories--however awful decent people might find those stories to be--underground. You don't want to give the censors precedent. Books and movies and video games and Marilyn Manson records don't kill people. An appetite for horror gore is not in itself a sign of anything other than a cultivated taste, such as one might develop for Norwegian folk-rock or single malt Scotch.
I don't worry about my friend who likes bloody movies, or my wife who counts Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange as one of her all-time favorites, but I do worry about myself. I think perhaps I should treat these works more seriously, that I should not be quite so enamored of James Ellroy's thuggish operatives or Cormac McCarthy's inhuman killing machines. I recognize the nihilism in No Country for Old Men, but it doesn't bother me.
But maybe it should.
I was a cop reporter. I have seen things.
Like the little kid in The Sixth Sense, I have seen dead people; I have seen the consequences of human recklessness.
Sometimes some of them still bother me. The most troubling of these acts were committed by more or less ordinary people in a moment of insensate rage or delusional panic: A little girl was angry with her sister and a pair of scissors was at hand. Two teenage boys killed everyone in a temple because they believed a rumor about a hidden safe filled with drug money and gold.
Bad things happen, innocent things are hurt. "We all have it coming, kid," William Munny tells the Schofield Kid in Unforgiven. Lots of pain and suffering lube our creature comforts. We push on.
Are we less sensitive to violence than we ought to be? Does our rough culture, particularly of consumption of thousands of fake homicides and atrocities, desensitize us to the actual harm that goes on in the world? Probably. When the Army uses video games to train soldiers, there's something to the idea that anything, even murder, can become mundane.
But the symptoms are never the real problem. And what's wrong with America is not so much the art its artists make or the stories its reporters report as the desperation and hopelessness--the economic and intellectual poverty--that makes so many of us susceptible to embracing nihilism. A healthier society might produce a different kind of culture, right?
I don't know. Blood-soaked crime novels come out of the gentlest, most peaceful and safest countries on the planet. More people die violently in the typical Jo Nesbo novel than are murdered in Norway every year.
It's not our art or our amusements, it's something in us.
As to what to do about it, I avail myself of Chekov's old dodge: It is not the writer's business to solve the problem, only to state it. We all know the problem, and it's not up there on the screen or buried in a book. It's creeping through the shadows of our minds, sheltering in the cool void where our hearts used to be.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 07/24/2018