Is TV violence all that bad for kids? The Age (Melbourne, Australia), March 5, 2005 Saturday, INSIGHT; Opinion; Pg. 9, 816 words, HUGH MACKAY LexisNexis Academic 9 Apr. 2008 

This article is a response to a report from The Weekend Australian that asserts a child’s witnessing of violence in media will result in higher levels of aggression. Writer Hugh Mackay refers to a 1960’s American child-psychology experiment which consisted of observing the different ways children would play with a particular object after they watched different videos, ones that either showed children playing peacefully with that toy or children punching and kicking it. The findings were that those who watched a violent video would treat the toy violently, and those who watched the peaceful video would treat the toy peacefully. Mackay makes sure to point out that although the children would emulate the behavior, it has been concluded that the effects are only short-term, and that all long-term personalities remain virtually unchanged. Furthermore, he declares that the search for variables which might shed light on a child’s increased or decreased susceptibility toward emulating violence in the media result only in negligible data that cannot give any indication of why a particular child would be acting more or less violent than any other one. Mackay’s overall point is that although these experiments may show children in the act of emulating violence on television, all large-scale national crime statistics show that the introduction of television into the societies of decades past resulted in severe drops in crime, and that the age-group which watches the least amount of television today commits the highest amount of violent crime. In short, what a child views in movies or videogames has far less positive or negative impact on his personality than the benefits of extensive human interaction, or the dangers of lazy, television-filled inactivity.      

This article is worth factoring into the discussion of Natural Born Killer’s potential effect on inspiring three young couples to committing separate violent murders in Europe and America, all after their viewing (and in one case, repeated viewing) of the 1994 film. Although accusations were made that the filmmakers and producers were responsible, hardly evidence has been found to support them. Mackay also says that at the time of his writing the article in 2005, the violent crime rate in America had been in steady decline for the last 10 years – which would mean the trend began in 1995, one year after Natural Born Killers was released. If violence in the media could truly influence people to emulate the brutality on screen, Natural Born Killers would surely qualify for those results, considering the rare intensity of bloodshed that is present throughout the whole movie. And considering it grossed 11 million dollars in the first weekend, and over 50 million dollars to date, enough people have seen the movie that we can say if there was a slight rise in a person’s aggressive tendencies after watching the movie, no matter how slight, the accumulation across the country would certainly be noticeable.

The relevance of this article has to do with the controversy surrounding Natural Born Killers, over what impacts a film of such incredible violence (coupled with its themes of glorifying such acts) can – and has – and will – have on the societies of its viewers.  Boyle draws on three specific cases of murderous love-duos that occured after the films release. Edmonson-Darras, Rey-Maupin, and Herbert-Paindavoine were all young couples tried for committing horrendous murders as pairs, and all three couples admitted to having been influenced by Natural Born Killers, further adding to the intense question of how acts of brutality we see in the media are linked to real-world violence.      

ONE MAN'S FAVOURITE FILM IS ANOTHER’S MOVIE OUTRAGE
The Scotsman, December 29, 1999, Wednesday, Pg. 3, 478 words, Phil Miller
 

In this article Phil Miller gives a light overview of the differing climates of censorship across time and around the world, and refers to some of the more famous individual films that were censored, banned, cut or delayed in their time. In terms of religion, he notes how Britain outlawed the showing of the face of Christ in any film until 1940, and how Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, a religious comedy, was denounced and picketed by religious groups around the world when it first came out. Similarly, the lighthearted Dogma was condemned by the US Catholic Church as recently as 1999. He briefly mentions the Nazi and Soviet propaganda of the 1930’s, and banned horror films such as The Exorcist – noting how what was once a terrifying scene has, with time, become somewhat laughable.

In terms of violence, Miller mention Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Saving Private Ryan, Natural Born Killers, Cronenberg’s Crash, and A Clockwork Orange. He compares western culture to that of the Gulf states, where sex is censored far more harshly than violence. It’s interesting to see the pattern in which almost everything that is censored at one time eventually, and sometimes immediately, becomes socially acceptable. Take Saving Private Ryan, for example. The dramatic opening sequence of the American troops landing on Omaha Beach is regarded by many as the greatest ever tribute to that significant day – but it potentially could have been censored for being too true to the actual events in its depiction of deaths and casualties.
 

It’s also not just the strictness of the censorship boards that change over time, but also the mentality of the filmmakers. Miller writes of Kubrick’s promptness at withdrawing A Clockwork Orange from circulation when rumors of a copycat-murderer came about. A few decades later, Oliver Stone did no such thing in similar circumstances, even after the news of a third young couple mutually participating in cold-blooded murder after watching Natural Born Killers.    

Review of Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History and Controversy by Robert Brent Toplin Paul Buhle, The Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 2, (Sep., 2001), pp. 747-748 Published by: Organization of American Historians Jstor 9 Apr., 2008

Paul Buhle reviews a collection of essays which cover various subjects to do with Stone’s vision and works, ranging from the charge that the nature of film will inevitably result in the over-simplifying, and therefore skewing, of large historical topics, such as the legacy of Nixon and the assassination of JFK. An exceedingly favorable review of Stone’s Vietnam trilogy comes alongside two dreadful reviews of two of his culture-oriented works, The Doors, and Natural Born Killers. His two presidential films JFK and Nixon are slammed by prominent authors as ridiculously inaccurate, and even quite juvenile. Buhle insinuates the essays go beyond discussing the works on their own and carry the focus over to Stone himself, to question and contemplate the quality, legitimacy and sanity of Oliver Stone’s directorial career canon.

Buhle merely comments on the nature of historical debate itself, sighing over cinema’s ability to out-persuade his meager, old-fashioned written texts, borne from a medium utterly unable to compete with the overwhelming portrayals of awing blockbusters like JFK and Platoon. He ends the review by graciously tipping his hat to Stone for his sturdy refusal to automatically accept common conceptions of recent American history simply because one might pressure him to do so. Buhle’s final point is more than valid: if there’s nothing to hide, why is such a huge chunk of government documentation completely lost?

The different opinions of Oliver Stone’s work apparently found in this book indicate the vast subject matter the director inevitably takes on at any given time. His movies are never about only a few characters, even when the cast is only a few people strong, such as in Talk Radio. The themes and dialogues always spill over the immediate mimetic confinements of the set and begin to address our culture as a whole, or our society as a whole, or our government as a whole. What’s particularly interesting is that Natural Born Killers received a terrible review in this book, which on the whole seems to give Stone credit where it’s due and assaults him where it’s not: Platoon is revered by all as a powerful, historically accurate, raw portrayal of a real war, while Nixon and JFK cause so much ire to those who oppose the conspiracies theories put forth in them especially because of how compelling the quality of the films are, as exciting, enticing feature-length blockbusters. But regardless of the looseness of the latter films’ historical accuracy, no one can argue that the one thing Stone understands better than pretty much everyone is cinema. And Natural Born Killers, despite being about all of media in America, and elsewhere, is a fundamentally a film about the roots, history and development of film, where all the evidence is available for anyone to see.