Violence in movies is overrated

Everyday I keep hearing this get brought up on everything from the local news to websites, to radio. Movies like both Hostels, and Saw show us how violent the films our teenagers watch are. And in my opinion it's actually a fucking stupid argument.

First off the whole "kids are so darn desensitized these days. That's why they love these violent video games and movies so much." argument has been around for, what, at least fifty years now? You can follow the bouncing ball back through the decades--SEVEN, FRIDAY THE 13TH, DAWN OF THE DEAD, JAWS, BONNIE AND CLYDE(which was back when I was a kid), THE EXORCIST, etc.--and at each stop, you'll find someone trotting out that old chestnut. It's how we rationalize the fact that our generation may no longer be leading the cultural charge. If kids today truly craved nothing more than gut-churning violence and despair, Consumption Junction would be the most popular site on the internet. YouTube would be filled with videos of kids screaming in agony instead of videos of people lip-syncing to shitty 80s theme songs. American Idol would be cancelled and the Nintendo Wii would collect dust on store shelves. It all goes back to that hysterical, "Our society is crumbling!" fear-mongering that guys like Pat Robertson specialize in.

And second of all the popular arguments that torture porn (or whatever stupid thing it's called right now) has no redeeming values is also pretty stupid. These are the EXACT SAME arguments that people were leveling against slasher movies back in the 80s. They were wrong then, and they're wrong now. Effective horror acts as a metaphor for the stuff that scares us. It distills our subconscious fears into a tangible boogeyman that we can actually defeat. We live in a world where monsters are hijacking planes and slamming them into buildings, where monsters are abducting journalists and sawing their heads off in front of the entire world, and where the most powerful government in the world is helpless to stop it because they're too busy stacking illegal prisoners into human pyramids. The world has always been an ugly, thuggish place, but it's rarely been so fucking blatant about it. So if violent films can offer a little bit of catharsis, if it can give a name and a face to the ghouls who scare the bejeezus out of us...well, that's kind of the whole point. You may not like it, you may get upset when you see it, and that's fine. they aren't supposed to be for everybody. And I'll be the first to admit that a large percentage of the films that fall under the (ugh) torture porn banner have been shoddy, amateurish pieces of shit. But acting like these movies have nothing to say and no reason to exist is naive.

Now of course the motivation is to make money. That's the motivation for every single studio film that's ever been created. Anybody who suggests otherwise knows fuck-all about how movies get made. That said, there's a reason it's called subtext. Most of the guys making giant bug movies in the fifties probably weren't consciously trying to comment on nuclear paranoia. Subtext can still exist, regardless of whether it was intenional.

I didn't seek out I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE when I was ten because I wanted to support women's rights. People aren't going to buy tickets for TRANSFORMERS because they're intrigued by the parallels of a faceless enemy that infiltrates our society to destroy us from within. Of course the violence is a lure. Of course it's designed to titillate. But the question is WHY this sort of violence resonates with today's audiences. We don't judge art (even bad art) in a cultural vacuum, and when entire demographics start gravitating toward certain forms of entertainment, there's usually a reason. Brushing off the appeal of Hostel or Saw or any other film of it's ilk as the simple desire to see red stuff is, I think, missing the point in a big way.