High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [104]
See enough of this bang-you’re-dead kind of thing and you’ll start to go numb around the edges, I guarantee. On some level you will start to believe that a violent act has no consequences. Researchers in social psychology have known for decades that watching violence makes a person more likely to participate in violence. Many people in the entertainment industry would have us believe otherwise, and so these studies are controversial, but they are mostly unequivocal. A review article written in 1991 by Wendy Wood, Frank Wong, and Gregory Chachere examined the body of research in this field, conducted in both laboratory and natural social settings, and they found that exposure to media violence significantly enhanced viewers’ aggressive behavior. Hundreds of other psychologists stand in agreement. They suggest many different mechanisms for the causal link between watching and doing: increased physiological arousal; decreased inhibitions; instrumental learning and modeling of aggressive acts; and decreased sensitivity toward violent acts. It boils down to one thing: we learn about the world through our senses, like any other creature. Watch your mother make a hundred tortillas, and you know how to love, live with, and manufacture a tortilla. Watch a hundred violent deaths and that, too, is your familiar. That the deaths were all faked is apparently incidental to the hardware in our heads that brings us learning. A trick on the eye works a trick on the psyche as well, for although our brains know it is only ketchup, in our animal soul it registers as blood. Blood without consequence.
So it happened, one day in Florida, that a thirteen-year-old shot a man in the head because he took two slices of pizza when he was only offered one. It has happened a thousand times over, will happen again tomorrow, and I hardly wonder why. That child believed the scene would fade out after he shot the gun, and then the world would be new again.
The simple, intense exposure of a vicious act, in film or in literature, is entirely different from a story that includes both the violence and its painful consequences. I can’t even call these two things by the same name. Those who like to say there is nothing new under the sun will claim that TV is no more violent than Shakespeare. But three average nights of prime-time TV contain as many acts of violence as all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays put together end to end—and quantity is only partly the point. More importantly, there is also a world of difference in the context. Think of all we learn of the world from poor Hamlet: the whole play is a chain of terrible consequences that fall one after another from the murder of his father. It’s about bereavement, guilt, and unbearable loss. Hamlet “raised a sigh so piteous and profound as it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being.” That is a tragedy that has earned its place.
I find I’m prepared to commit an act of violence in the written word if, and only if, it meets two criteria: first, the act must be embedded in the story of its consequences. Second, the fictional violence must be connected with the authentic world. It matters to me, for example, that we citizens of the U.S. bought guns and dressed up an army that killed plain, earnest people in Nicaragua who were trying only to find peace and a kinder way of life. I wanted to bring that evil piece of history into a story, in a way that would make a reader feel sadness and dread but still keep reading, becoming convinced it was necessary to care. So I invented Hallie Noline, and caused her to die. I did it because this happened, not to imaginary Hallie but to thousands of real people. One of them was a hydroelectric engineer in his twenties from Portland, Oregon, named Ben Linder,