During
the past decade there have been 1,500 mass
shootings, where a lone gunman enters a school
or any public arena and begins a random slaughter. In
the 1940s, before the television era, there were 400
shootings; crucially, nearly all of them were domestic
tragedies, cases where a person would snap and target
family members or acquaintances. The idea of entering
a school or driving a delivery van into a crowd of pedestrians
for the purposes of killing total strangers did not
exist.
Once upon a time, violence had a physical address. For
almost the entirety of our history, if you witnessed
a killing it meant you were present, either by design
or inadvertence. You heard the sickening whack of the
baseball bat on someone’s skull, or worse, you
saw it. You watched the sudden thrust of a blade pierce
the flesh, or saw the gun go off and a body collapse
with a final thud. And then you stood trembling in the
messy aftermath, the spreading dark pool of blood on
the floor leaking out of the still warm corpse, the
incoming wail of sirens, and then the routinized police
cleanup. What you witnessed churned in the mind long
after the event—and you were never quite the same.
Back
then, murder wasn’t a form of entertainment or
the soundtrack at the dinner table. It was real, and
the consequences were real—and absolute. A kid
learned about death and killing like he learned about
a thunderstorm; by standing in the rain in real time
and getting soaked. His behavioural development was
a function of his immediate environment. Networking
happened in the real world, at the local park or street
corner. If the hood was quiet, so was the kid’s
inner life.
The
young learn by mimesis, or observational learning. As
James Baldwin noted, “Children have never been
very good at listening to their elders, but they have
never failed to imitate them.” This is the non-negotiable
law of our development. A typical kid grows up mimicking
his father’s short temper, his mother’s
curiosity, a parent’s willingness to help others,
or the kindness or cruelty of what the other kids on
the block are doing, or want to do. He learns to procure
by example, by observing what everyone else wants. If
he is a mirror reflecting the “good, bad and the
ugly” that fall on him, he could have never mimicked
a mass shooting because he had never seen one: the concept
didn’t exist.
Then
television arrived and the world turned. By the mid
1950s, the majority of homes had a television. The TV
doesn’t condone killing, but it reprograms the
minds and morals of especially the young by exposing
them to conflicts (Westerns, crime dramas) where every
problem is solved with a gun. By the 1960s, ad hoc television
killing became de rigueur because there was a growing
appetite for it.
As
the middle class shrank and more and more mothers were
forced into low-wage jobs to make ends meet, some of
them surrogated the TV to babysit/distract their kids,
unaware of its nefarious influence. Through TV series
such as Dragnet and the Untouchables, the average kid,
now hooked on the good versus evil binary, witnessed
killing as entertainment on a daily basis, and imperceptibly
became not only inured to murder and mayhem, but required
more of it with each passing season. And the media moguls,
for whom quarterly profits counted more than the psychological
well-being of the nation, were only too happy to provide
the fix. We (nostalgically) note that killing in the
early days of television wasn’t nearly as quantitative
and graphic as it is today.
Sensationalized
killing, peculiar to TV and film, where the event is
stripped of its physical and sensory reality, was a
game-changer as it concerned the psyche of the viewer.
Sensationalized
killing is tidy and sanitized; it removes from the act
its odor and horror. As a meme that found a permanent
home in the modern psyche, television violence teaches
the viewer that killing is no big deal, that it’s
as innocuous as the furniture piece on which the screen
sits. A modern child sees more murders by age 12 than
a medieval executioner saw in a lifetime. With TV as
the great enabler, the idea that conflict can be solved
through violence and killing is planted deep in the
subconscious of the impressionable young. Beginning
in the 1950s, it wasn’t baseball’s fields
of dreams nor the electric glide in blue on the hockey
rink that the young looked forward to at the end of
the school day; it was TV and the 4.30 Western.
In
the 1950s, school psychologists were horrified that
a child might see 250 TV murders during the course of
a year. Today that same kid witnesses
12,000. Cinema upped the ante exponentially. TV screens
are measured in mere inches; theater screens are measured
in dozens of feet. The standard multiplex typically
measures between 45 and 65 feet, hovering over its captive
audience like a succubus. In the dark of the theater
there are no distractions; the experience is immediate
and overwhelming. In the ten-minute blood bath finale
of Scarface (1983), starring Al Pacino, 42 people were
killed. That scene became the template for “cool
violence,” code for graphic killing. In the TV
series Game of Thrones, watched by hundreds of millions,
the death toll reached 6,887. Today, 90% of American
films feature violence. In the 1940s it was 1%.
Have
we sacrificed on the altar of self-indulgence the cinema
of ideas for the cinema of high-definition mass killing?
And
yet we continue to be surprised when we hear about another
mass murder on our watch? Maybe the surprise should
be that it’s not happening as frequently as it
should. The link between the violence we are spoon-fed
on TV and headline news speaks to the sordid facts on
the ground.
In
a poignant observation attributed to Vance Maverick:
“We built a machine that markets killing as choreography,
put it on a pedestal in the corner of the house, and
called it entertainment. We shouldn’t act shocked
when a tiny percentage of the people raised by that
machine start following the steps.”
Unlike
someone in the pre-TV age, who wouldn’t have known
how to operate a tactical rifle, stalk a school hallway,
or enter his personal rage into the public domain through
social media, all of us, in the present age, with few
exceptions, have been inundated—assaulted by invitation—with
countless examples of how to go about killing on a massive
scale. We know how to announce it and video-record it,
knowing that the headlines and entertainment-starved
public will take care of the rest.
When
someone snaps, he turns to what he knows for a solution,
and much of what he knows has been informed by the blue
light of the screen. Before TV, a misfit, or someone
broken or damaged might drink himself into a stupor
or pick a fight in a bar; shooting up a school wasn’t
on his list of options; the playbook didn’t exist.
TV
refashions violence into a cartoon where there are no
consequences, where the road runner is flattened and
pops back up in the next frame. It persuades the unsuspecting
viewer to overestimate the results while ignoring the
cost, which in the case of mass murder are the victims,
the hollowed-out families, and the permanent damage
done to the psyche and soul of the community.
Can
there be any doubt that the recent explosion of mass
shootings is the inevitable comeuppance of over-exposure
to screen violence? Worldwide, the statistics are alarming;
the headlines reel the mind. Shooters in their twenties
have committed more mass attacks during the past 25
years than any other bracket. The frequency of these
events tripled after 2011—when kids raised on
cable and Internet content became adults with high-powered
smartphones in their pockets.
From
television to the billion-dollar gaming industry, today’s
children are fed on a 24/7 diet of violence that, as
an imitative species, predicts the violence we are presently
witnessing in the streets and in our schools. Fifty
percent of video games are designed around combat and
killing, where winning is a function of digital execution.
The sandbox and playground have been replaced by wireless
headsets and virtual triggers.
We
are the first society in human history to raise our
children on other people’s murders, and we are
now living with the fallout. The ubiquity of violence
and its ripple effects has rewired the human psyche.
Especially in schools, children no longer feel secure
while parents worry for their children in a manner unknown
to the pre-TV generation.
Is
it too late to remedy the turn to violence that turns
the world? As a society, we long ago decided that we
cannot live without our alcohol, and accept the annual
2.6 million death count as the price of modern life.
I find no evidence to the contrary that as a society
we are willing to give up our collective fascination
(obsession) with violence and killing. As for the now
predictable consequence—the routine killing of
strangers, the hardening of the spirit, the preponderance
of suspicion and mistrust that have undermined our most
sacred institutions—well, it is what it is until
it isn’t.
The
path of least resistance—or in Freudian speak,
the pleasure principle—predicts that man, in perpetuity,
will remain hostage to his marvelous inventions and
technological wonders. That this seemingly incurable
vulnerability has rendered him an imperiled species
is a development that should not only generate significant
worry, but more urgently, motivate him to interrogate
the dubious goals and rewards that have brought him
to his present predicament.
Which
is a huge ask. Is the species up to the task?
