-Caveat Lector-
The evil eye...the unaceptable face of TV
G L Playfair
PART THREE
Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of
ancestral memory that
things had once been different?
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
'Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the
suggestions is the child's mind.
And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too - all his life long.
The mind that judges and desires and decides -made up of these suggestions.
But all these suggestions are our suggestions!' The Director almost shouted
in his triumph.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
====================================================
9
THE LATEST IN BLOOD AND GUTS
'After thirty years of television in Britain there is no evidence that it
makes ordinary kids into violent kids, or that it bears responsibility for
national crime rates.' At least, not in the opinion of Mr John Whitney,
director general of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) who was
addressing a 1984 meeting of the National Association for the Care and
Resettlement of Offenders. A certain amount of violence on the screen could
even be a good thing, he thought. For example, the bombing in 1984 of the
Brighton hotel in which the Prime Minister and most of the Cabinet were
staying 'produced a tide of moral indignation and revulsion against the
violence depicted'. Was that a good cultural shock or a bad one?
If television really had any effect on anybody, Mr Whit-ney mused,
'we should now be living in a crime-free society' because of all those
programmes in which the police are shown as tireless champions of law and
order. He even had a go at the police for continuing to point out that the
rise in British crime coincided with the rise in British television viewing
(true) and he went on to blame the whole mess on politicians. 'Even home
secretaries in both Labour and Conservative governments have from time to
time used television as an alibi for the failure of successive
admin-istrations to deal with the problem of law and order in our society. '
All their fault, you see. In any case, viewers were not unduly
bothered by violence on their home screens. Only 3 per cent of all
complaints the previous year had even mentioned it, and that was down from
3.5 per cent the year before. (Three per cent of how many we were not told.)
Moreover, 'in an imperfect society, containing violence in many forms, it
would be unrealistic and untrue for televi-sion to ignore its violent
aspects.' He ended with a skilful piece of misdirection and issue-confusing
by referring to an IBA report in which it was revealed that viewers were
capable of identifying 'a complex combination of factors in programmes they
find violent'. Another major scientific breakthrough in the report was the
discovery that 'differ-ent types of people interpret different types of
violence in different ways'.
They do indeed. The headline next to the report of Mr Whitney's
speech was: VIDEO NASTY LEFT BOY, 8, 'SHATTERED'. The boy had been on his
way home from school when a friend invited him to come and see 'this
smashing video Dad brought home'. The director of the Child Development
Research Unit of the University of Nottingham described what happened next:
'This young boy watched a highly questionable and violent video film
for only twenty minutes and was totally shattered and disabled by the
experience. He simply could no longer control his own thoughts about it and
suffered recurring nightmares." Here was an example of how one
ordinary youngster was severely affected by some images seen on a television
screen, although they would not have been shown by any TV network. It
reminded readers that violent imagery can have profound effects and implied
that the dividing line between standard TV violence and the 'video nasty'
(of which more later) may not be so easy to find. The report also revealed
that the Royal College of Psychiatry had undertaken a survey of members
asking for case histories in which there might be links with TV or video sex
and violence. It was clear that the case of the eight-year-old was not an
isolated one.
Four years later the IBA issued a warning to Britain's commercial
programme directors that there was still too much violence on television. At
a meeting presided over by its chairman, Lord Thomson, it had been decided
that the depiction of violence in some programmes continued to be
'unacceptable'.a They had not yet found that dividing line, it seemed, and I
wondered why, if what Mr Whitney had been quoted above as saying was true,
the IBA was still finding it necessary to discuss the subject of violence at
all?
Mr Whitney's 1984 speech sparked off a lively series of letters in
the Daily Telegraph, including one from me in which I questioned the claim
that TV did not make normal children violent. 'This', I wrote, 'is precisely
what it has been statistically shown to have done.' I mentioned the exact
correlation, noticed more than ten years previously by Milton Shulman,
between the increase in average
TV-watching habits in the USA, Canada and Britain - the first three
countries to pass the 90 per cent set ownership level - and the increase in
crime committed by young people, adding that the correlation also existed in
countries with less TV and less juvenile crime. Nobody had yet estab-lished
that any factor other than television was responsible for this.3
Shulman himselfjoined in with a vigorous blast against the IBA. It
came close to irresponsibility, he said, to try to justify existing TV
violence levels by 'discrediting and distorting the evidence' that had led
the three leading
American networks to admit that television was a major contributor to
violence. In Britain, Dr William Belson had reported in 1978 that 'high
exposure to television violence increases the degree to which boys engage in
serious violence' after questioning more than ~,yo adolescents.
In the same year, Professor H. J. Eysenck and Dr David Nias had
concluded after a review of all previous studies on the subject that
television's contribution to violence was 'a powerful and omnipresent one'.
A committee headed by Lord Annan had reached a similar conclusion. In the
United States, the American Medical Association and the American Association
of Advertising Agencies had done
likewise. To allege that there was no consensus of opin- ion on the
question, Shulman concluded, was simply not true.4 Subsequent additions to
the consensus have includ-ed those of the American Academy of Pediatrics
(1984), the American Psychological Association (1985), and most notably the
National Institute of Mental Health (1982) whose committee reported after a
ten-year study that 'We have come to a unanimous conclusion that there is a
causal relationship between television violence and real-life vio-
lence'.
I have left the discussion of TV and violence until now in order to give
prominence to other aspects of the medium, such as the nature of the
technology itself regardless of pro-gramme content, and to show that while
violent behaviour is the most frequently discussed of television's negative
effects, it is not the only one and is probably not the most destructive.
All the same, it cannot be ignored.
The links between television and violence have been studied in four
different ways: single case studies, field studies, experimental field
studies and laboratory experi-
ments. Of these, it is the single case studies that make the best headlines,
like the one mentioned earlier. They can often seem very convincing, though
Eysenck and Nias emphasise that from the scientific point of view they are
the least satisfactory of the four types. They can serve as illustrations
but not proof of anything. Even so, they do show what happens in the real
world. For instance:
After watching a fictional film in which a man is beaten to death by his
son, a seventeen-year-old boy went for his own father with a meat knife.
'It's just that when I watch television I sometimes imagine myself
committing murders and thinking I can get away with it,' he said later, not
having got away with it.
A schoolgirl of fifteen saw somebody plan a murder on the American cops and
robbers show Starsky and Hutch by cutting a car's brake cables. She tried to
do away with her parents in a copycat replay of the
episode, but unfortunately for her they came along on the crucial day to
pick her up from school - in the same car.
Two viewers watched a break-in on a popular British serial and immediately
went out and did one themselves. 'We saw how it was done on Z-Cars', one
explained in court, 'and decided to have a go. It looked so easy.'
However, real life has an annoying way of failing to stick to the script.
The owner of the house came home and caught them red-handed.5
More choice single-case examples are given by veter-an American TV
reporter Daniel Schorr. They illustrate several different ways in which the
paths of television and violence so often seem to cross:
A Maryland Vietnam war veteran, who once admit-ted 'I watch television too
much,' saw an episode of a programme called S. W.A. T. in which a sniper
opens fire at passers-by and is picked off in turn by a police marksman. He
later went out and did likewise, and was also killed likewise.
Kidnapped newspaper editor Reg Murphy described later how the first thing
his abductors did was turn on their TV set to see if they had made the
evening news.
An Indianapolis man rushed out of a building holding a gun to the neck of a
hostage. 'Get those goddamn cameras on,' he shouted to the eagerly waiting
TV crews. 'I'm a goddamn national hero. '
Finally, we should spare a thought for the woman announcer on a Florida TV
station who came on air and announced this:
In keeping with Channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in blood and
guts in living colour, you're going to see another first - an attempt at
suicide.
Whereupon she produced a gun and made a successful one.
Single-case stories are of more interest when they form groups or
part of a series. For example, following the attempted assassinations
of presidents Ford and Reagan there were similar attempts or at least
serious threats shortly afterwards. Said the psychiatrist who examined the
second of Ford's would-be killers: 'People do get influenced by what they
see on television. '6
Next we come to studies in which researchers go out into the field
and observe what is assumed to be natu-ral behaviour, much as they would
study wild birds or animals. There were at least eight large-scale field
studies published between 1958 and 1972, the first of which is of special
interest since it was carried out when television was a new arrival in the
British home. Dr Hilde Himmelweit and two colleagues from the London School
of Economics began their work in 1954 and carried out several separate
studies involving a total of more than 4,000 children. One, in Norwich, was
designed to compare before-and-after differences in an area where TV had
only recently become available. Such differences turned out to be minimal,
and on completing their work the team was unable to produce any clear
evidence for harmful effects of any kind.
This was just what the industry wanted to hear, and the Himmelweit
report became virtually engraved in stone and regarded as the last word that
need be said on the subject. Carefully edited versions of it are still being
cited today by the pro-TV lobby, which overlooks the fact that British TV in
the '50s bore little resemblance to the American product at that time, and
still less to either British American programmes of even one decade later,
let alone three. Moreover, some of Himmelweit's youngsters had been watching
for only a matter of months. Her report could not comment on long-term
effects for the simple reason that there were no long-term viewers.
Overlooked also are such comments by Himmelweit on programmes of the
more violent kind as - 'We find little evidence that these programmes are
desirable as a means of discharging tension (they often increase it) but do
find evidence that they may retard children's awareness of the serious
consequences of violence in real life and may teach a greater acceptance of
aggression as the normal, manly solution of conflict.'7
Subsequent field studies have shown a clearly emerging pattern of
behaviour modification as a result of viewing, especially viewing of
violence. This is also true of experi-mental field studies, in which
researchers interfere in some way with the natural behaviour of their
subjects. This has usually involved making groups of people watch certain
kinds of programme and comparing their effects, but such manipulation has
often proved self-defeating. A normal group of lively youngsters, for
instance, might well start to behave violently out of sheer boredom at
having to watch several weeks of bland television.
Finally there is the laboratory experiment, considered by Eysenck
and Nias to be the method of choice, because although it is artificial it
does enable researchers to make precise measurements and generally keep
things under control. Such experiments are inevitably restricted to
short-term effects, yet they have produced the clearest evidence to date
that ordinary children can be made into violent ones. In a typical
experiment, a group of children is shown a film with an element of violence
in it while another group is shown an innocuous one. Both groups are then
given a specific task or just allowed to go out and play, and their
behaviour is carefully monitored. There seems no reason-able doubt that
violent visual stimuli have an immediate influence.
With adult subjects, experimenters have found some
ingenious ways round ethical objections to provoking real violence by the
use of various kinds of 'aggression machine'. In an early experiment,
subjects were asked to help test the effects of punishment on learning
ability, by giving somebody an electric shock whenever a mistake was made.
They were not told that they, not the 'torture victim', were the real
subjects in the experiment, nor that the victim was an accomplice of the
researcher and was not really being shocked. The torturers thought they were
doing the real thing, and the strength of the 'shocks' they were giving
could be measured precisely. At a certain stage there would be a break
during which the torturers were divided into two groups and given some light
relief in the form of a film - a violent one for one group and a dull one
for the other. In the first experiment of this kind, the violent bit of film
chosen was the knife scene from Rebel Without a Cause, and when the fake
'learning' experiment was resumed it was found that the group who had
watched James Dean doing his lethal thing gave stronger shocks of longer
duration than before, whereas spectators of the dull film gave weaker ones
of shorter duration. It was the first experiment of its kind to provide
clear evidence for the disinhibition theory, and reviewing six such studies
using various kinds of artificial aggression, Eysenck and Nias find them
'consistent in pro-viding evidence that film violence increases our
willingness to hurt or insult another person'.8
The value of experiments of this kind is that they pro-vide the
beginnings of an answer to the question of exactly how imagery can provoke
violence. With young children the key factor is imitation, which is not
surprising since young children imitate anything they can and much of early
learning is based on imitation. If they see a film of an adult bashing a
clown to a pulp and then find a similar-looking model clown in their
playroom (put there by the researcher, of course) they will know exactly
what to do with it, and will do it. In the case of older people the key
factor is disinhibition, meaning that they will be more
likely to consider violent behaviour as an option if they are given an
opportunity for it while in a state of frustration.
It is interesting to see how the TV lobby simply ignores evidence
while pretending to have discussed it. The classic experiment of the kind
mentioned above, carried out by Dr Albert Bandura and colleagues, is dealt
with in the IBA report recommended by Mr Whitney with this single bland
sentence: 'Early observational learning studies indicated that boys imitated
male actors rather than female actors, while the opposite was true of
girls.' Does this mean that boys and girls really are different? No mention,
of course, of anything else these 'early observational learning stud-
ies' indicated. Note the standard defence ploy here: faced with awkward
evidence, avoid the issue entirely and state something blindingly obvious
that has no chance of being denied.9
Disinhibition and imitation are not sufficient by themselves to turn an
ordinary child into a violent one. The third requirement is desensitisation.
This is probably the most important symptom in the television violence
syndrome, and luckily it has been thoroughly studied and is well understood.
It is often used for constructive purposes such as helping people to get
over phobias or other emotional
upsets. Eysenck gives an example of how it would be used in the case of a
woman who was so terrified of spiders that she could not lead a normal life:
first, she would be taught to relax properly so that she could become
familiar with the contrasting feelings of tension/anxiety and
relaxation/calm. Then the 'counter-conditioning' begins as the woman is
taught to associate the idea of a spider with the feeling of being relaxed.
A 'hierarchy of fears' is then used, starting with the least frightening
spider image - that of a tiny spider seen a long way off through a closed
window - and building up to the most frightening, a huge hairy monster
invading the woman's bed. The woman is asked to visualise the least
frightening image until she can do so without losing her relaxed and
anxiety-free state. The therapist then moves up to the next image in the
hierarchy, and so on step by step all the way to the top, perhaps even
introducing real spiders instead of imaginary ones. The whole process may
take several weeks, but it usually works. In this case the woman is
desensitised spider-wise and no longer fears the things. '0
The same process could of course be used in reverse, to make
somebody afraid of spiders or to desensitise people to something to which
they ought to be sensitive, such as love or peace. In a remarkably prophetic
article published in 1961 and entitled 'Television and the problem of
violence', Eysenck showed how it could be used to destroy something most of
us would regard as a good thing - conscience. He began by asking what it was
that stopped most people indulging in antisocial behaviour. Fear of
punishment was not the answer; the chances of getting away with most crimes
were reasonably good. Was it no more than a matter of 'conscience'? If so,
what exactly did we mean by conscience? Was it a set of learned guiding
principles as practised by religious people (and by the better type of
secular humanist, I might add)? Or was it no more than an example of
Pavlovian 'conditioned response'? If children are punished for being
naughty, they become negatively conditioned as they associate wrongdoing
with some kind of unpleasant experience in contrast to the rewards they get
for being good. Whatever it was, conscience could be measured up to a point
by means of the lie detector, which reveals the existence of our 'internal
policeman' supervising our behaviour and reminding us when we are breaking
the law, or even thinking of breaking it.
Now, said Eysenck, how would we go about destroying somebody's
conscience if we wanted to? His answer: 'In precisely the same way as we
would set about getting rid of his phobias and anxieties: by a process of
deconditioning. ' Viewing television in the home offered ideal surroundings
for the process.
Scenes of second-hand violence are shown while viewers are
comfortable and relaxed, which
they would not be if they were watching a real murder, rape or assault. The
hierarchy of violent stimuli could be gone through again and again until
none of it produced any anxiety response at all. An experience that would be
extremely unpleasant in real life is presented in the comfort of the home in
'an attenuated symbolic form' and associated with food, drink and family
togetherness. Thus violence becomes a normal feature of the home, like the
wallpaper, the cat or Mother's cooking.11
Some seventeen years after describing this imaginary
conscience-destroying experiment, Eysenck wrote: 'It would need a very
powerful argument indeed to persuade anyone familiar with the extensive
literature on desensiti-sation to take seriously the proposition that
viewing large numbers of scenes of explicit sex and violence on film or TV
would leave the viewer completely unaffected.' Those who claimed that such
material had no effects simply ignored both the evidence and the
desensitisation theory as if they did not exist.12
How right he was can be seen by the single brief reference to his 1978 book
in the IBA report mentioned
earlier, which ignores the entire contents and merely cites an earlier work
of Eysenck's on personality measurement!*3
Repetition is an important feature of the desensitisation process. Just as
fear of spiders does not go away after a single hour on the couch,
conscience is not suppressed with a couple of crimes on the screen. Pavlov
had to ring his bells at feeding-time fairly often before his dogs became
conditioned to salivate at the sound of it even when no food was given to
them. What could be more repetitive than television, whether in content or
the conditions in which it is watched? I have tried to avoid statistics as
much as possible in this book. There is only one television statistic that
really matters: there is far too much of the damned thing. However, one or
two facts and figures are needed here. In 1985 the National Coalition on
Television
Violence, an American watchdog body, announced that average American
sixteen-year-olds could be expected to have seen a staggering total of
250,000 acts of violence in their homes - on the TV screen, of course. Now,
society has become more violent since the 195os, but not that much more,
although the TV lobby continues to insist that the screen is only reflecting
society.
Milton Shulman demolished that argument back in 1973 by pointing out
that even then the average American viewer was watching a greatly
exaggerated 'mirror of society' on television: government statistics showed
that the probabil-ity of anyone meeting real-life criminal violence during a
whole year was about I in 400. The chance of facing it on any given day was
I in 146,000. Yet on television at that time there were at least twenty-six
criminally violent acts every day. Thus the 'mirror of society' was
enlarging its violent side by a factor of somewhere near 4 million. Shulman
wondered how 'a distortion of such gargantuan dimensions can be defended on
the grounds that it is only "mirroring" what life is really like in the
United States'."' One still wonders.
Another tired old excuse due to be given a rest is the 'Oh, but
society was violent long before television' one. This is true, but it
distracts attention from the question the TV lobby is not very good at
handling: why has violence, especially among young people, increased so
enormously since TV was introduced into their lives, even though most, if
not all, of the previously known causes of criminal behav-iour no longer
apply to the extent they once did? Moreover, why is the quality of today's
violence so different?
As already mentioned, it is interesting that violent crime by young
people began to rise very sharply in the first three countries to reach the
90 per cent set-ownership level (USA, 1961; Canada, 1963; Britain, 1964) at
precisely the time when each country's first generation reared with TV in
the house was old enough to commit it. Shulman noted that these three
countries had very different histories and traditions. 'What else had they
in common besides simi- lar systems of entertainment-oriented,
violence-saturated television?' he asked. 'I await a convincing alternative
explanation.'is One still waits.
Also awaited is an explanation for the fact that in Britain certain
types of violent crime increased at a faster rate than they did in the
United States, though admittedly from a lower baseline. At the same time
similar types of crime went down in some European countries that had not
reached the 90 per cent level, such as West Germany and the Netherlands.
There is a nice little research project waiting to be done here. My
prediction is that if the curves for TV home ownership for all countries are
plotted together with crime increase ratios for all categories and all age
groups, some interesting correlations will emerge. I also predict that the
IBA will greet the results with the revelation that people are different.
No statistics can give any idea of the quality of telly-generation
violence. I began to keep a file of news stories of unusually disgusting
incidents in 1983, but gave it up after a few months because I found it too
depressing. It included the following:
A young mother was out shopping near her home in Peckham, south London,
pushing her fifteen-month-old baby in his pram when two men snatched her
bag, after which one of them calmly stubbed out his cigarette on the baby's
cheek.
A week later, another young mother was wheeling her five-month-old daughter
around a Luton shopping centre when she was surrounded by a gang of youths
demanding her money. The appearance of police in the distance aborted the
mugging, but one of the gang found time to pick up the little girl, take out
a pen and shove it into her eye.
Three men broke into a London newsagent's flat above his shop. So many awful
things happened during a ninety-minute ordeal that his wife was unable to
say later which was the worst part. For the man, it was possibly having one
of his toes sawn off with a kitchen knife and being invited to eat it.
By 1983 we were well into the age of the video nasty. These were
readily available for rental at about &I from the friendly corner store to
any youngster tall enough to reach over the counter. Delegates at a
teachers' conference in April 1984 described some of the things their pupils
were looking at after school: there was one video about ritualistic rape,
another featuring the abuse and savage humiliation of a young girl, and a
third that was a kind of instruction film in how to do maximum damage to
human faces with knives. Mild stuff by video nasty standards, but sufficient
to alarm teachers, paediatricians and psychiatrists as well as some of the
children themselves.
It also scared the hell out of Members of Parliament, after a
private showing of video nasties in the House of Commons. They passed the
Video Recordings Bill (1984) in record time and set up a working party of
educators and medical men and women to dig out the facts. It found plenty.
For example, 45 per cent of all children in the seven to sixteen age group
had seen at least one video considered to be obscene and subject to
prosecution. More than 20 per cent had seen four or more. Some had been
profoundly affected by them, psychiatrists reporting anxi-ety symptoms,
depression, phobia, over-excitement, sleep
disturbance, behaviour disorders, reality-distortion and pre-cipitated or
worsened psychosis. One intrepid paediatrician sat through some video
nasties herself and suffered sleeping problems for two weeks.
'Right-minded people can have no concept of the content of these films,' she
said.16 Alas, they can now, thanks to a repulsive little book that some-how
found its way into my public library in which several detailed synopses are
given, all in the interest of the public's right to know, of course.l'
Video nasties are worrying for several reasons. Most important,
perhaps, is that unlike traditional fantasy-horror they do not show violence
in exotic settings but in the typical urban or suburban environment in which
their viewers live. But then they are not meant to be fantasies, they are
meant to be real, and among other things they lead to understandable
confusion in some viewers' minds as to what is real and what is not. One
teacher described how one of her pupils had told her one day that Mummy had
let her watch a nasty film the night before 'and now I know all about sex'.
Asked what she knew, she explained: 'Sex is when a big man knocks you down
on to the floor and gets on top of you and you scream and scream because it
hurts.' When the teacher spoke to the child's mother, she was told, 'Well,
she's got to find out about life some time, hasn't she?' The girl was four
years old. 18
Teachers questioned by the working party were unani-mous in
reporting a new and alarming quality of violent behaviour (and language) in
their schools. One boy, dis-ciplined for a series of savage attacks on other
children, admitted to being a video nasty addict. He described one of them,
or tried to, in writing: 'Four men rapped (sic) a lady and she got her back
(sic) by killing very badly.' He continued, in philosophical mood: 'People
can be affected by this and even go out and do these (sic) kind of things. '
They can and he did, and was later suspended for yet anoth-er vicious
assault. In a letter signed by six schoolteachers the point is made that
'violence and objectionable behaviour on the part of children is now
regarded as being so perfectly normal that nothing very much need or can be
done about it. '19
By 1987, an already bad situation had become worse, at least in
Australia where a survey of 1,500 children in the ten to eleven age group
from thirty-four schools found that a third of them admitted to having seen
and enjoyed scenes of sadistic violence. Asked to describe particularly
memo-rable scenes, they did, many admitting to having unwanted memories of
them which they could not get out of their minds. They may have that problem
for the rest of their lives. Commenting on this survey, a psychiatrist made
the important point that the effect of violent entertainment is gradual, and
most of its victims change their attitudes and behaviour without being aware
of it, and hence without anybody else usually being aware of it either until
it is too late. 2o
This is the whole point of desensitisation, whether for good or bad.
Just as the woman afraid of spiders is guided gradually and carefully up the
hierarchy, so is the television and video viewer guided steadily but also
gradually towards an ever-increasing appetite for bigger and better thrills.
Television executives may object, as I am sure they will, that any
comparison between what is shown on television and privately-made video
nasties is unfair, and so it may seem until we ask the question: who created
the demand for the video nasty in the first place? Not the people who make
them - they are supplying an obviously pre-existing market. Nobody would
have bothered to make the things if there were no demand for them, and it is
likely that the demand comes from those who have already been desen-sitised
to the entire hierarchy of violence permitted on the BBC and ITV.
Responsibility for the video nasty problem lies as much with the television
companies for creating the demand as it does with the perverts and
psychopaths who satisfy it. And what can we expect when the video nasty
audience becomes desensitised to yet another high in the hierarchy and needs
something even higher?
One of the most memorable films I ever saw was Michael Powell's
Peeping Tom (1959), described in Leslie Halliwell's Film Guide as a
'thoroughly disagreeable suspenser'. Dis-agreeable it was, yet it was also a
masterpiece. It featured a demented film cameraman who went around skewering
women with a bayonet that popped out of his camera, and filming their last
moments. The fact that one of his victims, Moira Shearer, had also starred
in Powell's ballet classic The Red Shoes added to the impact of what may
have been made as a rather black in-joke. Perhaps it will be shown one day
to illustrate media exploitation of women? Anyway, this was a one-off, shown
on general release, and I doubt if it led
to any real-life mayhem in amateur photographic circles. I saw it only once
and never saw any other film like it. Had I done so two or three times a
week for several years, I dread to think of the effects I would have
suffered. As it is, several scenes from Peeping Tom are still in my mind
thirty years after I saw them, proof of the staying power of images.
Violence is part of life and art must obviously reflect it, and for
most normal people there comes a point in the violence hierarchy where
cut-off level is reached and they do not need any more. They may enjoy
regular performances of Hamlet or Macbeth, each of which offer plenty of
blood and guts. They may go regularly to the cinema for some action and
excitement. They may look forward eagerly to the new Stephen King horror
paperback. However, in the theatre, the cinema and the book violence is kept
at a
distance, at one remove from reality either in a special building or in the
imagination. On television you have it for dinner and take it to bed with
you. Moreover, the dose is repeated every day.
Small wonder, then, that the habitual viewer is guided from an early
age all the way up the hierarchy of screen violence and then out into the
world of real violence, where a vicious circle soon forms as crimes are
committed, then covered by the camera which transmits its images to others
who then go out and commit more mayhem. This is how stereotypes come into
existence, and when a suitable opportunity arises for potentially violent
youths, as at a football game, they know precisely what is expected of them
as they act out their stereotype role without a thought. Eventually the
vicious circle becomes a vicious spiral with better and better coverage of
more (and more violent) violence. From time to time there is a climax that
brings about a temporary halt in the spiral -for example, the thirty-nine
dead at the Heysel stadium in Brussels in 1985, or the ninety-five crushed
to death at Hillsborough in 1989. Yet the indirect effect of
such climactic massacres is only to add to the general desensitisation to
the point where such incidents come to be accepted as fairly normal.
Eysenck has produced a simple model of what he calls the 'aggression
continuum' to illustrate his point that small effects can have far-reaching
consequences. He assumes that 'predisposition to violence' among the general
public can be shown on a scale from o for the completely non-violent to
100 for the completely violent, with most people some-where in the middle
and few at either extreme. He also assumes that somewhere on the scale there
must be a band of people who are not yet violent but are potentially so. He
now takes an imaginary group of a thousand people and shows them a very
violent piece of film. This may add just one point to the Aggression
Quotient (my term, not his, with apologies) of each. Not serious, one might
think, yet it could mean that about seven of the thousand move into the
violent group. If the film is violent enough to add two points to the AQ,
then fifteen people would be
affected. If five points were added, forty-four would enter the at-risk
category. Eysenck points out that shifts of up to 5 per cent are well within
the range of the findings of experimental psychology, 'even with single
presenta- tions'. A I per cent shift of the national AQ in Britain
could increase the number of overtly violent people in the country by as
many as 350,000. A 5 per cent swing would add 2.25 million to the total.zl
This is of course an imaginary model which has been greatly
simplified here merely to serve as an illustration of how violent behaviour
can be increased. I need hardly add the obvious: the more violence there is
in society, the more it will find its way on to the TV screen, thus more
people will see and ultimately imitate it. It has been shown over and over
again that violent behaviour can be provoked under laboratory conditions,
and that such behaviour is imitative. This applies even to single
presentations. Their effects may be temporary in the laboratory, but in real
life with daily repetition and reinforcement for two or three hours, with
anything up to twenty-five violent stimuli in a single hour (NBC's Walking
Tall, according to the National Coalition on Television Violence), they
can be permanent.
'It is clear to me that the causal relationship between televised
violence and antisocial behaviour is sufficient to warrant appropriate and
remedial action,' said US Surgeon General Jesse Sternfeld when he presented
the report of his Scientific Advisory Committee in 1972. There was no such
action. Indeed, there was plenty of action of a different kind before his
committee even set to work, the TV lobby man-aging to blackball members who
actually had experience of research in the field and had dared to publish
findings unfavourable to the industry, and to infiltrate their own people.
Victims of this purge included Albert Bandura, author of many books and
papers on such directly relevant topics as behaviour modification, imitative
learning and transmission of aggression. He was however called as a witness
and took the opportunity to protest that the committee was being controlled
'by the very industries whose practices they are supposed to evaluate'. 22
In 1984, a British headmaster looked out of his window during the
morning break and saw something both new and puzzling. Half the children
were gathered at one end of the playground, half at the other. A signal was
given and the two groups charged at each other until the entire school was
involved in a superfight. The headmaster dived in, grabbed a boy and asked
him what on earth was going on. 'It's all right, sir,' he was told. 'We're
playing police and miners. '
This was during a prolonged strike in which police and pickets gave
television a field day every day for nearly a year, and it was a neat
example of how the 'mirror of society' is reflected back on society. I hope
future games of this kind leave out the concrete block dropped at one stage
from a bridge, with fatal results.23
Moving up to the other end of the spiral, we go back to
1981. In that year, former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr began to have
second thoughts about the industry he had served for thirty years and to
express them in public. The attempt on President Reagan's life made him stop
to think about 'the perverse effects of our violence-prone culture of
entertainment'. The would-be assassin, John W. Hinckley Jr, was a pathetic
misfit who seemed to have been influ- enced by everything from novels and
films to 'fan frenzy' focused on a popular film actress. As he withdrew from
normal life he retreated into what Schorr calls 'a waiting world of violent
fantasy' in which he spent an increasing amount of time on his own with 'an
exciting companion that made no demands on him' - his television set. Though
it may have been a cinema film, Taxi Driver, that gave him the specific idea
of trying to shoot the President, it was almost certainly television that
took him through the necessary disinhibition and desensitisation processes
so that when the time came for him to act out a lethal fantasy 'the
screenplay was easily written'.
The television networks had set up a permanent 'presi-dential watch'
ever since the 1961 Kennedy assassination. They had missed that one,
though the close-up Ruby-Oswald shooting was some consolation and splendid
tele-vision, and they were not going to miss another. Ronald Reagan was
already a movie star, and with a pull of his trigger Hinckley was an instant
TV star. Schorr describes how Hinckley later arrived at the federal
courthouse to be charged, in a presidential-style motorcade, police sirens
and
all. 'No one could doubt his importance or challenge his identity.' If
Descartes were alive today, Schorr adds, he might say 'I appear on
television, therefore I am.'
The court hearing was 'great made-for-TV drama' in which not only
Hinckley but White House aides, TV anchormen and the courageous President
himself 'seemed to play assigned roles, as if caught up in some ineluctable
screenplay'. Reagan won worldwide admiration for a 'flaw-less performance as
the wisecracking, death-defying leader of the Free World', and yet
ironically in doing so he helped to reinforce 'the pervasive sense of
unreality engendered by a generation of television shoot-outs - the
impression that
being shot doesn't really hurt, that everything will turn out right in time
for the final commercial'. It was yet another exercise in the sanitisation
of violence and the blending of fantasy with real life. The media President
was 'as much a product of the age of unreality' as the media freak who
tried to kill him. The attack, planned as a media event, had been fed into
the system to push the hierarchical spiral to new heights.
'In the media age, ' Schorr concludes sadly, 'reality had been
the first casualty.'*4
10 OH, ANGIE!
,
On 27 February 1986 a London woman named Angie tried to kill herself after
discovering that her husband was having yet another extramarital affair. She
bought a large bottle of aspirin, put a handful into her mouth and washed
the pills down with a gulp of her favourite medicine, neat
gin. Angie and her publican husband 'Dirty' Den were, as most of Britain
will remember, two of the characters from the BBC soap opera EmtEnders. Her
unsuccessful suicide
attempt, or 'parasuicide', was watched by 14.4 million people -
about 28 per cent of the population of the entire
United Kingdom over four years of age. It was cut from the omnibus repeat
version of the programme shown three days later and seen by a mere 9
million.
At Hackney Hospital in the real East End of London the total number
of deliberate overdose cases admitted during the following week went up by
300 per cent. For Drs Simon Ellis and Susan Walsh in the accident and
emergency depart-ment, this was 'the straw that broke the camel's back'.
They were already short of beds and had to declare a 'yellow alert'
resulting in the cancellation of routine admissions. In a letter to the
Lancet they suggested that the BBC should contrib-ute towards the extra cost
it had caused their local health au!hority, and asked whether the
programmers had consid-ered 'the likely consequences of screening
self-destructive behaviour that is likely to be copied?' They added: 'Next
time, could they please arrange for Angie to take an over-dose in the
summer, when our bed state is not so acute?"
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