Blood and gore in the new cultural age: Aurora shootings

Seven years ago this week I wrote, for this paper, about the very real dangers of the gaming industry, feeding (seemingly harmless) trends of violence, images of mutilation and gore and inconsequential life or death considerations indoctrinated to children everywhere. I wrote: “‘Parental controls are firmly in place,’ scream Entertainment Software Association. They also ‘prove’ the safety net for minors by showing that ‘adults only buy mature games.’ Yet their own study shows that 35 percent of all mature video game users are under the age of 18.”The gaming industry marks video game packages with an age recommendation but there is no policing, no parental guidance, no download supervision for age appropriateness. And, I argued, that age may not be the real problem — the violence and trends toward rewarding violence in these games may be a negative indoctrination for people of all ages, including adults.I missed an important additional infection by these violent video games: Hollywood, the ultimate panderer to public whims.Anyone who grew up reading Batman or seeing the saccharine Batman TV series will know his primary weapon was a sock to the jaw. Violence was a precursor to capture and the police arresting the bad guy. With video games pushing the bad guys to despicable evil, Batman became increasingly violent, movie by movie; darker and darker. Deep from within the primitava psyche of the filmmakers come bloody images best left to cavemen, unleashed by the “acceptability” of video gaming consoles across the world, condoned by Wall Street, The City, Bourse, Tokyo or Beijing investors looking for a quick (financial) kill, unwilling to accept any responsibility for the cultural and sociobehavioral consequences.The Aurora movie shooting by an adult who was obsessed with violent gaming, the Mexican holdup during the Batman movie, the Italian man who jumped from the balcony of his local movie theater screaming, “I am Batman!” — these are small, yes small, milestones, warning signs of a much deeper seated shift in acceptability of blood, gore, violence and roleplaying mayhem in our society.Television is moving quickly to catch up; with blood running down faces, dripping off teeth, in vampire-inspired dramas and soaps meant to spark viewers’ ratings. Does it work commercially? You bet ... led by the most poorly written pandering violence in books (Twilight series and more — type “vampire books” in Google), the cultural ethic of America has changed toward allowing and then condoning these despicable acts of violence. Coming to a mall or neighborhood near you: a real roleplaying vampire attack. It will happen, some kid will drink the blood of a victim. Gamers, TV and the movies say it is only entertainment.Are these primitava people often disturbed? On drugs? Skirting the law in obtaining weapons? Sure. And the media and newspapers will focus on these facts, use them to explain why such-and-such aberrant event occurred. But they will not, ever, focus on the seismic shift to acceptable blood and gore that has happened to our kids and young adults precisely because their parent companies are making too much profit making this detritus.How does that affect you? It will become personal, if it has not already. All across our nation’s history, what was once the fringe, if allowed to spread as culturally acceptable, finds root and perversion of what was the norm before. Dime novels of the late 1800s about the Wild West and “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Circus” became the games of cowboys and Indians of my youth in which a six-shooter could harmlessly kill an opponent, became Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch,” became “Bonnie and Clyde,” became “Goodfellas” ... and the list keeps getting more violent, and yet the movie age ratings drop. How far? “The Dark Knight Rises” is rated PG-13, which basically means everyone can get in — and did. There were babies, toddlers and middle-school kids in the theater for goodness sake. If the killer was not harm enough, think what those images, actors’ screams, explosions, killings will do to a child.And that violence was happening all across the world — all 265 million moviegoers so far. And Warner’s feeling of guilt here? “Warner Bros. is not releasing weekend box offices figures out of respect to victims.” Their answer was not to brag about how much profit they made. But profit they did, off of the blood — now and in the near future — of all people, everywhere.Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.