Usually when you think about the politics of art, you’re thinking about ideology. Nadim Damluji’s recent post in which he questioned the representations of arabs in Craig Thompson’s Habibi is a case in point. So are Jeet Heer’s comments from a while back about Eisner’s use of racial stereotypes. Another example is Alyssa Rosenberg’s recent post where she argues that the movie In Time articulates a surprising and pointed critique of capitalism. I was more skeptical about In Time,, but either way, in instances like these, the political charge of a work comes from the point it’s making, either intentionally or otherwise. The politics of art is what the art says.
There’s another way of looking at politics in art, though. Recently I read this pdf by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna titled “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?” Like the title says, the paper is a study of the effect of violence in film on violent crime rates. Here’s the abstract:
Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in the field. We exploit variation in the violence of blockbuster movies from 1995 to 2004, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is partly due to voluntary incapacitation: between 6 P.M. and 12 A.M., a one million increase in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.1% to 1.3%. After exposure to the movie, between 12 A.M. and 6 A.M., violent crime is reduced by an even larger percent. This finding is explained by the self-selection of violent individuals into violent movie attendance, leading to a substitution away from more volatile activities. In particular, movie attendance appears to reduce alcohol consumption. The results emphasize that media exposure affects behavior not only via content, but also because it changes time spent in alternative activities. The substitution away from more dangerous activities in the field can explain the differences with the laboratory findings. Our estimates suggest that in the short run, violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend. Although our design does not allow us to estimate long-run effects, we find no evidence of medium-run effects up to three weeks after initial exposure.
What Dahl and DellaVigna found was that the movies had an important effect not through what they said, but through the amount of time they took up. People who are seeing violent movies are, presumably, people who are disproportionately interested in violence (i.e., for all intents and purposes, young men.) If these people interested in violence are watching a movie, they are not committing acts of violence. Moreover, they are not drinking, and therefore are not priming themselves to commit more, and more violent acts of violence. The ideological content of the film may be anti-capitalism or racism or the null-set; in terms of actual violent acts committed, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is butts in chairs.
Another example of this dynamic is discussed in Anne Allison’s book Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan. Allison talks at length about the Japanese obento, a lunch which mother’s prepare for their children in nursery school. The obentos are extremely elaborate; the dishes are to be aesthetically and nutritionally balanced. Moreover, children at school must eat all of their obento, and must do so within a prescribed time period. Mothers, therefore, work to make the obentos attractive and easy to eat. Food is cut into small, easily eatable pieces and is often shaped into cute figures (smiley faces, ducks, crabs, worms) which will entice the child.
As Allison notes, this is an extremely time-intensive process.
Women spend what seems to be an inordinate amount of time on the production of this one item. As an experienced obento maker myself, I can attest to the intense attention and energy devoted to this one chore. On the average, mothers spend twenty-five to forty-five minutes every morning cooking, preparing, and assembling the contents of one obento for one nursery school child. In addition, the previous day they had planned, shopped, and often organized a supper meal with leftovers in mind for the next day’s obento. Frequently women discuss obento ideas with other mothers, scan obento cookbooks or magazines for recipes, buy or make objects with which to decorate or contain (part of) the obento, and perhaps make small food portions to freeze and retrieve for future obentos.
Obentos are very much an aesthetic product; Allison points out that mothers in Japan often express their creativity through the creation of elaborate, funny, cute, and beautiful obentos. But the sheer time and energy required to make the obentos — and more broadly, to shepherd children through the highly regimented and demanding educational system — is itself a form of social control. Allison reports one mother saying that “being a mother in Japan meant being a mother to the exclusion of almost anything else.”
Allison points out that the mothers she spoke to weren’t frustrated; they were devoted to their children, to being good mothers, and even to the pleasurable aesthetic frisson which inhered in creating beautiful obento’s. Similarly, movie-goers aren’t coerced into seeing violent movies; they go because they want to, because they enjoy it, and even because they’d rather see a violent movie than engage in actual violence themselves. Art is pleasurable, and people are moved by pleasure.
In particular, they are moved to spend their time, whether in watching a film or in making an obento or in typing out a blog post. Art manipulates, not just through its message, but through the energy and hours you devote to consuming it or creating it. In fact, you could say that art and its pleasure consume and create you, whether you be blogger or non-violent watcher or dedicated mother. Maybe the politics of art is not really meaning at all. Maybe it’s praxis.
Noah — I think “In Time” was absolutely a critique of capitalism, but — as I believe you point out in your “Atlantic” essay — the reason it was shallow and flawed is because the film culture that created it so wholeheartedly embraces the very same system it is attempting to critique.
It’s like Michael Moore standing amongst the 99 percenters and rooting “go team.” Team? What team, Michael? You don’t live in a park in a frickin’ tent, crap in a frickin’ bucket, and wonder where your next meal will be coming from. In fact, it doesn’t look like you’ve missed a meal in decades. You’ve got millions; you apparently avoid paying your fair share of taxes if you can get away with it (like when you allegedly listed two houses you own in different states as your primary residences — just so you could save on property taxes); you allegedly hired non-union film crews until you were shamed into doing otherwise; and lord knows what else.
Hollywood… bah, humbug!
One part of the film “In Time” that cracked me up was the thinly-veiled “plight of the factory worker” homage/swipe from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” Justin Timberlake banging out stamped parts on an industrial forge was the topper — as if such manufacturing jobs still even exist in the U.S. in any great numbers anymore.
Yeah…it was sort of trying to be a critique of capitalism while also celebrating money and power and gambling and beautiful people and the authenticity of poverty. It just doesn’t come across as all that convincing.
I remember in high school we discussed different cultural attitudes towards violence in the US and Japan. In the US, the common assumption still seems to be that violent media leads to violent behavior, at least among the young. But in Japan, the assumption was that violent media served as a safe outlet for violent instincts. Of course, this was a long time ago and my high school teacher could have been full of it, so someone who knows more about Japanese culture may want to chime in.
The argument that violent media is an outlet for violent instincts shows up in the U.S. literature too. It doesn’t have any scientific basis, I don’t think.
The study I talk about here isn’t so much saying it’s an outlet for violent instincts as that if you’re watching violent movies, you simply physically can’t be doing something else which is less socially acceptable. It’s an incapacitation argument, not a psychological one.
I find the idea of a culture where we deal with impulses by sequestering people off and plying them with narcotics that curb their impulses through a combination of incapacitation and satiation to be really creepy.
Violent movies aren’t narcotics, I don’t think. Though, if you want to talk drugs…you drink coffee to get you ready for work, by chance?
And again, the point isn’t that you’re curbing their impulses. Their impulses are the same as they ever were. The point is that they’re entertained.
But…the fact that people are controlled by pleasure *is* creepy. It isn’t usually how we like to think about art. But I think it very much applies to participating in a blog like this (shouldn’t we all be off participating in OWS?) as to violent movies. Social control exists not just (or even primarily) through force, but through pleasure — especially in capitalist societies.
I think saying that watching violent movies serves as a substitute for participating in violent crime amounts to a curb.
I also think the difference between what this article suggests and, say, commenting on a blog, is the sense that this is an acceptable way for a society to view violent movies, that is, as a “control mechanism” to keep people who have violent impulses from acting on those impulses. Entertainment is pretty narcotic in the best of contexts, but what’s creepy here is the sense that entertainment should be manipulated for social control, that the substitution is a good thing, that social control through entertainment is a good thing, something that can and should be manipulated and exploited by various forms of institutional power. The ends justify the means.
As opposed to, say, a legitimate critique about indulging violence impulses (or about entertainment as narcotics, or of cultural self-indulgence period) and legitimate social effort to make violence less appealing, to get people to actually think about self-control and make choices that don’t result in violent behavior. You know, things that empower individuals rather than drugging them.
I drink decaf Earl Grey in the mornings. (Caffeine makes me nauseous, actually.) Although most people who are addicted to caffeine don’t get hyped up on it; they just get headaches if they don’t have it.
I don’t drink coffee. But I have a pretty important relationship with lots of things I consume.
Like I said, I think any social control through pleasure is fairly creepy. Allison’s description of the way obento’s are used to control mothers in Japan is definitely creepy, for example.
I don’t know that the article is arguing that it should be manipulated for social control; more just pointing out that it effectively works that way. The point I’m trying to make is that I think entertainment works that way fairly broadly. I don’t think it’s just violent movies and nursery school lunches.
I don’t drink coffee. But I do consume lots of other things, for better and worse.
NOW I see why Noah juxtaposed the school lunch thing and the violent movie thing without connecting any dots. Violent people and women need to be occupied.
As do, (and as Noah sort of pointed out), millions and billiions of children in compulsory schooling. Which is all allegedly to empower them somehow, and give them the ability to make better choices. Which sometimes they do, in wealthy and stable societies, and don’t, in poor and unstable societies. But the idea that you can separate “empowerment” from “control” is a bit rose-tinted, in my view (as a teacher of authentically poor and traumatized children of color).
I’m not sure I buy the idea that the % of the men and boys who go to see violent movies are actually so bad off that they actively could NOT make better choices if they weren’t corralled into blow-em-up flicks instead. That doesn’t seem like an either/or.
And I’m thinking that it really isn’t a sufficient goal to, say, have a decline in reported instances of domestic violence because the asshole men who commit domestic violence happened to be in the movies for 2 hours and did not beat their wives and girlfriends on the day they got it out of their system via Bruce Willis.
But I’m also not that big of a fan of compulsory schooling after the 6th grade.
Noah — While violent films, and other violent visual stimulation such as video games, may not be narcotics per se, they certainly do generate some of the same reactions by the brain as do narcotics — significant increases in the release of dopamine, for example.
In the old days, I played pinball, handheld video games, arcade video games, early Nintendo game systems, and a variety of PC games, but playing my xBox 360 over the past two years or so, I’ve experienced something I NEVER experienced with games in the past: Flashbacks.
Granted that in my case, while vivid, they are also very brief. I think the reason these flashbacks occur are due to the immersion level of the brain into the game, the length of time one usually devotes to a given game, and the closer-than-ever realism of the game. In fact, the only sensory stimulus missing in modern video games is smell (for the video game uninitiated, the touch sensation is supplied by the hand controllers, which actually vibrate when certain weapons fire, explosions occur, or one is struck by a fist or some object).
I’d even argue that, depending on the mental health of the individual, some games may even be able to evoke symptoms of PTSD. How about them apples?
PS — I didn’t include taste as a sensory stimulus because I was really just talking about external stimulus.
“I’m not sure I buy the idea that the % of the men and boys who go to see violent movies are actually so bad off that they actively could NOT make better choices if they weren’t corralled into blow-em-up flicks instead. ”
I don’t think we’re communicating quite. The point isn’t that they are or are not bad off, or that they could or could not make better choices. The point is that empowering them to make better choices is another way of talking about biopower. Violent films are a kind of biopower too. You’re claiming that the biopower of violent films is somehow more creepy/morally worse than other kinds of biopower. Bert and I are both skeptical.
I think I would feel exactly the same way about this if you (or rather, the people who did the study) were telling me that going to the symphony prevented them from committing violent crime — that it misses the point and isn’t a solution to the fact that if they aren’t distracted they’ll be committing violence. Constantly distracting the bad guys with shiny things really isn’t a solution to their being bad guys.
This all smacks of making excuses for idiots with poor impulse control and promoting movies as the all bran of social malaise. Did the film industry fund this study?
Let me try to put it another way — what are we, as a society, supposed to do with the information that violent crime goes down when the energies of violent people are channeled toward entertainment and the violent people distracted from performing violent acts? Are we supposed to build government-subsidized movie theaters in high-crime areas? I suppose that’s not the absolute worst thing you could do in a high-crime area, being as those areas are generally underserved in all sorts of ways, but is that really a solution to those people’s problem?
Are we supposed to think better of violent movies, because they help protect us by babysitting members of the Obnoxious Thug class? Are we supposed to think something different about the Obnoxious Thugs, knowing now that they commit violence because they’re not sufficiently entertained? Are we supposed to believe that nothing else (more education, decent jobs, less prejudice, whatever) wouldn’t also distract them because it takes violence to inoculate against violence?
What exactly is this study supposed to teach us, or lead us to believe?
Also…the paper really isn’t recommending that more violent movies be made, as far as I could tell. I think probably the most it’s (implicitly) saying is that the argument to censor violent movies because they *cause* more violence is weak.
Like I said, it’s part of a debate about whether violent movies cause violence, and whether they should be censored. It also doesn’t claim that there’s a huge drop in violence; just a measurable one.
Other things might distract violent people too, sure. You could educate them. You could make alcohol illegal. You could do various other things which might well be more effective. But all of those would involve coercion and targeted manipulation of some sort.
Also, this:
“Constantly distracting the bad guys with shiny things really isn’t a solution to their being bad guys. ”
I really strongly disagree with. These are people we’re talking about. They’re not bad guys.
Anyway, the point for me isn’t that it’s a policy prescription, necessarily. The point, especially juxtaposed with Allison’s discussion, is that *this is one of the main ways that entertainment works.* That is, we spend time and energy on it, and that time and energy (rather than necessarily the ideological content of the art) can have a significant impact on what our lives are like and on who we are.
I mean…the obento’s seem really significantly more creepy to me, really. They’re a much more focused and deliberate (and effective) form of social control. The violent movies creating (a small amount) less violence is really pretty random and ineffectual in comparison.
I think what you’re missing is how much this kind of narrow little study is itself a form of social control. Social science is one of the mechanisms by which this kind of social control gets naturalized and put into place. That study ultimately isn’t about “how entertainment works” in some kind of abstract theoretical sense – it’s a very narrow and distorting snapshot of how society works. The logic of the entertainment can’t be separated out from its system, the way it could in a philosophical context, with its ideological assumptions laid bare; this is social science. This is ‘objective’ and ‘analytical’ and ‘evidence’. And in this case, it starts with a society that is concerned about crime and wondering whether violent movies exacerbate it, and it casts entertainment in a role beneficial to that specific society, with its specific neuroses, by recasting the violent films as something which actually reduce violence. “Stop thinking about how awful violence is and and pay attention instead to how fake violence helps make the situation with real violence better.” The movies themselves are the least of the ideological problems here.
Knowing this does not help people who are in situations where they are likely to commit violence — it just casts them as bad guys who need to be incapacitated by luring them into movie theaters so they can indulge their impulses “safely.” It does not help people who are likely to have violence committed against them by people personally close or geographically proximate to them, because, like I said, if you take someone who commits violence when he’s not entertained and try to entertain him enough that he never commits violence again, you will fail, because you can’t keep anybody that entertained that much of the time.
So what’s it for? It is absolutely positively not for the people for whom violence is a reality. It is instead for the people who are worried about violence and violent entertainment, to make them less worried by telling them that the movies will fix it. It’s for people who are not violent but who like violent entertainment and are worried about that neurosis taking their violent movies away. It’s a kind of social scientific valium for masses of people neurotic about violence and/or violent movies.
So a big part of what’s creepy about that study is the way the study itself acts to provide a substitute satisfaction comparable to the one it claims movies provide — satisfy violent criminals’ taste for violence through movies, satisfy neurotic people worried about violence by giving them “scientific evidence” that violent movies not only aren’t bad, they make things better!
But what’s missing is that there are real consequences to distorting entertainment that way, manipulating it to simplistically fill a social role that should be incredibly multifaced and fix a social problem that has an incredibly multifaceted system of causes and effects. It’s an abdication of responsibility; it’s an validation of passive, narcotic creative work on social grounds; it’s a naturalization of the idea of entertainment as distraction rather than edification or enrichment; it’s a red herring to distract from the context that created this dynamic. This type of study provides “scientific” support for all those distortions and manipulations, none of which are good for people and none of which are good for creative work.
The role of narcotic is an incredibly corrupt and dangerous and insidious role for entertainment to play in a society. It isn’t the “natural” way entertainment works (entertainment historically was active and creative — singing schools and whittling and dancing and playing instruments etc. etc.) and we shouldn’t be asked to accept that this is just how it is. It should not be one of the main ways entertainment works, it has not always been one of the main ways entertainment works, and the fact that this entertainment works this way is an incredibly creepy social pathology, of mass media at its dehumanizing limits.
It is just as much a pathology that violent movies slow the rate of violence as it would be if they increased it, because it puts entertainment in control. Unless the study explicitly acknowledges the point you allude to, that it’s pathological for entertainment to serve this function, and unless it attempts to provide information and context and answers about why this entertainment serves this function, I think it’s a useless and even insidious study.
But it doesn’t do that. It just makes this point about violent movies. The very existence of this study means that somebody thought defending violent movies (or demonizing them – who knows what they thought they were doing at first) was more important than actually dealing with real problems of violence. What a waste of money and time.
“Allison’s description of the way obento’s are used to control mothers in Japan is definitely creepy, for example.”
Significantly less creepy than the way modern culture “teaches” women that they need better and more branded shoes and handbags (for men, just insert the latest tech gadget). This kind of thing can be resisted. Just like over pampering your children. I’m sure creating something like the cat obento or learning Ikebana staves off dementia more effectively as well.
I’ve certainly got my reservations about the social sciences. And perhaps people should be putting money into something other than worrying about violence in art. But…how is that different than saying people should put their time into something other than writing about sexism in superhero comics (or what have you?) If you assume that culture matters and affects people, it seems like thinking about that culture and looking at how it affects people seems like it should matter.
I think that entertainment in the past was not always necessarily either active or beneficial in quite the way you’re claiming. The obvious analogy here is to Roman circuses, which are quite old. Then there’s Egyptian pyramids, which were meant to serve as signs of power, surely (and awe can be seen as a kind of aesthetic experience, I think.)
And of course, the obento is an active aesthetic experience. But it’s also a form of social control.
“it’s a naturalization of the idea of entertainment as distraction rather than edification or enrichment”
“Edification” and “enrichment” are ideological terms. Obentos are created by mothers to edify and enrich their children…and to concentrate their minds, rather than to distract them. I just don’t see how that makes them any less creepy than the violence study (which I agree is itself a form of pleasurable entertainment and of social control — that’s a very nice point.)
You say the problem is that the violence study puts entertainment in control. But I don’t think you separate pleasure and control by making appeals to enrichment or edification, or by creating an organic past in which entertainment was active and healthy.
Suat, staving off dementia also means it’s a more effective form of social control. If you go insane, it means you’re not fitting into society correctly, at the very least.
I’m not arguing that Japanese society is objectively more creepy than U.S. society. I doubt Allison would argue that either. More like the social controls are always more visible on the other side of the fence, maybe. (Which is one of the reasons anthropology as a social science is kind of creepy.)
Noah asked “how is that different than saying people should put their time into something other than writing about sexism in superhero comics.”
How much money did a government or large corporations give you to write about sexism in superhero comics last year?
Now, how much money did a government or large corporations put into various forms of social science research?
That’s money that could be spent on hard science research or on funding actual art. Both of which are vastly more worthwhile.
I don’t get paid a lot of money for writing about sexism in superhero comics, but I get paid some. That money could be spent on hard science research, or on funding actual art. If it’s a waste in the one case, I don’t see why it’s not a waste in the other case.
Are you arguing that all social science research is worthless? That’s pretty hard core. I can respect that.
I don’t know that I agree with it exactly, thoug. I disagree that hard science or art or necessarily more worthwhile, anyway. Lots of art is terrible; lots of hard science is worthless. And for me, at least, this particular study got me thinking about art, pleasure, time and power in a way I hadn’t before. It’s a lot more worthwhile than lots of art I’ve seen, certainly (and no animals were tortured in making it, which puts it ahead of a lot of hard science research.)
Yeah, as revolting as it is, the best thing about social science is how totally non-humanist it is. Economics posits that markets are more important than people. Anthropology posits that culture is more important than people. Psychology posits that drives are more important than people. I don’t know that these assumptions are totally off-base, given the completely opaque nature of modernity.
I was just thinking. When I was in my formative drawing years, I drew lots of “violent” imagery — fights, horror stuff, and the like. And I remember as I was scratching away over the drawing board, on occasion I’d get so into what I was drawing I’d catch myself gritting/grinding my teeth and actually making guttural sound effects — which I thought was pretty funny at the time. I later recall reading that Kirby did as well. Could it be that DRAWING exciting or violent things sometimes acts as a narcotic substitute, releasing dopamine — thus making the drawing process almost addictive?
I know there have been video game studies that back up the dopamine-violence connection gamers, but I think it would be interesting and enlightening if the same type of study was done on filmgoers watching violence and artists drawing violence.
I mean, everyone knows we’re talking about sublimation, right? Taking erotic (thanatic?) energy and channeling it into something. I feel like the burden of proof is on Caro (as it was for Frederic WErtham in Seduction of the Innocent, the hearings around which helped establish the Comics Code) to delineate how we distinguish between what is positive and what is negative virtual violence, and where things truly stop being violence and are… life-affirming?
Caro – forgive me for being dense, but I’m not sure what you mean by enrichment and edification. If you have time, could you elaborate?
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Caro says:
…The role of narcotic is an incredibly corrupt and dangerous and insidious role for entertainment to play in a society. It isn’t the “natural” way entertainment works… It should not be one of the main ways entertainment works, it has not always been one of the main ways entertainment works, and the fact that this entertainment works this way is an incredibly creepy social pathology, of mass media at its dehumanizing limits.
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Yes, indeed! Though (to play the devil’s advocate for narcotics) I recall TV being praised as something that allows a bunch of people that can’t stand each other — as in many a family, trapped year after year after year after year together — to be in the same room for prolonged periods of time without constantly being at each others’ throats.
As far from ideal as it is, in this massively messed-up (and getting worse by the day) society, there’s a good deal to be said for entertainment as a drug to help people to escape the emptiness and hopelessness of their lives.
Because if they were not so distracted, it’s not as if they’d be aware and informed enough to cast off the chains of the ruling class, create a more humane society; they’d just beat their wives and kids more, go persecute some socially approved-of targets.
And many are in a fairly hopeless situation (or know the hell the human race is rushing madly towards), where to fully face that reality every waking hour would hardly be of benefit…
(On the other hand, some works of entertainment might be counterproductive: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2573/4197877898_9656600cdf.jpg )