28 - Violence and Film

Summary

During the Nixon administration, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a report that appeared to lend scientific legitimacy to the widespread belief that violence in the mass media causes violence in society. The report concluded that mass media violence desensitizes people, makes them more hostile and aggressive and more likely to perform violent acts. In Mass Media Violence and Society [hereafter abbreviated as MMVS (New York: Wiley, 1975)], Dennis Howitt and Guy Cumberbatch scrutinized the research cited by the Surgeon General's report and demonstrated that none of the data actually constituted evidence that media violence significantly affects violence in society. Social scientists had compiled voluminous statistics, yet by and large they had assumed, rather than shown, that media violence causes real violence. The book went on further to conclude that the available data strongly supported the conclusion that media violence has no effect on, perhaps even reduces, the level of violence in society. That conclusion seems quite unjustified, though. Indeed, thinking in statistical terms may well hinder more than help in clarifying the roles mass media play in the diverse forms of life lived by Americans today. Our readiness to allow human beings to be reduced to statistical abstractions, I suspect, plays no small part in American society's obsession with violence.

Since its beginnings, the American cinema has been dogged by the belief that movies are harmful to society.