I was watching an episode of “The
Big Bang Theory” this week when
I witnessed hundreds, if not thousands, of people dying en masse, their
bodies haphazardly flung about like
pieces of confetti.
My half hour of high-IQ hijinks
was suddenly hijacked by overwhelming amounts of death and destruction. The abrupt shift from funny
to apocalyptic human devastation
came without warning in the form of a
short trailer for a movie called “World
War Z.”
I researched and found that the “Z”
in “World War Z” stands for “zombie,”
so I am now presuming that the people
I saw being obliterated
were possibly unaffected by the violent
events. I don’t know
much about zombies,
but it’s my understanding that their
undead state makes
it difficult for them
to make the move to
actually dead. Nonetheless, until I
looked up the movie’s premise the
next day, I thought I had seen hordes
of the world’s alive-and-well population being wiped out.
Yes, I do realize it’s “just” a movie
either way. Yet, recent studies indicate
our brains process fiction in books
and movies as real enough to trigger
nonlanguage-processing regions. In
a New York Times piece titled “Your
Brain on Fiction,” Annie Murphy Paul
summed up the research by stating:
“The brain, it seems, does not make
much of a distinction between reading
about an experience and encountering
it in real life; in each case, the same
neurological regions are stimulated.”
A Huffington Post blog entry
written by Keith Oatley, a fiction effect researcher, is titled “Is Fiction
Good for You?” Oatley contends that
the resultant social understanding and
empathy that comes from fiction is,
indeed, good for you.
If fiction in popular culture can be
good for you, doesn’t it stand to reason
that, like most everything, it can also
be bad for you? If we read books and
view movies packed with death, dismemberment, destruction and devastation, wouldn’t that have a negative
impact on our lives and our psyches in
the same way opening our minds up
to different relationships and cultures
through fiction has a positive effect?
I saw a few other interesting movie
clips this week. In light of the Sandy
Hook massacre, the group Mayors
Against Illegal Guns released a video
featuring dozens of celebrities listing
off recent major acts of gun violence
in the U.S. They then declare that
enough is enough and demand that
we demand a plan of action against
gun violence.
I thankfully have no use for guns
in my everyday life, the Second
Amendment isn’t my favorite and
I am as horrified as most Americans by our senseless, embarrassing
ongoing illicit affair with gun violence. I am a perfect candidate to be
moved to sign the “Demand a Plan”
petition being advertised by the celebrity pleas.
The original “Demand a Plan” video was
not the first version I
happened upon, though.
The first version I saw
also featured the original
clips of solemn-faced celebrities denouncing gun
violence; however, those
clips were interspersed
with clips, often graphic,
of many of the celebrities performing
acts of gun violence themselves during
movie and TV appearances. I see.
Anyone with children, or who
has had even a brief encounter with
any human being, knows that “do
as I say, not as I do” doesn’t stand
a chance against “monkey see,
monkey do.” I am reminded of the
1987 anti-drug PSA that reveals the
influence a father’s own drug use
has on his son’s drug use.
We can argue that celebrities,
movies, books, music, video games
and the like don’t have the influence
on kids that parents do, but what
if the parents are the ones being
influenced? What are we saying to
our children when we praise a book
about kids hunting one another, yet
cry over Sandy Hook; when we still
cry over almost 3,000 lives being
lost on Sept. 11, yet get excited to
see a movie about the world’s population being brought to the brink of
extinction? The signals have to be
mixed at best.
Not every person who absorbs
fictional violence commits real acts
of violence, of course. In fact, I would
venture to guess the rate of copycatting is quite low. Still, do we want to
be consumers of death and destruction, albeit fictional, for pleasure?
Are we really OK with passing such
a pastime along to our children? If
fiction can teach our brains a little
something about life, is violence the
thing we want to be learning about?
Who taught them to enjoy this
stuff, to give violence a starring
role on the American stage, to find
entertainment value in our darkest
human acts?
You, all right?
They learn it by watching you.
