Forum: I survived . . . media violence

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Forum: I survived . . . media violence

It has been too easy to blame violent behavior on media images, says Chad Hermann, a gore aficionado who wouldn't hurt a flea

Sunday, October 10, 1999

A few nights ago I stayed up late and watched "The Beyond," a film by infamous Italian goremeister Lucio Fulci that includes several impalings, a few beatings and a couple of blindings, two faces melted by acid, packs of flesh-eating zombies, a crucifixion, buckets and buckets of blood, no fewer than five eyes gouged out and (in one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen on film) a man literally picked apart by a horde of tarantulas. I thought some of it was funny. I thought much of it was revolting. I enjoyed myself immensely.

Chad Hermann, a writer living in Shadyside, is an adjunct assistant professor of business communications at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University. He is at work on a book about violence in the media.

After the film, I went upstairs and checked on my son, pulled the covers back to his chin, and lingered for a moment over his face. I climbed into bed and hugged my wife. She stirred. I kissed her and told her that I loved her.

And now I wonder: Why didn't I kill her?

Why didn't I bite her, beat her, gouge out one of her eyes? Why didn't I smack my son, maybe club him once or twice about his soft, little head before retiring for the evening? Why didn't I rise the next morning, arm myself with semi-automatic weapons, and head off to work to right some long-festering wrongs?

If we believe all the pronouncements on the terrible effects of media violence, I should have. After watching that film (I even rewound and rewatched some of the juiciest bits), I should have gone rampaging upstairs with a taste for mayhem and a thirst for blood. After almost three decades of enjoying such celluloid atrocity, I should by now be so wholly inspired by and so thoroughly desensitized to such violence that the slightest provocation, even the sight of innocent flesh, should set me instantly to wilding.

I really should have snapped long ago.

So I ponder those pronouncements, so solemnly published in periodicals like Parents and Pediatrics, so faithfully parroted in (of all places) the mass media whenever some deeply troubled souls shoot up a high school, a workplace, a community center .Like a national rite of mourning, we wring our collective hands and furrow our figurative brows over the effects of media violence on children. Exposure to violent movies and video games, we say, makes kids more aggressive; prolonged exposure poses serious health risks. It will, we're told, make kids kill. In the past months, I've heard everyone from pundits to the president righteously declare that a childhood like mine is something to be feared. But I know better.

I am not a killer.

I remember my childhood fondly: Saturday afternoons with Karloff and Chaney, Saturday nights with Cushing and Lee. I remember my mother (what was she thinking?) taking me to see "Jaws" at age 7, utterly horrified, looking through my fingers at Robert Shaw spitting up great gouts of bright red blood when the shark bit him in half.

I remember Jamie Lee Curtis stalked by a white mask and a really big knife at age 9, then some hideous, screeching little space beast erupting from John Hurt's chest at age 10.By then I couldn't look away. Terrified, oddly exhilarated, I loved every awful minute of it.

I remember discovering Stephen King and George Romero, Wes Craven and David Cronenberg, Clive Barker and Dario Argento. Zombies, aliens, madmen, cannibals, killer dwarves. I watched blood flow and body counts rise. Stabbings, skewerings, impalings, dismemberings, disembowelings. Knives, razors, icepicks, axes, machetes, sickles, scythes, screwdrivers, pitchforks, chainsaws - all pieces in some psycho match-game: Pick a good weapon, find a vulnerable body part. I immersed myself in media death, gorged on cinema gore.

I craved that stuff. I still do.

So I should be a statistic. A poster boy for those posted studies. I'm the big fear: the kid who grows and cuts his teeth and feeds heartily on a grotesque feast of media violence - including generous side dishes of shoot-em-up video games and slam-bang action pictures - whose inquisitive and impressionable young mind turns and returns, over and over again, to horror film murder and mayhem and random, senseless acts of atrocity. I'm the kid who saw 15,000 media murders by the time he turned 18. I'm the guy the studies warn you about.

But if the studies are right, then what is wrong with me?

I have never been in a fight, never thrown a punch. I have never, even in my weakest, angriest moments, contemplated shooting up my school or my workplace. I don't own a gun. I hunted for a few years because my father wanted me to, but stopped because it bothered me far more than any film I ever saw. I never felt the thrill. But I should have, according to the studies.

Why don't I kill?

Because, like any healthy child, I could separate fantasy from reality. Because I knew that real life is no horror film and that horror films are not real life. Because I was not so impressionable, no blank slate upon which a succession of unspeakable images could carve its ugly mark, no empty vessel waiting, slack-jawed and weak-willed, to be regularly programmed for wanton evil, as those studies so desperately want you to believe.

I can't and don't and won't kill now because the media violence didn't matter. I had a home in which I felt always warm and whole and safe, with two great parents who loved me and told me and showed me so every day. And I don't hurt now because nothing ever hurt me then. Because the flickering images were no match for those parents and that home, for two doting grandparents and so many fine friends, good relatives, and talented teachers, who taught and touched and nurtured me in hope and grace and love and compassion, who believed that what I saw was not nearly as important as what I knew or how I felt, and who trusted that I would turn out all right. With a wicked taste in entertainment, but still all right.

And I am all right. Flawed and imperfect, and so perfectly human. Humane, despite the inhumanity I have seen. And, even in frightening times like these, somehow happily wise, because I know I can provide that same safety and security for my own son. I can ensure that what is wrong with me also is wrong with him.

As I wait to share with him my love of horror, I prepare him, inoculate him with the gifts of heart and home. And I teach him the lessons that I have learned, loving him as my parents loved me, so that he will learn and grow and he will not kill, no matter what he sees or how often he sees it.