Lecture 8 'Shoot and Cut'

This weeks lecture was on screen violence and the way in which we are exposed to violence everyday through tv, films and videogames.

Bill mentioned the Columbine high school massacre and how the boys involved had been obsessed with the computer game Doom, which i mentioned in my blog two weeks ago. This disturbs me slightly, when i talked about it before i said how the gore and violence hadn't affected me but it clearly affected those two boy to the extent that they committed mass murder. It makes me feel uneasy thinking that i have something in common with those boys. I haven't played that game in years and was never obsessed with it, just to clear that up.

CCTV footage of the Columbine Massacre               Doom Video Game

But it raises the question - are we all affected by our exposure to such graphic violence? Does it make us more OK with violence in the real world. I'm not sure. We are able to watch torture and abuse on screen but if we were to see it for real i think our reaction would be the same, for me at least. Because i can watch gory films but when you see real footage on the news of war or a terrorist attack i have trouble watching, even if the images aren't graphic it's the thought of what happened to real people. In movies it's ok because you know for sure that it is made up, i can watch Kill Bill and watch the crazy 88 get their arms and legs cut off but if i were to see that in real life i think i'd vomit or faint.

I think you'd have to be really hardened to gore, maybe a paramedic or surgeon could cope with an amount of bloody violence in their real lives, but i don't know.

It was not a cheery lecture as you can probably tell.