In 1993, the “Murder Is Not Entertainment” movement was initiated by the National Organization of Parents Of Murdered Children, Inc. There was a brief flurry of activity by members of the group in my hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1994. If I remember correctly, local theaters showing violent movies were picketed, and flyers were handed out in front of a local playhouse. I have not heard much about the movement since it still exists thirty years later.

While the phrase “murder is not entertainment” might seem somewhat Pollyanna-ish given the cultural history of mankind, the movement’s main concern has always been the commodification of actual tragedies, where real murders are turned into consumable entertainment, often without regard for the victims and their families. True crime podcasts, documentaries, and sensationalized films based on actual crimes would seem to be their primary concern.

But MINE has also voiced its concerns about fictional portrayals of murder, primarily when they are marketed to children and/or glamorize violence in ways that could desensitize viewers to real suffering. It advocates for responsible portrayals of violence in all forms of media, emphasizing that murder—even in fictional settings—should not be trivialized, glamorized, or treated as merely a plot device.

I don’t exactly disagree with MINE’s position. For several years, murder was my business; I was a cop reporter for a newspaper that emphasized crime stories in a city that averaged more than a murder a day in the early 1980s. I have been in rooms with the freshly killed. I have talked to murderers, I have seen things that I wish I had not. 

I have told violent stories.

Sometimes, I’ve relished them. As a reporter, I wanted my stories to be compelling and to resonate with readers. I wanted people to read my accounts for their style and pacing and how they limned the human condition and spirit. I wanted to write stories about murder with inherent drama that people couldn’t look away from, but that told us about something more than simple crime. But in doing so, I realized that I was part of a larger, almost unbreakable fascination that Americans seem to have with violence.

•••

About fifteen years ago, a young woman I knew slightly was murdered. She was beaten to death during a home invasion. She was a news anchor for a Little Rock television station and was well-known in the community. She was a local celebrity but also one of those vibrant and charismatic people seemingly marked for bigger things than local news. While my wife and I did not know her well, we shared many friends. 

By coincidence, we had attended a charity event she was hosting the night before her attack at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. We walked our terriers, dressed up for the occasion, down a red carpet runway, and the young woman described their couture.

The next evening, she was beaten unconscious. Five days later, she was dead. 

Police detectives theorized that her assailant—who was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison—entered her house through her dog door and probably did not realize she was home at the time.

We were shaken by the news. For me, the sensation was a strange commingling of shock and guilt and an uneasy and uncomfortable feeling of irrational culpability. It wasn’t so much that I was close to the young woman as I was close to people who were close to her—within a week of her death, two people told me they considered her their best friend. 

A few weeks after her death, I had a conversation with a young man who had been very close to the young woman. Though their relationship was platonic, it was very deep, and her death had hollowed him out. He was drawn and tearful when we talked. He said her death had led him to question his love of horror movies, especially torture porn films like Jame Wan’s Saw (2004) and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005). These films, he noted, skewed more realistic than the classic Giallo films like Suspiria (1977) or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and the supernatural monster movies he’d grown up watching. He wondered if he hadn’t desensitized himself to brutality and if realistic depictions of violence weren’t inherently immoral.

I wasn’t satisfied with what I told him, which was the fact that he was asking these questions seemed to me a sign of character, and that after going through something as tragic and real as what happened, it made sense for us all to take stock of the images and ideas we unthinkingly consume in pursuit of entertainment and escape. I said I thought it was good that he was questioning his own complicity in what we might all agree was a world gone mad. I said we all should undertake this kind of moral inventory from time to time.

If I wanted to rationalize his—and my own— fascination with depictions of violence, I would say there is a fundamental difference between what happens in the movies and what happens in real life, just as there is a difference between what we imagine and what we bring into the actual world. Horror can be a controlled way to experience intense emotions—fear, suspense, even shock—in a safe space. Watching horror movies doesn’t necessarily signal approval of violence, though I would imagine that violent people are less dismayed than most by violent imagery. 

Still, my instinct—my guess— is that horror can serve as an outlet for emotions or curiosity, almost like a release valve. It could help us cope with tough stuff. 

A school of thought holds that the brain struggles to distinguish between lived experience and vividly imagined or dreamed experiences. While I don’t believe it is that simple, it is a compelling notion, especially given how horror films affect us. Our brains and bodies often respond as if the onscreen threats are real: our heart rate spikes, stress hormones increase, and we might even jump or feel tense.

But while the brain engages deeply with the fear, it also continuously monitors context clues to confirm the threats aren’t real. We keep telling ourselves, “It’s only a movie,” and this awareness acts as a buffer. Some studies suggest that even as fear activates, the “contextual control” systems in our brain—assessing whether a situation is safe or dangerous—reassure us. So watching a horror movie—even watching torture porn—is not the same thing as witnessing a brutal crime.

I don’t know about watching so-called “snuff films,” or the Faces of Death series of shockumentaries that had a vogue in the late 1970s and ’80s. Even though snuff films were an urban legend and a significant portion of the “deaths” depicted in the FOD series were staged with actors, special effects, and makeup, if the audience’s expectations were that they were watching the real thing, that would seem to change the dynamic. As a crime reporter, I did cover a case where a developmentally disabled high school kid murdered a female classmate after a party where one of the Faces of Death movies was shown. (This was not a detail I elided from my story.)

But we shouldn’t be surprised if sadists gravitate toward violent films; their embrace of gore might be seen as more symptom than root of their pathology. Human beings are complex and few monsters fit the precise profiles we hold for them. Hitler was kind to animals; Jeffery Dahmer was not. 

It’s entirely possible that  horror movies provide healthy people a way to experience the thrill of terrifying scenarios in a safe, controlled setting. Some people find this cathartic: confronting one’s fears in this way can allow us to feel stronger. Maybe horror can even help us process real-world anxieties in a fictional context, allowing us to explore our fear without consequences.

Still, when the real world breaks in on us—when a friend is murdered in real life—onscreen violence is going to feel very different. When we understand the real-world consequences of violence, it’s more challenging to accept it as an entertainment trope. Murder is not entertainment—but perhaps fictional violence can serve as something else entirely. It can be a way to probe the jungles of the psyche and confront fears that otherwise haunt us in silence.  

Still, after we encounter the raw reality of violence, that threshold between fiction and life grows thin, and we can no longer ignore the ways these images shape us. Garbage in, garbage out— we are what we consume.

Violent films and television shows can offer release, a tool for reflection, or a window into the human condition—but when actual loss touches us, we are reminded that even the most vivid onscreen horror on screen pales compared to the bad things we do to each other. 

•••

In her 2003 essay collection Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag argues that photographs of war and suffering often serve as a kind of crude spectacle, eliciting in the viewer a response similar to that of entertainment. Sontag examines the ethical tensions in viewing such images, acknowledging the human impulse to look at these painful scenes —to gawk—while questioning whether viewers are genuinely moved or changed by them. 

“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists… has not reached moral or psychological adulthood,” she writes. Often, our fascination with violent images arises from a kind of moral immaturity—a desire to look at atrocity from a safe distance without genuinely confronting their reality. Sontag argues violent images can be a kind of pornography. 

Still, we’ve noted evolutionary biological reasons that witnessing or imagining violence might produce a physiological thrill, releasing pleasant doses of adrenaline and dopamine within us and creating excitement and engagement. This response was initially meant to prepare early humans for danger—a danger that has now been removed and rendered imaginary. The bullet that screams toward the viewer from the barrel of the gun held by the outlaw Justus D. Barnes at the end of The Great Train Robbery (1903) was not going to hurt anyone. However, there’s some truth to the myth that audience members were startled because they had never experienced such a lifelike depiction of moving images before.

Film was an excellent medium for producing these exploitable dopamine moments. People feel a “safe thrill” when they see violence in a controlled setting, allowing them to experience intense emotions without any direct personal risk. The movies are, by and large, our safe space. 

Or so it seemed until July 20, 2012, when a gunman dressed in tactical clothing and employing smoke canisters killed twelve and wounded seventy after opening fire during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in a Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. (There were two other attacks in American movie theaters in 2015, with four more fatalities. As of this writing, there hasn’t been another. Still, we can no longer assume that theaters are immune to the violence that permeates other parts of our society, an inviolable boundary between the make-believe and actual. The horror has come off the screen, leaving a lingering sense of vulnerability in spaces once considered sanctuaries of escapism. Like so many other public places, movie theaters have become reminders of our inability to separate real threats from fictional ones, challenging our belief that we can fully experience fear, thrill, or suspense in total safety.

The allure of violence in American culture runs deep. Born of Puritans, we are more abashed by the horrors of loving  flesh than in flying steel. We will shield our children from what we deem lurid and prurient, but we allow them to play with guns and watch thousands of characters die in awful ways on their screens.

We invented the myth of the gunfighter. We’re a society that venerates outlaws and immortalizes antiheroes. From the myths of the Wild West to Hollywood’s silver screen, violence has become a staple of American entertainment—a paradoxical inheritance from a culture that claims to prize peace. But what is it about the violence that captivates us? Why do we, as a society, consume stories of bloodshed with such eagerness, as if they were cautionary tales and fantasies all at once?

Our sacred freedom contains room for fascination with bad things. American culture revels in stories of heroes who fight, who transgress, who test the boundaries of morality. Perhaps it’s not violence we love, but rather the thrill of freedom pushed to its extreme—the notion that anyone, regardless of background, can become an outlaw hero.

This fascination is rooted in a long historical and cultural lineage. From the earliest days of the frontier, America has been drawn to figures like Daniel Boone, who pushed westward and clashed with Indigenous nations. This pioneering spirit, mingling with an often romanticized notion of “Manifest Destiny,” produced a cultural archetype: the rugged individual who uses violence as both a tool and a defense, not necessarily for justice but for survival and, in some twisted way, for freedom. It’s an inheritance that led to the creation of distinctly American legends: the lone cowboy, the lawless gunfighter, and, eventually, the modern serial killer, who simultaneously repels and fascinates us.

I’m not sniffing at this tendency to treat violence as entertainment; I recognize that some of the gentlest people I know are hardcore horror fans. I’m not a particular fan of the genre, but I am a fan of hard-boiled crime novelists like Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler; I like most of Sam Peckinpah and Quentin Tarantino’s films. 

I recognize it in myself, even if I do not understand it. I like the “bang, bang, you’re dead” stuff.

•••

I like some very violent movies very much; watching Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was one of the formative adventures of my childhood.

At least, I believe it was. 

I cannot always reconcile my memories with how the world works—I cannot believe I could have seen Penn’s movie at a matinee as a ten-year-old, unaccompanied by any adults. I must have seen the film itself later, maybe I saw it for the first time on television. But there are a few things I feel sure of.

Our parents dropped my nine-year-old sister and me off at a small theater in a small town, maybe in California or Georgia, on a Saturday afternoon. 

Parked in front of the theater was an extended trailer that held what the exhibitors claimed was Bonnie and Clyde’s “death car,” a 1934 Ford Fordor V-8 with a desert sand paint job. For 50 cents, you could enter the trailer, walk around the bullet-riddled car, and look through its windows at Bonnie Parker’s notebooks, Clyde Barrow’s Thompson machine gun, and other paraphernalia. 

The carny in charge made sure I noticed the gold death masks of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker—bland, stiff, and anonymous. They could have been anybody.

In real life, Clyde was a scrawny, screwed-up seventeen-year-old car thief who was sold to a cellmate for a carton of cigarettes during his first stint inside the penitentiary. 

Bonnie married a safecracker named Roy Thornton at sixteen and tattooed his name and a pair of hearts on her right thigh before he went away to prison for ninety-nine years, for good. She then worked in cafes and police bars in Kansas City and Dallas before taking up with the man who was later to become Clyde Barrow’s lieutenant, Ray Hamilton. 

There is some speculation that Hamilton was Clyde’s genuine love interest, that perhaps the only members of the Barrow gang who never shared a bed from time to time were Bonnie and Clyde. 

Others claim that Clyde was “robustly heterosexual” and that Warren Beatty invented Clyde’s impotence to add complexity to his character. The first time she gets him alone, Clyde begs off, telling her he’s “not much of a lover boy.” “Your advertising is just dandy,” a frustrated Bonnie replies. “Folks’d never guess you don’t have a thing to sell.”

(The character was initially imagined as bisexual, but Penn and Beatty thought this might lead audiences to attribute his murderous tendencies to sexual deviancy, a surprisingly progressive idea in 1967. )

I don’t know the truth, and that facts are superfluous in the legend-building matrix, where images are supreme. Clyde’s weak, watery features and Bonnie’s birdy looks blur across the twin filters of time/nostalgia and grainy photographs.

I’ve seen some old pictures where Bonnie seems pretty and others where she seems as lined, complex and stark as any Depression-era portrait. It doesn’t matter. Bonnie and Clyde drove dead into the fabric of American road myth; they are forever young, beautiful, and dangerous in our collective consciousness. 

After the guns cooled, they hauled the bodies and the death car to Arcadia, Louisiana, stopping at a school to let the children peer into the car and rub their small hands across it, the ruptured sheet metal an object lesson. They laid Bonnie and Clyde out in front of Conger’s Furniture, and thousands of people came from two and three states away to view the riddled corpses. (The owner of the bullet-violated Ford, Ruth Warren, had to file a federal lawsuit before the Bienville Parish sheriff would release it to her.) 

Inside, we watched some old newsreel footage, some of it captured “by an amateur photographer five minutes after” Texas Rangers had shot the car and its occupants to pieces on a stretch of road between Gibsland and Sailes. 

(I’ve been to that site — marked by a graffitied and pocked tombstone-like monument — on Louisiana Highway 154 a dozen times. For a while in the 1990s, my other little sister, who wasn’t yet born when I think I saw  Bonnie and Clyde for the first time, raised quarter horses a few hundred yards away. It feels like nothing there, only a low spot in the piney woods.) 

They staged a reconstruction of the ambush just “days after” the criminals were assassinated (there is no more perfect word) in 1934. You can find that film on YouTube today. I’m sure it’s the same footage we watched.

I don’t know what real movie we might have watched that afternoon.

•••

Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde is where realistic brutal violence married to gleeful comedy enters the American cinematic lexicon, specifically in an early scene where Beatty as Barrow shoots a middle-aged bank manager in the face after he’s jumped on the running board of their getaway car. This was one of the earliest instances where American movie audiences were faced with the graphic consequences of violence. The camera doesn’t cut away from the victim’s face; we see the blood and what appear to be bits of brain and bone flecking the car window. 

Clyde is visibly shaken by the episode; he protests that he didn’t want to do it and blames the getaway driver, C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard), for parking the car rather than idling outside the bank.

It is the first sober punctuation in a film that, for the most part, plays effervescent comedy and jazzy romance. It’s another kids-on-the-run story in the mode of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), Nicolas Ray’s They Live By Night (1948), and Joseph H. Lewis’s Guncrazy (1950), all of which were inspired by the actual Bonnie and Clyde. 

Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde weren’t the first antiheroes to appear on screen; Lang’s sympathies obviously lay with the doomed Joan (Slyvia Sidney) and Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) — at the end of You Only Live Once he had then ushered into heaven by a vision of a kindly prison chaplain Eddie had accidentally killed during a jailbreak. Ray started They Live By Night with a tender moment between his romantic outlaws over which words are superimposed: This boy …  and this girl …  were never properly introduced to the world we live in… 

Yet, while contemporary audiences are likely to find these films corny today (I screened They Live By Night to a group of upscale retired folks who’d signed up for a summer series I curate, and I was surprised by their indifference to it; one gentleman confided that if he’d encountered the movie on T.C.M., he’s “have changed the channel), Bonnie and Clyde retains much of its power to shock and discomfit. It is a strange marriage of glee and horror, and the abrupt shifts of tone (which, at the time, I didn’t realize were imitative of the French New Wave) can still rock us. 

At the movie’s end, the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde is presented in a brilliantly edited, realistically gory fashion. The filmmakers take their liberties — in real life, Clyde Barrow never got out of his car as Warren Beatty does; he died at the wheel, with Bonnie slumping into him. But the scene’s improved by separating the pair; we see Clyde’s face as he realizes it’s a trap, and the sun glints off his preppy spectacles. (I remembered the ending slightly differently — somehow, I put a pistol in Clyde’s hand and had him returning the Texas Rangers’ fire as he rolled across the asphalt. But that scene isn’t in Penn’s movie, just mine.)

We watch their bodies jerk in slow motion. We hear Faye Dunaway as Bonnie shrieks.

“We were operating in a totally different social context in those days,” Penn told Terry Gross on her Fresh Air interview program in 1989. “It was in the midst of the Vietnamese war and the daily news, the news that we saw on television, had body counts — numbers of soldiers wounded and dead — and it was a time where, it seemed to me, where if we were going to depict violence we would be obliged … to depict it accurately, with the kind of terrible, frightening volume that one sees when one is genuinely confronted by violence. And that’s what we did in Bonnie and Clyde….”

The ending, he says, was “an attempt to raise these two characters to a faintly mythic proportion … to propel them upwards into myth.” 

Penn said he filmed the ending with four cameras ganged together running at different speeds: “The intention there was to get this kind of spastic motion of genuine violence, and at the same time, the attenuation of time that one experiences when you see something, like a terrible automobile accident…. this extraordinary stretch of time, while these events were taking place. ” 

I didn’t think much about how Arthur Penn achieved the “spastic, balletic violence” that marked the film’s ending at the time — I’m still not very interested in the technical details of a given movie. I only remember receiving the ending as terrible and strange. It was beautiful in a way that I couldn’t quite express, though it had something to do with the shadows falling across my country at the time. 

I didn’t think about how Bonnie and Clyde were victims as well as murderers or about how they were particularly American types, our kind of Romeo and Juliet, living fast, dying hard, and leaving ruined and riddled corpses. 

I didn’t connect Bonnie and Clyde with Vietnam at the time, though I bet Oliver Stone did. When he made Natural Born Killers, he made sure that the man didn’t do in Mickey and Mallory. They got away, more or less, which is one reason N.B.K. unsettles so many of us, why so many people who might have felt a little wistful at the end of Bonnie and Clyde were angered by Stone’s audacity. 

Bonnie and Clyde might have been the first movie I loved for itself. Maybe it’s not technically true, but I still think of it as one of the first movies I saw without adult supervision. I wasn’t ready to see it, I probably shouldn’t have seen it as a pre-adolescent (and while I almost certainly didn’t see it at the matinee I remember seeing it at, it wasn’t long after that I saw it), but I did. When my father took me to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid shortly after it opened in 1969, Bonnie and Clyde was already part of my frame of reference.

I know this because I distinctly remember (just as distinctly as I remember seeing Bonnie and Clyde at a matinee)  talking about it with him afterward. I told him I thought the endings of the two films were virtually the same — the glamorous and outnumbered outlaws died in a hail of authoritarian gunfire. But he argued that because George Roy Hill ended his movie with a freeze frame rather than jerking bodies, he had allowed for the possibility that Butch and Sundance had, in fact, escaped. 

My father thought Hill’s ending was better; I thought — or at least I believe now — that the ambivalence of the ending is wishful but tonally appropriate. Butch and Sundance didn’t get away; like Bonnie and Clyde, they died in a hail of gunfire. But it was pretty to think they might have.

What I didn’t know then is that Hill’s ending was a homage to The 400 Blows (1959), François Truffaut’s semi-autobiographical film that also ends on a freeze frame. Truffaut’s purpose is explicitly reneging on the tacit contract between the filmmaker and the audience.

We expect a resolution in exchange for two hours of attending to the filmmaker’s narrative. But in The 400 Blows, Truffaut withholds this resolution, suggesting that there’s more to the story of young Antoine than we’ll get to see. Hill doesn’t really do this in Butch and Sundance, but he teases us with the “what if?” the outlaws got away. And for a possible answer, we can see Mateo Gil’s 2011 Blackthorn, which starred Sam Shepard as an aging Butch Cassidy living in hiding in Bolivia. I love how movies can converse with each other across decades.) 

Anyway, Bonnie and Clyde was a movie for its time — it was released during the Summer of Love but anticipated the curdling of the hippie. Vietnam was playing in American living rooms every evening. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had months to live. Charles Manson was creeping-crawling through the Southern California desert. L.B.J. would soon abdicate. It didn’t seem like the center could quite hold; outlaw nihilism felt like a reasonable option. 

Bosley Crowther wrote a long and peevish review of  Penn’s film in the New York Times that called it “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie…   [S]uch ridiculous, camp-tinctured travesties of the kind of people these desperadoes were and of the way people lived in the dusty Southwest back in those barren years might be passed off as candidly commercial movie comedy, nothing more if the film weren’t reddened with blotches of violence of the most grisly sort… This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth.”

He concluded: “I’m sorry to say that Bonnie and Clyde does not impress me as a contribution to the thinking of our times or as wholesome entertainment.” 

Some people say he was fired for that misjudgment, and maybe he was. And perhaps he should have been — Crowther, who was sixty-two years old then, wrote three more negative pieces about the movie and referred to it negatively in several reviews of other films before being replaced as the Times’ critic in early 1968.

Meanwhile, in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that the violence in Bonnie and Clyde was “a kind of violence that says something to us; it is something that movies must be free to use.”

Kael makes some very subtle points in her review; she didn’t like The Dirty Dozen (my father and I did) and wrote that the violence in that film “personally [the italics are hers] offended” her — she wouldn’t deny the filmmakers the right to use its graphic depiction as a tool. Yes, there is a danger in depictions of violence; people can be warped by what they experience and consume, but “[p]art of the power of art lies in showing us what we are incapable of. We see that killers are not a different breed but are us without the insight, understanding, or self-control that works of art strengthen. The tragedy of Macbeth is in the fall from nobility to horror; the comic tragedy of Bonnie and Clyde is that although you can’t fall from the bottom, you can reach the same horror.”

In other words, we manufacture monsters out of people. There, but for the grace of art, go all of us. The unrefined soul is dangerous and liable to act out of fear and the tribal imperative. Movies are like travel in that they might cure us of prejudice and ignorance. I would not regulate what they can show us.

There has always been a constituency for dark stories, and our particular American tradition is rife with murder ballads and bloodbaths. Shakespeare wasn’t dainty—there is a dark yen in the human animal, a drive for extinction that rivals the urge for sex. And it is from these base and desperate urges that art is made. We make things from bones, blood, the humors of the body, and invisible things that float in the air.

Part of the power of art is also that it shows us we are not so different than our monsters. Goethe could not imagine a crime he could not commit; Kael says art might save us from nihilism. The schoolmarms and the White Citizen Council fear that impressionable minds will imitate the beautiful violence or the unleashed sexuality they see on the screen: Monkey see, monkey do. 

It’s naive to imagine that some people don’t directly copy what they see on screen. The movies teach us how to talk, dress, and flirt. If you’re the sort of person who is inclined to kill, then maybe the film will give you ideas on how to do that. I think that violence in the media we consume is a risk factor, but human beings have always been consumed by this sort of material. 

•••

The death of the “good” Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) in Platoon feels like the end of Bonnie and Clyde. It’s shot in slow motion to the same apotheosizing ends. But Stone carries it even further; as Elias emerges from the jungle, chased by North Vietnamese Army regulars, we don’t hear screams, gunshots, or the whirring of helicopter blades, only the swelling of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio For Strings” on the soundtrack as Elias falls to his knees, receiving bullet after bullet.

Yes, it’s beautiful, but it’s not a lie. Or at least it doesn’t feel like one. 

That’s the problem, isn’t it? Some uses of violence are cheap and offensive, but we don’t proscribe them because people like Arthur Penn and Stone can use violence in artful ways. And we can argue about who makes good use of it and who is merely exploitative. While Kael didn’t like The Dirty Dozen; I can make a case for Robert Aldrich (who famously said he didn’t believe “violence in films breeds violence in life” but that “[v]iolence in life breeds violence in films.”

Maybe we’re just inherently violent creatures, though when faced with it, a lot of us have trouble committing actual violence. Or at least we used to.

•••

In 1995, four years before the mass shootings at Columbine, Dave Grossman, then a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, pioneered a psychological field he dubbed “killology, the scholarly study of the destructive act.” He told me he thought the country was in denial over the extraordinarily harmful nature of consuming violence as entertainment. 

Grossman, who was a professor of military science at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro (about 135 miles northeast of Little Rock) at the time, had just published his landmark book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, a work that’s now considered a prime text — it’s required reading at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico is on the curriculum at West Point. 

Grossman, citing the work of Army historian Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall, alleged “that, during the Second World War, “ maybe twenty percent of the troops… fired their weapons.”

This claim was controversial then and much of Marshall’s work has been discredited now, but the point is that it was accepted as fact by the U.S. military. Combat reticence posed a problem that they set about to solve. By the time of the Vietnam conflict, the individual firing rate had risen to over  ninety percent. Grossman says this was accomplished by “desensitizing and conditioning” soldiers to think of their enemy not as human beings but as “targets.” Soldiers were trained by shooting not at circular bull’s-eyes but at human figures that flopped over when hit. They were given a language of euphemism; they were not “killing” other human beings like themselves but “engaging an enemy target.”

Much of the clinical, technical jargon of Vietnam was an intentional device to detach soldiers from the reality of what they were doing, to remove the emotional component of battle, to overcome the natural psychic resistance to Killing, and to bust the taboo. As Grossman points out, this desensitization had devastating results for returning Vietnam veterans. They came home bearing burdens of guilt, only to find that a large part of society condemned their actions. 

“Now those same kinds of techniques that more than quadrupled the firing rate in Vietnam are at work in our society at large,” Grossman told me. “We are taking the same kind of individuals that the military found so malleable and subjecting them to the same kinds of desensitizing techniques.” 

Grossman suggested movies and television programs that showed countless people gunned down were working to dissolve the natural disinclination to kill. And he is even more disturbed by the verisimilitude available via immersive, interactive video games. 

“Video games are great things,” he said. “They allow us to learn all kinds of skills by mimicking and rehearsing, mimicking and rehearsing. Now we’ve got these games that are so real; you’re holding a weapon in your hand, and human forms pop up on the screen, and you’ve got a split-second to shoot them down. Bang. The gun rocks in your hand, your adrenalin is pumping, and the figure on the screen goes down, jerking, twitching, bleeding. 

“And, on top of that, you’re scored on a point system. It is the exact model of operant conditioning.” And, it also works another way. 

Grossman referenced the scene in A Clockwork Orange where Dr. Brodsky attempts to instill an aversion in the young thug Alex (Malcolm McDowell) through the fictional Ludovico Technique. Brodsky subjects Alex to where nausea-, paralysis- and fear-inducing drugs while his eyes are clamped open, receiving images of graphic violence and sex. It’s a classic Pavlovian kind of conditioning— he idea is he’ll forever associate violence with the bad feelings he’s experiencing. (One unintended consequence of the therapy is that Alex cannot enjoy classical music; Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony served as the soundtrack for the conditioning reel.)

“Now, what we’re doing with these violent television shows and movies is reversing the process,” Grossman said. “When someone watches a vividly, horribly violent scene, they usually sit in a relaxed, enjoyable environment with their favorite soft drink. And what do audiences do when the prime bad guy, the one everyone agrees deserves to have horrible stuff happen to him, finally gets it? They cheer.”

More than a quarter of a century ago, Grossman believed the country was in denial over the extraordinarily harmful nature of consuming violence as entertainment. 

“We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the inflicting of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion,” he wrote in On Killing.  “We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it.”

In the end, onscreen violence on screen is just another mask we wear, a shadow-play that lets us glimpse our darker impulses without consequence. It’s a performance of the chaotic and tragic forces that flicker beneath our polished surfaces. T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Perhaps that’s why we retreat into stories of blood and bullets, of outlaws and antiheroes—we’re trying to touch the real without being swallowed by it. 

Yet when the boundary blurs, as it so often does, we’re reminded that the things we see, even on screen, aren’t so different from the things we do. We are, as much as we might like to deny it, made of the same stuff as our monsters.