Do we as viewers become more sensitive to screen violence over time?
Resurrecting the Classic Discussion Thread
I recently tried to do the Substack Chat thing and it didn’t quite work out, despite my best efforts. Honestly, I’ve never really liked Chat that much (except the dms) and think Substack made a mistake abolishing the good old-fashioned discussion thread post.
So, now I want to try to resurrect it. Here is hopefully the first of several posts meant to mostly just generate some discussion via the use of the Comments.
I went to see Weapons last night. I really liked it though I don’t think the movie quite lives up to the hype. It really reminded me of Longlegs, a movie that was marketed as a really dark super-serious horror movie that turned out to be more of a satire/black comedy and somewhat less than the knockout early buzz had proclaimed it to be.
What really struck me was how much difficulty I had watching the scenes of violence and gore. Weapons has relatively little of it compared to other horror movies.* But my capacity to stomach it and not get squeamish is clearly not what it used to be.
*Though admittedly some scenes go really over-the-top, to the point where I wondered if it had to be cut back due to an NC-17 rating.
I’ve been noticing it more and more over the last few years. I simply can’t watch uber-violent sequences like those in Only God Forgives (2013) or super gory splatter ones like in Evil Dead (1981) without at some point averting my eyes anymore.
Stuff that never bothered me 20 years ago now makes me really uncomfortable.
It’s as though I used be desensitized to that stuff. And now I’m not.
Which makes me wonder - do people normally get more sensitive to screen violence over time? Anybody else here find that violent films - especially horror films - you used to watch are no longer tolerable? If so, why do you think this is happening? Could all the real-life violence shown on-screen be impacting our ability to watch fiction? Do we generally get more sensitive to such imagery as we age?
What do you think?
Working in developmental psychology, I would credit maturing into adulthood for each of us increasingly thinking about children’s need for emotional security in a safe world.
Hence, horror stories will seem less and less relevant as we mature in our familiarity with the needs of the wider world and prosocial institutions like healthcare and childcare.
On the other hand, we do tend to rehearse what we see and hear, due to what are called “mirror neurons“.
Mirror neurons are how we learn to play a sport by watching it, or learn a song by hearing it.
That would argue for being more likely to act violently after watching violence, which is indeed a concern when letting children watch any violent movies.
I have gone back-and-forth with Noah Berlatsky about why horror movies are considered entertainment to begin with.
My suspicion is that violence and horror must be normalized to numb us to the colonial need to conquer and subjugate for economic benefit.
It is easier to pretend that our history is fictional, like a horror movie, than what it actually was, and in many countries still is.
Thanks for this post!
I think they do. As a kid I didn't mind it at all, but, as an adult, learning about the fictional supernatural world, and the real-life medical and economic costs of on-screen behavior, it does start to get more scary...