With the release of Hunger Games, violence in the media is a hot topic of discussion again. Let it first be known that I love the Hunger Games series; it is perhaps my second-favorite fantasy/sci fi series after LOTR. Many do not like the third book, arguing that it gets away from the essential story. I disagree. But let's leave that for another day. The question now is: What's a concerned parent to do with something like the violence in The Hunger Games film?
I have not yet seen the movie, but I've been reading a lot about it. I did recently watch another very violent movie: The Dark Knight. Sammie has been telling me for years to watch it; for a couple of years it was her favorite movie and basically the only movie she would watch. She generally doesn't like movies. I recently let Nathan watch it as well. I recall my students urging me to see it from the moment it appeared and hear it frequently named among LDS students as a favorite.
Well, I finally saw it. The movie has a lot to recommend it, including outstanding acting and pacing. It even, surprisingly, deals with great themes and interesting ideas, which I think are both essential for great movies and books. The choices faced by the District Attorney in Gotham capture nicely the sorts of dilemmas facing politicians in, say, Mexico where they get blamed for fostering violence when they go after powerful outlaw elements like the drug cartels.
Yet, at the end of the day, I'm going to trash our copy of the movie (given to us, probably; we don't generally pay for movies) and have talked to my kids about not watching it again. I have two fundamental objections: 1-It portrays the details of violence, and talk about violence, far too explicitly and unnecessarily; and 2-More disturbingly, it portrays an extraordinarily bleak picture of human nature.
I read a story in the D.News where they were interviewing a psychology professor at BYU who studies media and violence. He was arguing that context is king: If violence is portrayed in a disapproving fashion, as in Hunger Games, it is far less harmful than if it is portrayed in approving light. I think, upon reflection, that this is exactly what's wrong with Dark Knight. It's not just that it's violent; it's that the notion of good and evil disappears.
I very much admire complexity, but I detest relativism. Picking one's way through complex choices in a murky world is essential; striving to do one's best in this process is admirable. In Dark Knight, virtually no one even cares enough to even try to sort through the morality of it all. There are a couple of glimpses of people caring about morality and making moral choices. But they are generally few and far between. They are generally amoral individuals driven only by passion.
Consider for a moment another fairly violent film: Harry Potter VII (1 or 2, take your choice). Both Potter and Knight get rated a 7 on the violence scale by parental guidance website "Kids In Mind." But think about Voldemort's compatriots in comparison to the Joker's. Voldemort's people sometimes demonstrate reluctance or even defiance when asked to engage in some great evil. The Joker's henchmen, in contrast, think nothing of killing a friend in the middle of a conversation.
We live in a violent world; I don't mind seeing some on screen. But we also live in a world where people have strong moral views and where human nature has a lot of good in it. To remove that entirely from the picture is a real tragedy. We have too much of cynicism in the world; it is the reinforcement of cynicism and the absence of virtue that I worry about, more than violence, in these films.
To its credit, the website commonsensemedia has started to take this viewpoint into account. It now has ratings for positive messages and role models, not just level of violence. And it seems to take account of such things in its ratings. This is the right move, and it's a good place for parents and teens to go to begin to get advice and information about these sorts of things.
