Pete Martin: When a dark shadow falls

Published on 24/07/2012 10:50

While the evidence does suggest that exposure to onscreen violence can desensitise the viewer, it is a mistake to blame art for the misdeeds of a few wrong-headed individuals, says Pete Martin

Kapow! Crunch! Zlonk! Holy cow, the Batman franchise has become a whole lot darker since the 1960s when podgy actor Adam West first brought the caped crusader’s cartoon violence to our TV screens.

Yet even the British director Christopher Nolan couldn’t have imagined how his latest Batman caper would spill over into real life carnage. We won’t be surprised when this latest massacre in Aurora, Colorado doesn’t trigger a debate in the US on the Land of the Free’s lethal, constitutionally-protected love of firearms. Both Barack Obama and Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney remain silent on the subject. But, for the moralists of the right wing, cultural control is a far easier target than the gun lobby.

The slayings at the midnight screening of the critically-acclaimed Dark Knight Rises will almost certainly re-open the debate on “entertainment violence”. Can such virtual experience warp human behaviour and promote anti-social attitudes and sometimes deadly actions?

It’s a problem for the liberally-minded. We like to believe in the power of art to heal, but not to corrupt. Yet there is some evidence that violent movies and computer games do “de-sensitise” people to violence. In 2009, in a paper for the Association for Psychological Science, experimenters Bushman and Anderson tested the idea that the enjoyment of virtual violence might make people less empathetic in real life.

Witnessing a staged “fight”, those exposed to a violent video game came less readily to the aid of a person in distress than those who’d played a family-friendly game. The “violent group” helped less often, more slowly, and rated the fight as less severe than the control group. Some claimed not to have witnessed the fight at all.

A similar experiment tested whether the audience for an 18-rated violent movie would be less caring than those who watched a PG film. Outside the movie theatre, a girl with her leg in plaster drops her crutches and struggles to retrieve them: a hidden researcher times how long it takes someone from each audience to help her. Repeating the stunt 36 times in different locations, the team found that the people who had watched the violent film responded 26 per cent more slowly than those who had attended the PG movie. The researchers concluded that “people exposed to media violence become ‘comfortably numb’ to the pain and suffering of others”.

It’s fascinating stuff and great, knock-about experiment design. Yet, in all instances, the girl with the crutches received help in less than 11 seconds. Equally, those who were tested before seeing the violent movie were no different from those viewing the PG. If we assume that the audience for the violent movie were more likely to have seen an 18-rated movie in the past, we may also presume that the “comfortably numb” effect doesn’t last.

That’s a far cry from suggesting that the average cinema-goer is going to leave any X-rated action flick with an overwhelming urge to buy two .40-caliber Glock handguns, a semi-automatic .223 caliber AR-15 type rifle, a single barrel 12 gauge Remington Model 870 shotgun, plus 6,000 rounds of ammunition and 300 shotgun shells. And tear gas. And bullet-proof body armour. Oh yes, and rush home to booby trap their flat with home-made explosives.

Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange was Britain’s most infamously violent film. At the time, newspapers claimed that the story of Alex and his droogs incited copycat crime. In 1972, when a teenager was charged with the manslaughter of a schoolmate, the prosecutor alleged that the killing had been inspired by the movie. Even though the lad admitted he’d never seen the film: he’d only been told about it by friends.

More recently, two 17-year-old girls, Ruby Thomas and Rachael Burke, kicked an elderly gay man to death in Trafalgar Square. Widely reported in the press, one witness described the attack as “like a scene from Clockwork Orange”. But it wasn’t suggested that the two vicious, drunk devotchkas had ever seen the film either.

The trouble is that we like easy answers. Our minds are shaped to seek congruence, to look for cause and effect. In one famous psychological experiment from the 1940s, the study revealed a fundamental human drive to create stories from meaningless events. Subjects were shown a simple animation in which a small triangle, a circle and a bigger triangle move around a rectangle. Today, on Youtube, people still have no problem perceiving that the big triangle is “bullying” the smaller shapes. We see causes and connections that don’t exist.

By the same token, it’s easy to create a self-consistent story in our minds if we know that a violent person watches violent films and plays violent video games. We feel free to assume a causal connection.

And yet, for example, you may not know that Saddam Hussein, the butcher of Baghdad, was a big fan of romantic fiction. Indeed, he was so taken with the genre that, in between killing around 180,000 Kurds, he found time to publish four burqa-ripping melodramas of his own. No-one has ever suggested that a penchant for Mills & Boon might make you into a megalomanic monster. Even Baroness Thatcher, whose favourite book was Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal, was never tempted, we assume, by a career as an international hitman.

We don’t know the taste of Harold Shipman – Britain’s most “successful” killer – in reading matter or in movies. We do know that he had a horrible domineering behavioural style. We also know that, when he was 17, his cancer-stricken mother died with morphine being administered by a doctor in much the same way in which Shipman would later dispatch his own victims.

And so, I guess, we’ll find something different but just as daunting in the story of James Holmes – the fresh-faced, neuroscience postgrad turned killer who looks out at us from his college photo with a shy smile.

There’s no mention yet of his mental health record, and there may be none. But few will be surprised if the 24-year-old student turns out to have endured a disastrous psychotic episode within the last few months. The formerly successful student had failed to find work after graduating and had been working in McDonalds. So he went back to college but now seemed to be struggling in his academic work. Factor in the feelings of failure and social isolation that can be hallmarks of mental ill-health. And the classic 20-something age range for the onset of schizophrenia among young males. Then he drops out of college and starts feverishly buying guns and ammo…

When Holmes told police he was “The Joker” he may have been serious. He may even be as paranoid and delusional as Anders Breivik who killed 77 people in Norway a year ago. Breivik constructed a mental world in which Templar Knights are battling a Muslim conspiracy; Holmes may believe in a storyline that would be equally comic if it were not so tragic. The real battle is mental illness, and the reaction of both men’s mothers is telling. Breivik’s mother told the Norwegian court she had been worried by her loner son’s extreme behaviour since 2010. When police called Holmes’ mother, her simple reply spoke volumes for what she already dreaded: “You’ve got the right man.”

Which seems more likely? That, in a celebrity-obsessed world, Holmes is a rational man calmly seeking the ultimate notoriety? Or that the university authorities simply missed the signs of a student in severe mental distress? We’re likely to find that, in essence, this terrible event has very little to do with Batman. The movie merely frames Holmes’ homicidal delusions. While we may like to believe that X-rated material creates a cruel society and vicious individuals, the damage has been done much earlier and elsewhere. What’s already in the human head and heart is far more dangerous than any art.