Squint a bit, and Britain and America could almost appear quite similar. They say everyone is beautiful if you squint a bit. But open your eyes, and America is like a garden party BBQ, while Britain is the conceptually pleasant, but climatically shit picnic. The American BBQ chef will invariably be some alpha male with a funny apron and erection problems. The English will dine on potted shrimps and custard tarts, and have their real conversations in the cold silence between words. It’s the little differences. Over there the date comes second. Everything is still measured in feet, gallons and pounds. Strong patriot and puritanical values. Privatised health service. Jaywalking. Candy. Driving on the right.
And the
ability to buy a gun at the cultural equivalent of Tesco.
On 14
December 2012, a twenty year-old man shot and killed his mother. He then went
to a suburban Connecticut elementary school and opened fire with multiple
weapons, killing twenty children and six adults. Adam Lanza then turned one of
the guns on himself. On 15 December 2012 certain news networks salaciously rubbed
their hands together and showed us in bafflingly unsubstantiated detail the
mechanics of the massacre. The upshot of
this was a renewal in the long-dormant national debate about gun control, and
sparked a complementary- and in some cases diversionary- discussion about
mental health funding and treatment. But it’s also revived another old
conversation, about whether video games are too violent, and whether they play
a role in encouraging, desensitizing, and even preparing mass killers for their
rampages. I just watched the head of the NRA (Neanderthal Redneck Association)
- one of America’s most powerful and influential corporate lobbying groups
(though they play at being a citizen's rights outfit for gun owners, of course)
- hold a press conference to say, effectively: Guns don't kill people,
video-games and Hollywood kill people, and have created a Culture of Violence.
This is not
a new argument. It is a tired, reactionary cliche we've seen trotted out time
and time again, completely lacking imagination. If NRA executive vice-president
Wayne LaPierre was trapped inside featureless room with a single, solitary tea
cosy, he wouldn't even be tempted to
try it on. It isn't just the NRA though. A Jay Rockefeller introduced
legislation in the Senate “to arrange for the National Academy of Sciences
to study the impact of violent video games and violent programming on
children.” That’s right, videogame legislation
beat gun control bills to Congress. I understand why some
people don’t like violent video games. I also understand why some people don’t
like violent films or TV shows. But before you start talking about censorship,
I want to see some proof (of which there currently is none). I worry that if
you decide (with no good evidence) that you don’t like my video games, and want
them gone, then next you’ll come for my films. Then, maybe, you’ll decide you
need to come for my books. That will not do.
And there’s
something deeply sophistic, in the absence of that evidence, about pivoting
away from questions of effective gun control to proposals for video game
regulation or condemnation. Blaming video games or any other kind of violent
media for causing violence in the real world is a dodge from policy solutions.
And it’s a dodge from the conversation we actually need to have about the state
of our popular culture, and the profound fears about justice, disempowerment,
and the state of civil society that are reflected in it. Video games are easy
to target. The things that actually, truly frighten us are much harder.
I will,
however, briefly concede that the games industry does not help itself. It has become altogether too obsessed with murder
and rather too good at selling things. If you were a gaming novice attending
this year’s E3 show, (the annual publicity machine for new releases) chances are you
would have been absolutely mortified.
Every major "live" demo of every game was a scripted sequence fabricated
from disparate parts into the most smash-mouth-in-your-face bloodbath thrill-reel
a video editor could chop together. Goons were impaled by arrows, engulfed in
flames, savaged by tigers, strangled, bludgeoned, shot and stabbed (mostly in
the neck for some reason) and with enough "fucks"
and "motherfuckers" to make Quentin Tarantino blush. There's no denying the skill and
craft on display - but it felt like the same staid meal served over and over
and over again. The people for whom gaming just isn’t their cup of tea- they aren't
prudes or snobs or prigs. They’re just people who have no stomach for endlessly
shooting the same five guys until the credits roll. They love the look of say, Bioshock, they love the ideas, they love
the world, they want those production values, but do we really have to kill all of
those bad guys?
But as much as I feel somewhat
burned out by the gouts of violence on my PlayStation- it’s increased visibility
does not equal causality, no matter what the NRA says. The “culture of
violence" in America is a very real, very serious problem that needs
proper discourse. Art, music, movies, and certainly not Call of fucking Duty- do not have a prominent or even
noteworthy place IN that discourse.
America's real culture of violence is...
The culture of a vague yet
potent sense of existential, media-driven panic: "SOMETHING
is coming to get me and I require a military-grade arsenal with no background
check, waiting period or meaningful limitation of any kind to protect myself
from... well, I don't know what from, but FoxNews, talk-radio and Infowars
SWEAR they're on the way and if you say otherwise you're one of them and that's
why you want to take my guns away!"
America’s
real culture of violence is....
If you’re a
woman in the United States, you’re taught from a young age that you have to be
careful to avoid having sexual violence visited upon you. You also live in a
country where there is a backlog of 40000
untested rape kits, and where victims of rape and sexual abuse are
routinely shamed, exposed, and disbelieved.
America’s
real culture of violence is....
Being African-American
and trying to warn their children of the possibility that his or her
interactions with law enforcement may become deadly, or that in some areas of
the country, people may feel entitled to shoot them dead on slight, and
imagined, provocation.
America’s
real culture of violence is....
The best way
for many people to pay for college, is to enlist to be sent to a protracted war
that carries with it a considerable risk that they will return maimed or brain
injured.
America’s
real culture of violence is....
Waging a war
from the skies in which political leadership appears to accept the deaths of
children as a reasonable level of collateral damage, and where 17% of the
pilots who actually have to carry out our drone strikes are considered “clinically distressed”
by their work.
America’s
real culture of violence is....
A political
election in which obvious references to the lynching of the first black president
were excused away as jokes.
There are
narrative reasons for our popular culture to portray violence. But it’s also
possible that our popular culture is violent precisely because our larger
culture is violent. No wonder we love seeing unpunished rapists have their testicles wrapped around their necks or whatever in TV shows like Dexter.
Even though Osama bin Laden is dead, the damage he and his warped ideology did
is irreversible, and popular culture will continue to give us outlets to
fantasize about destroying his face over and over again- from the hunt for Abu Nazir
in Homeland, or the procedural exploration of Bin Laden’s
death in Zero Dark Thirty.
Embedded in
both our conversations about real violence and in our pop cultural responses to
violence is the idea that escalation is the appropriate response to profound
failures of justice and the social compact. Women should defend themselves more
effectively against their abusers, or in general claim equality by
appropriating violent power previously reserved for men for their own, whether
they’re buying
blinged-out rifles or
transforming themselves into kick-ass action heroines. Men should reclaim their
masculinity, threatened by the economy, by feminism, or whichever culprit is
popular at the moment by burrowing in, whether by adopting
steroid regimens or purchasing the Bushmaster A-15, the
gun Adam Lanza used in Connecticut, which the company that manufactures it once
advertised with the slogan“Consider Your Man Card Reissued.”
The question
we should be asking is not whether Call of Duty, or Dexter, or the Saw films are going to turn us into a
nation of multi-ethnic, multi-gender, multi-generational psychopaths, unable to
or disinterested in distinguishing reality from the images we see on all kinds
of screens. Violent culture has existed for years, and yet, the murderers in
the mass shootings that appear to be descending on us at an escalating rate,
are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Rather, it’s why so many of
us, even those who will never put a rifle stock to our shoulders or wrap our
hands around a pistol grip, feel so drawn to violent fantasies in our culture.
Pretending that such an attraction came to life somewhere in a massively
multiplayer online game is self-deluding. And acting as if shutting down the
production of violent images would curb our fears and desires to fight back
against them is an attempt to avoid confronting how frightening our society is.
Oh, Merry Christmas.
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