F E A S T S   OF

V I O L E N C E

No people before or since have so reveled in displays of mortal combat as did the Romans during the last two centuries B.C. and the first three centuries thereafter, nor derived such pleasure from spectacles in which slaves and convicts were exposed to wild beasts and killed in front of cheering spectators. According to Nicolaus of Damascus, writing in the first decade A.D., Romans even regaled themselves with lethal violence at private banquets; he describes dinner guests relishing the spectacle of gladiators fighting to the death:

Hosts would invite their friends to dinner not merely for other entertainment, but that they might witness two or three pairs of contestants in a gladiatorial combat; on these occasions, when sated with dining and drink, they called in the gladiators. No sooner did one have his throat cut than the masters applauded with delight at this feat.

Perhaps the delectation and thrill of viewing a fight to the death at such close hand while reclining after a meal with friends provided even greater pleasure than the vast gladiatorial shows in the amphitheater, in which thousands of combatants confronted death each year. Devotees versed in the aesthetics of violence and the "science of pleasure" could study at close hand the subtleties of the moves in each encounter and celebrate the nobility and beauty with which defeated gladiators who had been denied a reprieve bared their necks for decapitation.

The satiric poet Juvenal's phrase "bread and circuses"-panem et circenses- that has come down, through the centuries, to stand for public offerings of nourishment and spectacles on a grand scale, would have meant nothing to the earliest Romans. There is no evidence from their period of vast wild beast hunts in circuses or spectacular forms of capital punishment or gladiatorial combats to the death in the arena. The first gladiatorial fight we know of took place in 264 B.C., when the ex-consul Iunius Brutus Pera and his brother, in a ceremony to honor their dead father, presented three pairs of gladiators in the ox market. More such encounters were offered in the ensuing decades by private citizens as a way to honor dead relatives. But gladiatorial combat was increasingly seen, too, as entertainment and as evidence of generosity, even lavishness on the part of public officials.

Barely two centuries after the first gladiatorial fights, they had become the centerpiece of the Roman "games," alongside wild animal hunts with live game brought from every corner of the known world to be slaughtered, and countless slaves, prisoners, and other victims "thrown to the beasts." Those who died thus were seen either as expendable nonhumans, such as slaves or wild beasts, as criminals or prisoners of war who justly deserved their fate, or as volunteers who had chosen to take part freely or sold themselves into service as gladiators.

Violent spectacles kept the citizenry distracted, engaged, and entertained and, along with reenactments and celebrations of conquests and sacrifices abroad, provided the continued acculturation to violence needed by a warrior state. And the association with bread was constant. Not only were shows in the amphitheater or the circus meant for feasting the eye as well as the emotions: many sponsors also gave out bread, meat, drink, and favorite dishes to the crowds gathered for the games. Elements of entertainment and feasting were combined with ritual and sacrifice. Ancient Rome seems a particularly striking illustration of the claim by literary scholar Rene Girard that all communal violence can be described in terms of sacrifice, using surrogate victims as means to protect the entire community against its own internal violence. No program could begin without a sacrifice to a deity, often Diana, who presided over the raucous hunting scenes, or Mars, patron of the gladiatorial combats; and after the bloodshed was over, "a figure, representing the powers of the under-world, gave the finishing stroke to the wretches who were still lingering."

Throughout, such violence was regarded as legitimate, fully authorized, even commanded at the highest level of Roman society. The festive atmosphere, the rousing music of the bands, the chanting by the crowds, the betting on who would triumph or lose, the colorful costumes, and the adulation of star gladiators all contributed to the glamour attached to the games. But as historian Kathleen Coleman points out, while "the 'contagion of the throng' may aptly describe the thrill that the Roman spectators experienced in the Colosseum, [it] does not explain why their communal reaction was pleasure instead of revulsion or horror." Part of the reason, she suggests, is that the Roman world "was permeated by violence that had to be absorbed."

Just as Roman spectacles remain the prototype for violent entertainment at its most extreme, so Rome's own history illustrates the development of a prototypical "culture of violence." It was one in which violence was widely sanctioned and hallowed by tradition, in foreign conquest as in domestic culture; in which courage and manhood were exalted and weapons easily available; and in which the climate of brutality and callousness extended from the treatment of newborns and slaves in many homes to the crucifixions and other brutal punishments so common for noncitizens. Entertainment violence officially sponsored on a mass basis served to enhance every one of these aspects of Rome's martial culture.

Among Romans, spectacles of violence had many celebrants and few outspoken challengers. The poet Martial, in his De Spectaculis, written in A.D. 80 for the inauguration of the Colosseum, conveyed the magnificence of the fights and wild beast hunts in evocative tones. Speaking of a condemned criminal who, "hanging on no unreal cross gave up his vitals to a Caledonian bear," Martial described his mangled limbs as still living, "though the parts dripped gore, and in all his body was nowhere a body's shape. A punishment deserved at length he won."' I This death was staged as a performance of the story of Laureolus, a famous bandit leader who had been captured and crucified. This was a favorite subject for dramatic enactment, but as Martial pointed out, the victim in this instance was "hanging on no unreal cross," and his agony was compounded by exposure to the bear.

Why did such spectacles have so few outspoken critics among Romans? We can only wonder at the silence of those, like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, who proclaimed Stoic and other ideals of goodness and justice; not to mention the many other philosophers, poets, and legal scholars who were openly admiring of the practice. Like most Romans, they may have been too thoroughly acculturated to violence to see any need for criticism. The historian Tacitus recounts that "there are the peculiar and characteristic vices of this metropolis of ours, taken on, it seems to me, almost in the mother's womb-the passion for play actors and the mania for gladiatorial shows and horse-racing."  At home as in the lecture halls, the gossip is all about such spectacles; even the teachers dwell largely on such material in their classes.

Along with such acculturation, fear was the great silencer of outrage and free debate among the Romans and the peoples they conquered. It was dangerous to speak freely, above all to criticize acts of the emperor and practices linked to his worship. At his whim, critics could be jailed, exiled, or thrown to the lions. But more than acculturation and fear was involved. Opportunistic self-censorship was rampant. Many among the intelligentsia and in the aristocracy derived great prestige from sponsoring displays of gladiators. They had a vested interest in seeing the games continue and in deriding criticism.

One who did note a moral paradox in the gladiatorial games presenting violence as public entertainment was the philosopher Seneca." He pointed to Pompey, reputedly conspicuous among leaders of the state for the kindness of his heart, who had been the first to exhibit the slaughter of eighteen elephants in the circus, pitting criminals against them in a mimic battle [and] thought it a notable kind of spectacle to kill human beings after a new fashion. Do they fight to the death? That is not enough! Are they torn to pieces? That is not enough! Let them be crushed by animals of monstrous bulk!

That human beings should kill and maim their fellows was hardly paradoxical in its own right; rather, the oddity was that the pleasure in seeing it carried out could be so relished as to override all sense of respect for life: "Man, an object of reverence in the eyes of men, is now slaughtered for jest and sport ... and it is a satisfying spectacle to see a man made a corpse." For Seneca, sharing the enjoyment of that spectacle brutalized and desensitized viewers and fostered their appetite for still more cruelty. It undercut the central task of seeking to grow in humanity, in nobility of spirit, in understanding, and in freedom from greed, cruelty, and other desires; and thereby to progress toward self-mastery. Seneca saw any diversion as deflecting from this task; but taking pleasure in brutality-in "seeing a man made a corpse"-actually reversed the development, destroyed humanitas:  the respectful kindness that characterizes persons who have learned how to be fully human among humans.  Violent entertainments rendered spectators crudelior et inbumanior-"more cruel and more inhumane"-acculturating them to pitilessness and to lack of respect for their fellow humans and other creatures.

The same forces that numbed most Romans' shame or sense of moral paradox inherent in relishing such cruelty-acculturation, fear, and profiteering- also helped to dampen criticism in the provinces. Many Roman military encampments had their own amphitheaters, and hundreds of others were built for the public around the Empire in the first centuries A.D. But though Roman authorities and commercial sponsors encouraged attendance at the games in conquered territories as a form of homage to the emperor- deities, such spectacles could not compete in extravagance with those offered by the emperors in Rome and rarely met with the special exultation elsewhere that they evoked there. A few spoke out against them openly: when King Herod wished to offer spectacles in an amphitheater he had constructed near Jerusalem, "the Jews found such a cruel pleasure to be impious and an abandonment of their ancestral customs."

Among the severest critics were Christians, from whose ranks so many were tortured and killed at the games. Late in the second century, Bishop Tertullian thundered, in his De Spectaculis, against violent spectacles rooted in pagan religion, with their brutalizing effects on victims, sponsors, combatants, and spectators alike. He lambasted the Christians who took pleasure in such shows and cautioned against the degradation that came, not just from viewing cruelty but from delighting in it, finding it entertaining, developing a "passion for murderous pleasure." With puritanical zeal, he insisted that people should avoid not only violent shows but all spectacles:

There is no public spectacle without violence to the spirit. For where there is pleasure, there is eagerness, which gives pleasure its flavor. Where there is eagerness, there is rivalry, which gives its flavor to eagerness. Yes, and then, where there is rivalry, there also are madness, bile, anger, pain, and all the things that follow from them and (like them) are incompatible with moral discipline.

Tertullian ended on a shrill note that clashed with all that he had said about the evils of taking pleasure in violent spectacles. He appears to have promised his fellow Christians, in spite of all, the reward of " murderous pleasure" in the next life if they would only abjure it in this one. Reveling in the horrors that would befall those who now took any part in spectacles, he predicted that, come the Day of judgment, Christians could look forward to the thrill, the exultation at being able to watch, as if they were at the games, the infliction on nonbelievers, such as actors, kings, athletes, poets, and philosophers, of suffering, torture, and burning, horrors far worse than at the earthly games and everlasting to boot:

How vast the spectacle that day, and how wide! What sight shall wake my wonder, what my laughter, my joy, and exultation? As I see all those kings ... groaning in the depths of darkness! And the magistrates who persecuted the name of Jesus, liquefying in fiercer flames than they kindled in their rage against the Christians! Those sages, too, the philosophers blushing before their disciples as they blaze together ... and then, the poets trembling before the judgment-seat .... And then there will be the tragic actors to be heard, more vocal in their own tragedy; and the players to be seen, lither of limb by far in the fire; ... Such sights, such exultation-what praetor, consul, quaestor, priest, will ever give you of his bounty? And yet all these, in some sort, are ours, pictured through faith in the imagination of the spirit. But what are those things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor ever entered into the heart of man? I believe, things of greater joy than circus, theatre, amphitheatre, or any stadium.

RE C 0 I L A N D
R E C O G N I T I O N
 

After the kill, there is the feast. And toward the end, when the dancing subsides, and the young have sneaked off somewhere, the bounds drunk on the blood of the bares, begin to talk of bow soft were their pelts, bow graceful their leaps, bow lovely their scared, gentle eyes.

LISEL MUELLER,
"SMALL POEM ABOUT THE HOUNDS AND THE HARES"
 

Just how unimaginable are the Roman practices to today's publics? Most people would recoil from the thought of banquets such as those described at the beginning of this chapter, offering guests the chance to feast not only on food and drink but also on gladiatorial combat. Even so, they might recognize the emotions underlying the guests' delight in viewing such fights at close hand and their aesthetic appreciation of the combatants' skill.

As we strive to understand in what sense the Roman practices might nevertheless be "completely alien" to us, we have to ask whether our contemporary versions of entertainment violence exhibit anything like the paradox inherent in the role of the gladiatorial games as public entertainment. This is not to say that our societies are at any risk of tolerating public spectacles such as Rome's. Our laws prohibit them, and our institutions allow the open debate and criticism that Romans could not have. Rather, what matters for us is to explore the uncomfortable present-day parallels to the thrill and joyful entertainment associated with watching bloodshed, the function of the games in acculturating the Romans to violence, and the exploiting of even the bloodthirstiest practices by Rome's commercial and political vested interests, not to mention the selfcensorship practiced by many of its authors, artists, and critics.

Consider present-day bullfights, cockfights, or bouts of "ultimate" or "extreme" fighting, in which two combatants "do whatever they can-absent biting and eye-gouging-to send each other into unconsciousness or submission. They kick, they probe, they grapple, often on mats that quickly become slick with sweat and blood." Outlawed in some states, permitted in others, such games draw large crowds and hundreds of thousands of TV spectators. Would not at least some among them likewise thrill to watch human combatants fight to the death?

To Sigmund Freud, there would be nothing alien about contemporaries delighting in such spectacles. In discussing the aggressiveness that he took to be an instinctual characteristic of human beings, Freud quoted the words of the Roman playwright Plautus, "Homo homini lupus"-"Man is a wolf to man." Freud viewed aggressiveness among humans is one expression of Tbanatos, the drive toward death and destruction that is opposed and harnessed to the drive toward life, creativity, and love, or Eros:
 

Their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him .

Few still speak of such instincts today; and on the basis of the research done since Freud's time on the development both of aggression and of empathy, more are now prepared to view them as acquired through imitation and practice, even as they are based on inborn predispositions. Thus the biologist Edward O. Wilson suggests that aggressive behavior is learned, but that the learning is prepared in that "we are strongly predisposed to slide into deep, irrational hostility under certain definable conditions. With dangerous ease hostility feeds on itself and ignites runaway reactions that can swiftly progress to alienation and violence." For Wilson, as for Freud, Simone Weil, and others who have studied aggression, the arts are central to the prospects for civilization to counter and constrain and deflect the human potential for destruction.  Music, literature, theater, and spectacles of every kind enhance the chances for human thriving, even as they have also been enlisted, most strikingly in Rome as in our own century's totalitarian states, for purposes of aggression.

Both sorts of potential have been vastly enhanced by modern technology. Our worldwide distribution systems, piping programs into hundreds of millions of homes at all hours, go beyond anything the Romans, adept as they were at engineering feats, could have imagined. By now, the American entertainment industry produces and trades in violent programming on an ever vaster scale; and it aims its products with increasing precision at children and adolescents. Not that children were excluded from crowds watching boxing matches or bullfights or even the bloodiest slaughter in the Roman arenas. But never before have children been targeted as a lucrative market for entertainment violence and for toys, games, and paraphernalia associated with particular programs; nor have marketing experts studied with such care the factors heightening the "audience arousal" that draws television viewers in and facilitates their acceptance of advertising messages. In previous generations, children had little money to spend; they now influence the flow of vast sums: in 1997, it was estimated that American children 14 and under would directly spend $20 billion and would influence the spending of another $200 billion.

As the profitability and the amount of violent entertainment grow, as technology is improved for presenting it more graphically and realistically, and as children are increasingly seen as targeted and at risk, public concerns deepen. However forceful the disagreements about the extent to which the allure of violence is inherent in the human species or, on the contrary, culturally fostered, it is clear that children are made, not born, to be consumers of entertainment violence on today's scale.

Polls show that Americans are deeply ambivalent about how to respond. Even many adults who acknowledge the thrill they derive from films such as Natural Born Killers and Silence of the Lambs worry about the hypnotic power the screen exercises over children and young people. Among adult respondents to one 1995 poll, 21 percent blamed television more than any other factor for teenage sex and violence. But public concern goes beyond the question of whether consumers of entertainment violence turn out, in the long run, to be more aggressive in real life, to focus on the desensitization and the arousal of greater and greater appetite for the thrill that entertainment violence can bring. Yet even as parents worry about the messages on television about drugs, sex, and brutality, they rely on it for keeping children busy, and most set no limits whatsoever on the amount of television their children see. 15 Indeed, Americans of all ages go to great lengths and expense to seek out the very forms of entertainment that so many condemn in polls. They flock to blockbuster movies that "push the envelope" with respect to graphic brutality and take in countless TV shows featuring domestic violence, rape, child abuse, gang violence, and serial killers.

T H E T H R I L L O F

T H E K I L L

What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty, what seems agreeable in so-called tragic pity and at bottom in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at an auto-da-fe or bullfight, . . .

-that all of them enjoy and seek to drink in with mysterious ardor are the spicy Potions of the great Circe, "cruelty."

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

Nietzsche, who celebrated the Romans as the strongest, noblest people who ever lived and every vestige of them "a sheer delight," has no rival among philosophers in extolling cruelty as central, liberating, and exhilarating in human culture. Yet few might disagree with him about the pleasure such cruelty can give to devotees of blood sport, whether in ancient Rome or today. He links the thrill of witnessing violence both to consuming and to the erotic. Both aspects are at issue in his references to the ardor with which people drink in cruelty during spectacles of violence. Discussing murder stories, literary scholar Wendy Lesser likewise holds that they "stimulate the hunger they purport to feed, offering us a few morsels but leaving us, finally, with our own unappeasable ravenousness"-an urge that she sees as underlying also the taste for violent films and for watching "live" or televised public executions.

But even as people in all periods have derived sensual, aesthetic, at times erotic thrills from witnessing fights to the death or public hangings, it would be wrong to conclude that spectators at such events and consumers of media violence are guided by no other motives. Romans went to the arenas as many go to boxing matches today, in part to while away the time, to eat and drink and gossip and cheer for their favorite combatants.

Vicarious terror can also be pleasurable, as spectators test their reactions to mortal danger without having to run the actual risks. Seeing humans and animals fight, sometimes for their lives, allows viewers to engage indirectly in their travails and to test their own responses to terror-to confront the reality of horror and cruelty from which they ordinarily shield themselves. Wes Craven, director of such horror films as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, suggests that "in scary movies, we are looking behind the scrim of propriety and finding things 'not pretty to look at, ancient in nature and primal in their importance." For Craven as for Nietzsche, such works challenge our instinctive denial of our most primitive layers of fear and aggression. By entering into the excitement and the power of inflicting pain or death and the terror of seeing these up close, they suggest, we may also learn to steel ourselves, to become better able to "take" the violence before our eyes. A common accompaniment of such learning is to come to look at the infliction of suffering in a purely aesthetic way: to make judgments about the expertise or the strength or the courage of the combatants, or to look for elements of beauty in the encounter itself.

The confrontation with one's own fears and the vicarious sharing of risks to life and limb are also among the attractions of disaster stories and movies, as of news accounts of floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes. In these "spectacles," however, because there is little or no intended cruelty behind the horrors that befall victims, the paradoxical pleasure found in the carnage that humans inflict on one another is absent. Here, the terror of the circumstances often blends with pity for the victims-something entirely different from the pitilessness that accompanies much entertainment violence.

What about war movies, detective stories, and cops - and-robbers accounts, in which viewers are presented with confrontations between right and wrong, good and evil? The killing of villains occurs as a dramatic device or a form of closure rather than something to be savored for its cruelty. It is often the "element of precipitousness" in such confrontations that attracts us most forcefully, as William James points out:
 

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its barest chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.

Whatever extra elements may draw spectators to violent entertainment of this kind, it is the thrill derived from the violence itself that is often highlighted in movie and video game advertisements. For example, publicity for Kathryn Bigelow's film Strange Days, that offers viewers the vicarious experience of rape and killing, touts the film as "a troubling but undeniably breathless joy ride," a "wild, mindblowing spectacle," and a "combination of adrenaline rush and cold sweat"; and players of the video game Carmageddon are invited to "waste counterparts, pedestrians, and farmyard animals for points and credits!"

It is this intense pleasure in watching violence done in which Nietzsche exulted and which Seneca condemned in speaking of the "satisfying spectacle to see a man made a corpse," The experience of that pleasure has rarely been more vividly described than by Saint Augustine in an incident involving lovers of gladiatorial games, recounted in his Confessions. In 380 he was a young teacher of rhetoric already renowned for his brilliance, not yet a convert to Christianity but outspoken against the frenzy of spectacles and distressed to see his young friend Alypius addicted to them. Augustine succeeded in convincing Alypius to give up this passion; but later, in Rome, Alypius fell for the blandishments of friends begging him to go along with them to see gladiators fight in the amphitheater. Even as he went with them, he protested that at least they would not be able to force him to look at what went on with open eyes:
 

When they arrived at the arena, the place was seething with the lust for cruelty They found seats as best they could and Alypius shut his eyes tightly, determined to have nothing to do with these atrocities. If only he could have closed his ears as well! For an incident in the fight drew a great roar from the crowd, and this thrilled him so deeply that he could not contain his curiosity.... So he opened his eyes, and his soul was stabbed with a wound more deadly than any which the gladiator, whom he was so anxious to see, had received in his body. He fell, and fell more Pitifully than the man whose fall had drawn the roar of excitement from the crowd. The din had pierced his ears and forced him to open his eyes, laying his soul open to receive the wound which struck it down....

When he saw the blood, it was as though he had drunk a deep draught of savage passion. Instead of turning away, he fixed his eyes upon the scene and drank in all its frenzy, unaware of what he was doing. He reveled in the wickedness of the fighting and was drunk with the fascination of bloodshed.... He watched and cheered and grew hot with excitement, and when he left the arena, he carried away with him a diseased mind which would leave him no peace until he came back again, no longer simply with the friends who had first dragged him there, but at their head, leading new sheep to the slaughter.

This passage has resonated throughout subsequent debates about violent entertainment. Augustine conveyed both his perception of the craving for still more bloodshed that the thrill of the games could arouse and his conviction that such experiences threaten grave harm to spectators-harm for which he used the metaphor the "stabbing of the soul."

Some have thought his portrayal overwrought; others have taken it to be as true of violent entertainment in our time as in Augustine's. For the purpose of our contemporary discussions, his example raises two questions. They concern the nature of the harm imputed to spectators themselves-to their souls, as he put it-and the risks that spectators thus debilitated might pose to others. Are they rendered more uncaring about suffering as a result of having partaken of carnage as entertainment, more pitiless, perhaps even more easily moved to aggression?

How seriously must we take Augustine's conviction about damage to the spectators in considering our own entertainment violence? Clearly, there is hyperbole in his calling the wound to Alypius's soul more deadly than any that the fallen gladiator had received in his body. Augustine was not a teacher of rhetoric for nothing. In fact, his young friend went on to renounce the games, convert to Christianity, and become a bishop. What is meant, in that case, by the "stabbing of the soul"? Did Augustine imply that there is a link between the thrill in witnessing murder and mayhem and the excitement that can accompany actually engaging in such acts in real life?
 

Among all those who relish the brutality of corpse-strewn slasher films, only a small fraction are capable of perpetrating lethal violence themselves. Even among the latter, only a minority experience an intense thrill in the process, as opposed to emotional numbness, shame, or rage. Criminologist James Alan Fox distinguishes the "thrill" killer from the "mission" killer and the "expedient" killer: only those in the first category, he suggests, derive pleasure from the sheer act of killing. Some of these fortify themselves with films and fantasies of sadistic acts in order to "live them out," as Joyce Carol Oates points out in her review of books on the subject, "I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness." Citing serial killer Ted Bundy's claim "I'm in charge of entertainment," Oates characterizes such killers as "individuals whose self -definition, whose sole happiness is bound up with killing." A large public, in turn, finds their exploits mesmerizing. Oates suggests that their highly publicized crimes, along with often sentimentalizing books, films, and poetry about them, have contributed to serial killing being "the crime of the nineties."

No matter how intrigued people may be by accounts and images of such carnage, the average man or woman feels intense instinctive resistance to actually killing a fellow human, even in self-defense or what they take to be a just war. But it is also the case that many, especially the young, can be conditioned to overcome such resistance by means of well-known training techniques. They can be more easily persuaded that it is right to engage in killing when such action is held out as legitimate, authorized, commanded; still more when it is portrayed as glamorous, admirable, heroic, and deserving of imitation and when the victims are held to be unworthy of ordinary concern and respect, perhaps less than human or as having chosen to take the risk of dying. Together these influences, when successful, generate a heightened sense of rightness about the act of killing, drawing on its felt necessity and glamour as well as on a lack of pity for the putative victims.

Depending on the suggestibility of those exposed, these influences can serve not only to support legitimate individual and collective self-defense but also to facilitate every form of aggression. At such times, they can weaken the most basic respect for humanity and in turn, at least for short periods, anesthetize the shame, inculcated since childhood, of violating that respect. It is at this point that the "combat high," the "thrill of the kill" described by combat veterans can take over-a feeling that resonates in the words attributed to twelfthcentury Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, that life's greatest joy is to "kill your enemies, make their beloved weep, ride on their horses, embrace their wives and daughters."

Those who have crossed even the most basic moral boundaries in such a fashion have made themselves nearly impervious to criticism. It is of no avail, William James held, to attempt to dissuade those who have come to love war by pointing to its horror: "The horror makes the thrill." What is often left out of larger debates about war and all other violence, he suggests, is precisely that core of sheer thrill. For James, engaging in violence is one of the paths (along with intoxication by alcohol and other substances) to what he calls a "radiant core" of consciousness that can focus, illuminate, and intensify experience--a core that can give the sense, momentarily, of opposites welded together, of single - mindedness in the midst of chaos, of all fear and shame and awareness of transgression temporarily erased. But these shortcuts to mystical experience and to brief visions of vitality, insight, and oneness with truth give but momentary access to what James calls the "steeps of life."

Even if we see a link between the thrill some people derive from engaging in actual combat and from being a spectator to such combat, however, there are clearly immense differences between the two. How then can we tell whether the three influences mentioned aboveauthorization, glamorization, and induced pitilessness-accustom and enable spectators to experience heightened pleasure from violence? And why should we care, if no actual violence to third parties is at issue?

Some critics of media violence are convinced that these influences do affect viewers, beginning in childhood. They point out that most families provide authorization to enjoy entertainment violence and that the story lines themselves in violent shows-involving, for example, cops and robbers or warfare or attacks by aliens-offer further legitimacy; that screen violence is often rendered more glamorous than real-life combat; and that pitilessness is greatly encouraged by seeing scenes of torture and murder recur innumerable times on the screen and being able to record and replay them at will in ways not remotely possible in real life even for the most obsessive killer. What these critics still have to ask, however, is whether becoming inured to entertainment violence in such ways is harmful to the persons so affected and whether there is any carryover effect into real life that can place others at risk.

One commentator, Colonel Dave Grossman, suggests that the same techniques that military trainers use to prepare recruits to kill are now provided in the media. Because even the youngest children experience influences such as habituation to violence and desensitization, their effects are much more indiscriminate, without the distinctions made in the military between targets that are legitimate and those that are not. Children are exposed to these influences long before they understand the distinction between fact and fiction, between right and wrong, between shame and shamelessness-and as a result, long before they have the tools for giving their free and informed consent to the conditioning that they are unwittingly undergoing.

Others disagree vehemently with any implication that the depiction of violence need have deleterious effects on viewers, much less on third parties. Some go further, to underscore its benefits. According to media analyst Lawrence Jarvik, such depiction "reflects a fundamental confidence in individual freedom and personal liberty. Repeated illustrations of violence and immorality are necessary to impart ethical lessons to the citizenry just as 'hellfire and brimstone' are used in sermons to emphasize the frightening prospect of hell." For most people, the strongest reason for skepticism about whether entertainment violence brings about anything like Augustine's "stabbing of the soul" is that they are not viewing actual bloodshed in a crowd but sitting at home in front of their screens watching cartoons and movies. Their participation is of an entirely different nature; the violence and suffering they witness are staged; and the persons involved are actors or animated characters. Why draw comparisons, in that case, between most entertainment violence and the carnage in the arenas, or suggest that cartoons and movies damage spectators?

'' B U T M O V I E S A R E

N 0 T R E A L "

I mean it's a western, it's entertaining, it's good guys versus bad guys. In that
scene in "The Searchers'' when jOHN Wayne went after all those Indians, was
that genocide? Was that racist? wHEN James Bond dropped the guy in a
pond of piranhas, and be says "Bon appetite,'' we loved that. That ' s a great
moment. Movies are not real.

JOEL SILVER

Why should moviegoers not love James Bond's quip as he drops his adversary into the piranha pond in You Only Live Twice? Or hesitate to relish the explosions and up-close shootings in blockbuster films such as producer Joel Silver's Die Hard and the Lethal Weapon series? Granted, such actions qualify as violent by any definition. But consumers of entertainment violence who enjoy them are, after all, neither doing any harm in their own right nor witnessing real-life carnage and mayhem. Where is the harm, if no real violence is done?

The vicarious participation of movie publics is of an entirely different nature from that of Romans in the arena. As director John Woo-variously dubbed "the poet of spilled blood" and "the Mozart of mayhem"-puts it, "Violence in real life is horrid, frightening. Movies are fake, not real. People know that movies are not real." The difference between what is and is not real in films must be especially glaring to anyone involved, as are Silver and Woo, in the actual production of movies. To them, what is real is precisely not the artifacts they produce. It is, rather, their work with the actors, the stage sets, the makeup personnel, the costuming, the cameras, and all that goes into creating the appearance of reality for viewers.

At times, however, the two worlds come close, even for Hollywood professionals. When Joel Silver protested that movies are not real, he was responding to those who criticized his timing in opening his film Lethal Weapon 3 in May 1992. Only weeks earlier the Los Angeles police officers whose roadside beating of motorist Rodney King had been shown on TV screens the world over had been acquitted by an all-white jury. The verdict had sparked outbreaks of looting, burning, and killing that left thirty-seven persons dead and more than fifteen hundred injured, even as fires burned out of control for days. In that crisis, the boundaries between movies and reality blurred, not only for the public but also for Hollywood producers, directors, and actors who were seeing smoke rising beneath their hillside residences and hearing sirens echo up and down the canyons. The newsreel footage of store owners terrorized, of victims trampled underfoot, of families watching their homes burning out of control was suddenly all too similar to the most brutal of the films from which Silver and his colleagues made their living. Of course they would have known how to stage the mayhem and pyrotechnics to still greater effect for viewers, using state-of-the-art special effects. But the differences between the two worlds, just then, were no longer quite so self-evident.

Producers, directors, actors, and others in the entertainment industry are increasingly rethinking the initial response of simply rejecting any responsibility for societal ills through claims about their products not being real. When polled, many are troubled by the impact of media violence. It is clear to growing numbers among them, as among the public, that while the distinction between what is real and what is enacted or reenacted is indispensable, it cannot suffice to terminate discussions of the effects of media violence. Although the violence in movies and TV programs is often fictional or at least reenacted and thus is not actually carried out on real victims, movies as such are surely real in most other senses of the term. A killing in a movie is watched by real people on whom it may have real effects: (in news programs, documentaries, and many "infotainment" programs, moreover, the violence itself is "real" in Silver's sense as well; and in fringe underground so- called "snuff films," murder is expressly carried out and filmed live to cater to the tastes of viewers.)

The screen renders experience both less and more real in its own right. It both mediates violence and makes it seem more immediate, exposing viewers to levels and forms of violence they might never otherwise encounter. It helps cross boundaries between real and reenacted, between art and entertainment, between being near the violence and being at a distance. In "virtual reality" offerings of experiences of gunplay and combat, the whole point is to erase the boundary between what is and is not experienced as real. Video technology offers the possibility of revisiting violent scenes at will, even as it permits viewers to click off and tune out. At times the only lack of reality in films for viewers comes from the fact that they have no personal responsibility for inflicting or enjoying whatever brutality they are witnessing. They can cross even that boundary vicariously in participatory computer games such as Mortal Kombat in which players are rewarded for slashing, gouging, or shooting their opponents. In recent years, video games have become increasingly graphic in presenting elaborate death sequences in highly realistic detail. "First person shooter" games such as Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem enable players to see with the eyes of the killer holding the gun.

Questions about degrees of reality and about the role of real-life, imagined, and reenacted violence in our lives are crucial to our learning to understand and to deal with violence. But these questions cannot be dismissed, much less resolved, by making tidy distinctions between the real and the not- real. Nor should the public debate about entertainment violence be prematurely dismissed on such grounds.

There are no watertight barriers between the real and the not-real, least of all when it comes to the imagination. The same holds true for the chasms some would conjure up between entertainment and art, education, or news-none of which suffices to isolate or explain or demystify entertainment violence, least of all to tame it, to strip it of the potential for providing the deep inward thrill that doing violence can also bring.

The boundaries between reality and unreality are especially permeable for small children. They are unable, through at least the age of three or four, to distinguish fact from fantasy. Even older children rarely manage to keep "real life" and vicarious experience in watertight compartments. Children are also more likely to conclude that violence on the screen reflects real-life abuses if they have personal experience of abuse in their family or neighborhood. For them, what they witness at home and on the streets reinforces what they see enacted on the screen. They are exposed, before they are in any position to distinguish what they see on the screen from real life, to amounts and levels of entertainment violence that are potentially more brutalizing than many adults- parents, script writers, and TV producers among them-realize.

In Britain, the video Child's Play 3 was at issue when two ten-year olds tormented, then murdered a toddler, James Bulger, after viewing it; and later when a teenager, Suzanne Capper, was kidnapped, tortured, and set alight by a group of young acquaintances who chanted the catchphrase from the video: "I'm Chucky. Wanna play?" The novelist Martin Amis points out that the video has in turn been set alight, semi -ritualistically by public-spirited managers of video- rental stores. When my two children (aged seven and nine) noticed Child's Play 3 in its package, up on a high shelf, they regarded it with reverent dread. In their schoolyard voodoo, Child's Play 3 was considered potent, venomous, toxic. It was like angel dust-a ticket to frenzy.

Amis concludes that Chucky is unlikely to affect anything but the style of atrocities. "Murderers have to have something to haunt them; they need their internal pandemonium. A century ago, it might have been the Devil. Now it's Chucky." But about the ten-year-old throwing bricks at James Bulger, Amis concludes on a note of greater doubt concerning, precisely, the distinction between reality and makebelieve: "Perhaps, also, the child did not understand the meaning of earnest. As a result, he was all too ready to play."
 

T R A N S F O R M I N G

V I O L E N C E

"However, we haven't yet made the greatest accusation against imitation. [mimesis] For tbe fact that it succeeds in maiming even the decent men, except for a certain rare few, is surely quite terrible.... Whenever the best of us bear Homer or any other of the tragic poets imitating one of the heroes in mourning and making quite an extended speech with lamentation, or, if you like, singing and beating his breast, you know that we enjoy it and that we give ourselves over to following the imitation; suffering along with the hero in all seriousness, we praise as a good poet the man who most puts us in this state.... But when personal sorrow comes to one Of us, you are aware that, on the contrary, we pride ourselves if we are able to able to keep quiet and bear up, taking this to be the Part of a man and what we then praised to be that Of a woman.... Is that a fine way to praise?" I said. "We see a man whom we would not condescend, but would rather blsb, to resemble, and, instead of being disgusted, we enjoy and praise it?"

PLATO, THE REPUBLIC, BOOK

Plato had no doubts about the power of poetry and all imitation in art to have what he called a 'maiming effect on listeners and viewers. There could be no place even for the greatest poets in his ideal city.

Disagreements concerning the effects of violence conveyed in works of art and entertainment have resonated, over the centuries, with the terms he and Aristotle employed concerning imitation in art more generally. Iris Murdoch suggests, in The Fire and The Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, that because Plato viewed human life as a pilgrimage from appearance to reality, and held that works of art constituted imitation capable of impeding this quest, they had to be strictly censored not least when they depict evil and cruelty. When artists imitate what is bad, they are adding to the sum of badness in the world, so that "images of wickedness and excess may lead even good people to indulge secretly through art feelings which they would be ashamed to entertain in real life. We enjoy cruel jokes and bad taste in the theatre, then behave boorishly at home."

The challenge to such a view has relied on one or both of two arguments about art's transforming power: that it can transform either the subject matter it represents or its recipients in ways that nullify maiming or other damaging effects, and at times also bring about purification and ennoblement. Picturing or describing a violent scene, first of all, can shed light on it in such a way that it provides, at the very least, harmless amusement, possibly insight and joy. As both Plato and Aristotle pointed out, we do delight in representations of objects and emotions that would evoke altogether different responses in real life; but most of us side with Aristotle in refusing to regard this as corrupting or maiming in its own right. We laugh at the pratfalls and pies thrown at people's faces in slapstick movies as we would not in real life. We relish works of art such as the Vatican's Laocoon or Picasso's Guernica. The seventeenth -century French poet and art critic Nicolas Boileau went so far as to say that there is no monster or odious serpent that does not please the eye when imitated by art; the agreeable artifice of a delicate paintbrush can make "a lovable object" out of the most horrific one.

If all depiction of monsters and of acts of cruelty and evils more generally could transform them thus into "lovable objects," there might be no paradox in today's concept of entertainment violence. But it is hard to see how Boileau's statement can be extended in this way. He was speaking of classical tragedy and painting, both of which offer an aesthetic distance that is absent from much of contemporary violent entertainment. And he specified, as had Aristotle and Horace, that some horrors are better merely recounted, as in classical tragedy, than conveyed visually: too much resemblance to reality would generate the same recoil at the sight of what was depicted as that aroused by the real object. It is precisely the massive visual presence on home screens of either realistic or stylized violence for entertainment purposes that both worries and attracts many in the public today. Even as we accept the first challenge to Plato's condemnation of imitation in art on Aristotelian grounds, therefore, this conclusion does not remove the need to examine the effects of such media violence.

Could the second challenge to Plato's views be of greater relevance in this regard? It holds that portrayals of violence can transform the viewers themselves, not simply their perception of the violence depicted; and that this transformation can act upon viewers in such a way as to cleanse their emotions. According to director Martin Verhoefen, it is "a kind of purifying experience to watch.  Perhaps such works can transform and purify viewers by violence." granting them insight into violence without their having to experience it or be tempted to engage in it in their own lives. In that case, the programs in question would not only represent mere harmless entertainment but would also make possible great moral benefits for viewers.

The notion of art as purging viewers has come down over the centuries, entering common parlance as an echo of Aristotle's complex working out of the concept of catharsis. Aristotle insists, as against Plato, that there need be nothing wrong with imitation. It is natural for us to engage in imitative play and activities from childhood on. We know from experience that "though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms, for example, of the lowest animals and of dead bodies." Tragic drama and epics such as the Iliad can so treat the course of human lives as to allow those who listen to "thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place," to bring about a "proper purgation of these emotions."

A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.

This experience of catharsis permits a schooling of the emotions and a deepening of one's understanding of human nature and of the paradoxes relating to the role of violence in human life. It can bring what the literary scholar Walter Jackson Bate has called "an enlargement of the soul by sympathetic identification with the tragic character and the tragic situation."

Those who stretch the concept of catharsis so as to claim that it occurs in viewing violence more generally have to address the issue of the schooling of the emotions and the enlargement of the soul that it makes possible, Without such sympathetic identification brought about by the experience of both fear and pity, there can be no catharsis in the Aristotelian sense. For Aristotle, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and the tragedies of Sophocles-the very works that Plato wished to banish-could allow catharsis, but only for adults mature enough to derive the fullest benefit from such an experience. Part of the schooling of the emotions to which such works can contribute, moreover, involves gaining fuller insight into the role of violence in human lives that we ordinarily do so much to avoid confronting.

Such catharsis, however, is precisely not at issue in much entertainment violence. Whether or not taking delight in spectacles of bloodshed inflicts a "stabbing of the soul," few would claim that it automatically produces an "enlargement of the soul." At the same time, however, there clearly are films and television programs and works of art that arouse both fear and pity in ways that can have transformative effects on viewers-as much in our day as in past periods. It matters as urgently now as then to consider what it is about works such as Picasso's Guernica and Steven Spielberg's film Scbindler's List that sets them apart from productions of entertainment violence.

Some envisage catharsis in the contemporary therapeutic sense of "abreaction," the release of anxiety through reliving episodes in one's past, or of acting out aggression, contempt, or hatred in imagination. Sigmund Freud developed the "cathartic method" as a therapy whereby patients could unburden their minds by "bringing the submerged painful experience to consciousness, thus releasing the strangulated emotions." Perhaps there is some echo of this Freudian sense of the word in director Martin Scorsese's remark about our needing "the catharsis of blood-letting and decapitation like the Ancient Romans needed it." But catharsis in the classical sense could hardly be at issue in Roman gladiatorial games, since they were not dramatic imitations (mimesis) but the real thing. Whatever terror the carnage in the arenas produced, its accompaniment was predominantly thrill rather than pity. As Pliny said, it inspired citizens to "a glory in wounds and a contempt of death, since the love of praise and desire for victory could be seen, even in the bodies of slaves and criminals."

The Freudian view of catharsis as a working through or "abreaction" of painful personal experiences involves, as does Aristotle's, learning to feel and perceive more fully, and to reflect more deeply on the role of violence. Simplified versions of both views lend themselves to a third, still more recent interpretation of the word as "letting off steam," allowing individuals to vent dammed-up energies that could otherwise find dangerous outlets in real life . Catbarsis in this sense has received considerable attention from social scientists studying the effects of television violence on children.  If iolent films, videos, television shows, and interactive games could be shown to have such an effect, this would constitute a benefit to be weighed against other, more debilitating effects.

In the early years of television, when far less graphic violence was available on the screen, a few studies claimed to show such a "catharsis effect." Investigators held that at least some adolescents who saw violence on the screen were able to release pent-up emotion and exhibit less aggression as a result. Such claims are occasionally still made: thus media studies professor Jib Fowles holds that by having "television entertainment with adequate sex and violence, Americans are nightly able to empty their subconscious; aggressive fantasies produce tranquil minds." By now, however, most media scholars regard this "catharsis theory" as having been disproved for children and adolescents, as well as for those adults who admit that violent programs stimulate aggressive thoughts, sometimes actions.

The concept of catharsis is crucial to our understanding of when works of art contribute to an enlargement or a stabbing of the soul. But when this concept is bloated to encompass the effects of all entertainment violence, whether among the Romans or in today's media culture, it becomes useless for making such distinctions.

The stakes are high. Because of the scope that entertainment violence has assumed, the new technological and marketing means at the disposal of its producers, and the importance of considering any linkage it may have to societal violence, we have greater reason than ever to inquire into its effects. Does present-day programming constitute "harmless entertainment"? Has it become something of a scapegoat in societies unwilling or unable to undertake serious measures to curb crime? To what extent can it help legitimate violence, glamorize it, perhaps desensitize viewers and arouse the need for more frequent and more intensive exposure?