Big Bang Theories: Critics Address Violence on Screen Mirko Illic The top-rated show on cable TV is rife with shootings, stabbings, machete attacks and more shootings. The top drama at the box office fills theaters with the noise of automatic weapons fire. The top-selling video game in the country gives players the choice to kill or merely wound their quarry. In the weeks after more than two-dozen children and adults were shot to death in Newtown, Conn., we thought we would long recoil from such grisly scenes staged for entertainment's sake, especially when the public debate quickly turned to our culture of violence and the violence of our cultural offerings. It's a cyclical discussion that's followed other, sadly similar tragedies, and not long ago it included pop music and even books. Now, as the culture has become ever more screen focused, the debate has largely narrowed to what we consume on our TVs, laptops and smartphones. And this time there is a sense that it is harder to ignore the source of our vicarious pleasures. But we've managed to find a way: Flying bullets and macabre deaths have long made for compelling viewing. In December the Hollywood premiere for "Django Unchained," a vengeance tale filled with bloody shootouts, was canceled in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School deaths. Last week the film, which has crossed the $150 million mark at the domestic box office, won the Oscar for best original screenplay. Whether there's a direct connection between what happens on screen and what happens in real life is up for debate. That the images are here to stay is not. And so, as Congress begins to consider legislation meant to prevent another Newtown, these critics of The New York Times take a closer look at what we watch and why: Movies Finding Comfort in Easy Distinctions Gene Page/AMC "The Walking Dead" presents a social order organized around the brute necessity of survival. IN A RECENT ARTICLE for the conservative news site The Daily Caller, Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, described some of the conditions that he said make the unfettered availability of guns an urgent necessity. "Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States," he wrote, noting that the states along the nation's southern border were especially vulnerable to criminals and terrorists. Phoenix is already one of the kidnapping capitals of the world. Further east, he surveyed the "hellish" landscape of New York after Hurricane Sandy: "Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all. Residents of those places might not recognize them from Mr. LaPierre's account. It's been a while since I was in Phoenix, but my own experience of post-Sandy New York was of a city where the social infrastructure proved more resilient than its physical counterpart, and the blacked-out nighttime streets felt remarkably safe. Still, anyone familiar with American popular culture over the last 40 years or so will find his dystopian, danger-filled images familiar - perhaps comfortingly or thrillingly so. When an especially dramatic event happens, we sometimes say it's like a movie, but we also have a tendency to project what we see in movies onto more mundane situations. The vision of New York as a decaying, crime-ridden inferno may be out of date, but it is still cherished by devotees of "70s and "80s cinema and television. "Death Wish," "The Warriors" and "Escape From New York" may have been dark bulletins from an anxious era, but now they show a nostalgic patina. Fans of "Breaking Bad" and "No Country for Old Men" know a Southwestern landscape infested with narco-criminals and freelance killers, though the imagined lawlessness of that region goes back to the classic westerns and the popular novels that spawned them. After the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mr. LaPierre declared that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," as pure a distillation of traditional Hollywood morality as you could want. Film Society of Lincoln Center "Escape From New York" perpetuated myths about urban life. Of course, in the current discourse of gun politics, Hollywood and the N.R.A. are supposed to be on opposite sides. The issue has been framed as an either-or argument about the causes of violence: If it's not guns, then it's popular culture, the brutal movies, TV shows and video games that infect the young and seduce the unstable. The debate supposedly takes place between promoters of the First Amendment and defenders of the Second; between the liberal entertainment industry and conservative hunters and pickup truck drivers. But it is absurd to pretend that gun culture is unrelated to popular culture, or that make-believe violence has nothing to do with its real-world correlative. Guns have symbolic as well as actual power, and the practical business of hunting, law enforcement and self-defense has less purchase in our civic life than fantasies of righteous vengeance or brave resistance. Those fantasies have proliferated and intensified even as our daily existence has become more regulated and standardized - and also less dangerous. Perhaps they offer an escape from the boredom and regimentation of work and consumption. The life of a cowboy, a maverick lawman or a postapocalyptic zombie hunter promises clearer dangers and keener pleasures than the compromises and routines that most of us face from day to day. And a social order organized around the brute necessity of survival - like the one explored each week on "The Walking Dead," for example - can be attractive as well as scary. The characters in that series must continually prove their mettle without the guidance of the rule of law or the meddling of the state. When mass killings happen in the real world, the mark of the killer's pathology is often described as an inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. But that is not a syndrome that afflicts only individuals. We gravitate, collectively, toward a simplified world where might makes right and good guys and bad guys are easy to tell apart. That in itself may be harmless, except that we increasingly seem - in our politics and our civic discourse - to fall prey to the delusion that this world of dream and legend is the one we actually inhabit. Which means that any hope for a realistic discussion of the causes and consequences of violence might be the biggest fantasy of all. Pushing Grisly Boundaries Since 1895 Zade Rosenthal/Marvel Studios and Paramount Pictures Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner in "Marvel's The Avengers," which by one count had 964 deaths. SEX AND VIOLENCE ARE the twin engines that have long fired up American movies and their harshest critics. This isn't exactly news - or new. In 1934 Francis D. Culkin, a Republican congressman, riding a wave of political and religious outrage against the movies, declared that "steadily the stream of pollution which has flowed forth from Hollywood has become wilder and more turbulent." By July 1934 the industry agreed to enforce the Production Code, deciding that self-censorship was better than risking the federally mandated kind. Yet while movies instituted regulations, the industry made sure that its stories were ambiguous enough to contain vice and its comeuppance too. As the historian Tino Balio writes, as early as 1927, the industry understood that if the code was to work, it had to allow the studios to develop a system that was elastic enough to please and appease different viewers. Or, as one insider put it in 1927, movies that worked for "the sophisticated mind but which would mean nothing to the unsophisticated and inexperienced." Under the code the bad would be punished, but only after they had spent the entire movie flouting the very morals the code enforced. I wonder what Culkin would have made of Oliver Stone's "Savages," a 2012 release about drugs and dudes that opens with a spooky scene in which a killer beheads some men with a chain saw. One problem for those who would prefer their violence less graphically deployed is that big studios historically play it safe by recycling the same stories, character types and bang-bang, shoot-"em-up, kill-or-be-killed, vengeance is mine, yours, ours distractions. The enterprising Web site All Outta Bubblegum, which racks up the dead, mostly in action flicks, estimates that the "killcount" for "Marvel's The Avengers," the highest grossing movie last year, is 964 - which I suspect is higher than that for "Savages." "The Avengers" received a PG-13 rating: "Parents strongly cautioned." The more explicit "Savages" was rated R for, among its other attractions, "strong brutal and grisly violence." If any of this seems shocking, it shouldn't be. Movies have been transfixed by violence from their beginning. Among the earliest subjects for nonfiction cinema were war, battles and death, with execution films, as the scholar Mary Ann Doane has observed, a popular subgenre. The film pioneer Thomas A. Edison, in an early example of synergistic branding, advertised two innovations at once in his 1901 exploitation item "Execution of Czolgosz, With Panorama of Auburn Prison," a re-creation of the electrocution of President William McKinley's assassin. Far more disturbing is "Electrocuting an Elephant" (1903), in which Topsy, a real Coney Island elephant, was killed on camera with 6,600 volts of electricity with help from Edison's assistants. (The poor creature had been deemed a menace, having killed several men. Edison had other animals publicly electrocuted in his fight against alternating current.) Library of Congress Moving Image Section Topsy the elephant was killed on-camera in the 1903 Edison film "Electrocuting an Elephant." By the time he fried Topsy, Edison had already turned death into a spectacle, as in "The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots," a wee shocker from 1895, when movies were still watched on viewing machines called Kinetoscopes. Ms. Doane observes that the execution film "manifests an intense fascination with the representation of death," and that contemporary viewers took notice of the paradox of these images in a medium that, after all, captured bodies in their lifelike glory. It is a paradox that has troubled us for more than a century, as we wring our hands and argue whether bloody life imitates bloody art or the reverse. In the end all that remains clear is that whether in stark black or white or deepest red, American movies have been killing characters since 1895 - and that we like to watch. Television Creating Immunity to All That Horror Monty Brinton/CBS A scene from CBS's "NCIS," which sets its violence against humor. STUDIES ARE INCONCLUSIVE about whether repeated exposure to violence on screen inures viewers to violence in real life, but you don't need a government grant to assume that scenes of violence on television inure viewers to more violence on television. Lots of people deplore the violence, but they should specify which kind. There is violence on network television, and then there is cable, where violence is really violent, flowing freely without almost any censorship or fealty to community standards. That means that on a show like "Justified" on FX the camera doesn't pull away when thugs saw off a man's foot; in the next episode the camera moves in closer as they cauterize the jagged, bloody stump with a blowtorch. Shows on broadcast networks don't usually get quite that gory, though "The Following" on Fox, a series about a serial killer's murderous cult, clearly aspires to and comes pretty close. That show emulates cable in an even more unusual, jarring way: The horror is unrelenting and unrelieved, without fetching characters and comical subplots to change the subject and lighten the mood of the narrative. Network series about crime have to address a broader audience - and F.C.C. guidelines - but they do it not so much by tamping down the violence as by ramping up the humor. "NCIS," on CBS, is one of the nation's top-rated shows, and it offers perhaps the most dizzyingly discordant messages. One moment a victim has been savagely tortured, raped and murdered; the next, young, cute investigators are slapping each other's heads around the office, or yacking it up in the morgue. That's a have-it-both-ways formula that CBS has used with great success, and even the grimmer variations, like "Criminal Minds," follow it. Prashant Gupta/FX Gerald McRaney in "Justified" on FX, which goes right up close to the gore. Broadcasters pride themselves on keeping good and evil straight: The good guys are violent in the pursuit of justice, and it's the villains who maim and torture for fun or profit. But heroes seem to inflict pain and recover from it with the cartoonish speed of Wile E. Coyote. If humor and distancing deflect the true horror of violence and numb audiences to it, then network television shows may be worse for audiences than even the most gruesome scenes on Showtime's "Dexter." Murder, rape and torture are depicted more graphically and artfully on cable shows like "Breaking Bad" or "Game of Thrones," yet those kinds of series could be less offensive than tamer ones on network television. On cable, horror isn't shaken off with a quip and commercial break, it lingers like cigarette smoke, infecting all the characters with secondhand depravity. There may be black humor on "Breaking Bad" or "Dexter," but it's dark, and not the lightheaded good cheer that CBS and other networks pump in to freshen the air and change the subject. Gratuitous violence has its place. A series that holds it up as damaging and indelible sends a more realistic message to impressionable viewers than one that uses kooky, unthreatening characters to mitigate violence and make it seem normal. Video Games Check Your Remote, Not Your Console Advertisements for Call of Duty (an image from Black Ops II) display guns but emphasize camaraderie. ANXIETIES ABOUT violence in video games are as old as the medium. In 1976 the chunky, Pong-caliber graphics of Death Race, an arcade game in which players tried to run over digital gremlins with virtual cars, led a psychologist to fret that the game was more dangerous than watching passive violence on television. In 1982, the year Ms. Pac-Man landed in arcades, a rabbi warned on "The MacNeil/Lehrer Report" that video games were teaching children to regard other people as "blips to be destroyed." In retrospect these old fears about games seem ludicrous. And I suspect that today's concerns about far more realistic-looking first-person shooter games training teenagers to carry out mass murders like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., will one day seem equally misguided. After all, 80 percent of high school boys play video games. Sales have doubled in the last two decades, while the number of violent youth offenders has been halved. But as the father of two very young daughters I am not indifferent to the complaint that our culture has become saturated with violence. It is too hard to shield our children from things they are too young to understand. Video games are not what I'm worried about, though. No one shows up at my house and starts playing Grand Theft Auto without my permission. Besides, our 8-month-old has yet to evince any interest in games more complicated than peek-a-boo. On the other hand, on Sunday afternoons in the fall and winter, I had to watch N.F.L. games on a slight DVR delay, so that I would be able to fast-forward through the unbidden and luridly violent and sexual TV commercials for Hollywood action movies (with titles like "Bullet to the Head") that would otherwise have flooded our apartment, and my daughters" brains. Video game commercials are considerably less violent than movie commercials, or so it seems to me. Perhaps because some games are incredibly bloody and death filled (even more so than action movies), or perhaps because game creators are more anxious than moviemakers about their cultural status, the marketing tends to emphasize drama and character. The first ad for the excellent, violent shooter Gears of War is a famous-for-video-games example: PG-rated and set to the somber cover of Tears for Fears" "Mad World" that was used in "Donnie Darko." The ads for the Call of Duty games are about guns and shooting, sure, but they're comic and not all that scary, emphasizing the camaraderie that is created by playing a game with others. I wouldn't want them to run during episodes of "Super Why!" on PBS, but if they did, I'm not sure that I would scramble to turn off the television. There aren't fistfights in them, or close-ups of one man seemingly about to shoot another man in the face, which was the climax of one of the many inescapable ads for "Gangster Squad," starring Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn, that ran in the weeks after the killings at Sandy Hook. Then again, I don't think watching 700 movie trailers for "Gangster Squad" would turn my daughters into violent criminals, either. So why do I care? As a father who wants to raise them to be empathetic and humane, who wants them to learn to solve problems with their wits, I don't want my girls to mimic the behavior they see in these ads. But my larger concern, I think, stems from a simple desire to protect them from the awfulness of the world for a few years. There will be plenty of murder and death in their lifetimes, and I'm in no rush to introduce them to the stuff. The pervasive guns and explosions that are now regarded as acceptable daytime entertainment by the people who approve TV commercials at the networks make that task a lot harder. But video games? They are, in our family, a refined adult pastime, like bourbon or sex - something best explored late at night or in the middle of the day when the children are out. At their best games provide the same sublime pleasures that any work of fiction offers.