Violence, Video, Guns, Entertainment - LA TImes 2013

herocomplex.latimes.
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Pushing wrong buttons in blame game

Feb. 15, 2013 | 5:00 a.m.
(Edel Rodriguez / For The Times) Yes, unrelenting carnage is a problem in video games but not in the way most people might thing.
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Twice now I have failed to finish the 2011 film Drive. The first time I left the theater. The second time, encouraged by friends who love the movie, I tried to watch it at home. Shortly after Ryan Gosling smashed a man to death in an elevator, I was out. Bottom line: I avoid ultra-violent entertainment. Unless its a video game. Its not because I write about them for a living. Its because the modern, big-budget game that doesnt celebrate the art of shooting is as rare these days as an original Intellivision console. In the wake of last years tragedy in Newtown, Conn., Vice President Joe Biden met with representatives from the video game industry. The conversation was about how to limit gun violence in games. Earlier, the National Rifle Assn. also tossed out the expected names Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto in its own war on violent pop culture. After all, Newtown gunman Adam Lanza was reportedly addicted to the Call of Duty war games. But like many who love to play video games and write critically about the field, I rolled my eyes when interactive entertainment was once again singled out for inciting real-life violence. But I wasnt surprised. Video game publishers arent much for providing arguments to the contrary. Instead of a story, 505 Games Sniper Elite V2 boasts a kill-cam, which breaks from the game narrative to detail exactly how a bullet wreaks havoc on a victims innards. Borderlands 2, from Gearbox Software and 2K Games, is so efficient in its line-em-up, shoot-em-down formula that it makes a joke of it. Heres an example: Theres a character named Face McShooty, a mohawked buffoon who hollers and yelps until you shoot him in the face. And yes, Face McShooty made me laugh.
Zer0 takes on Stalker enemies at close range in a scene from the video game Borderlands 2. (2K Games / Gearbox) Why Drive but not these games has an effect on me is not easy to articulate, but it has to do with context and presentation. Violent images in most games come fast too fast for them to linger in ones
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mind. The next mission is always just seconds away, and the development of most characters stops at the name. Face McShooty isnt anything resembling a real person; hes a punch line. Ultimately, the difference between Drive and Call of Duty is that the film is so emotionally involving that it forced me to look away from the screen. The game is simply a test of button-pushing endurance. Thats OK, as its probably what makes for an effective game. But that doesnt mean its an interesting one. There are Cuban soldiers in the latest Call of Duty, but theyre obstacles the military game equivalent of a barrel in Donkey Kong. Only here, you press a button to shoot instead of pressing a button to jump. Ive had fun playing some of these games and dont deny they can be, well, a blast. Each year, shooters get a little more refined in their controls, and the settings become a little more expansive or outlandish (witness the island sex and savagery of Far Cry 3). Yet these are tweaks to a well-honed formula rather than creative advancements. Its violence, with a different-style template.
A scene from Far Cry 3. (Ubisoft) Dont just take my word for it. The incredible success of the Call of Duty-type stuff drives games away from more constructive conflict. I think thats one of the sad things and one of the things I dont like about the game business. Enough with the shooting. Figure out another type of productive conflict building, creating. Thats Edmonton, Canada-based Greg Zeschuk, who last year resigned from BioWare, the company he co-founded about two decades ago. One of the most successful game operations in recent history, BioWares credits include the Mass Effect series and Star Wars: The Old Republic, the former of which was heavily lauded for its use of narrative elements. Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the latest blockbuster in the Activision Blizzard series, was the top-selling game of 2012 and fastest ever to $1 billion in sales, hitting the milestone in just 15 days. It boasts writing from David S. Goyer, who counts Christopher Nolans Dark Knight trilogy among his credits, makes
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overtures to current events and the debate surrounding unmanned drones, and features digital interpretations of the likes of David Petraeus and Oliver North.
Soldiers and terrorists battle in the streets of Yemen in a scene from Call of Duty: Black Ops II. (Activision) Yet Zero Dark Thirty it is not. Make no mistake, Call of Duty asks questions of the gamer. They are all variations on the following themes: How fast can you shoot, and can you sneak through this area undetected? Its a test of reflexes. Its true, when 10 or 15 seconds of the game are flashed on the news, it does indeed look garish, and early in Black Ops II gamers even watch a character get incinerated. Yet blink and youll be behind in the action. I, for instance, had no idea my character was talking to a real-life figure such as North until I played the game a second time. The story is an accessory and not an examination of war or shooting. The industry saw what the reflex game mechanic could do and they invested heavily in it, said Dan Connors, a former LucasArts employee who co-founded Telltale Games, the independent company responsible for last years wildly successful story-driven take on The Walking Dead. They left behind this other form of entertainment, which is allowing people to interact with characters inside of a story. Like cinema and television, theres a vast array of video game content to provide exceptions, and theres even the occasional blockbuster such as Halo 4 thats able to push the shoot-em-up genre into more emotional territory, which did so by taking a laser-sharp focus on its main character. Though not a shooter, another noteworthy title is the action-driven assassination game Dishonored, which is as damp and macabre as they come, but challenges gamers to constantly question how they move through the world.
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A scene from Dishonored. (Arkane Studios / Bethesda Softworks) Yet it would be nice if the video game industry used the current gun debate as an opportunity, a chance to openly discuss whether its use of violence is artistic or gratuitous. Its the time for self-evaluation and to ask whether the industrys biggest games the so-called AAA titles are pushing the industry forward or simply finding new places and new ways to kill things. This, said Connors, can be the moment in which games started to create characters you cared about and characters who felt real. Independent developers like Telltale are taking risks and challenging the industry to tell better, deeper and more involving stories. Theyre not doing so by creating shooters. In fact, how to build a better shooter is not a question that should be asked. Even the bad ones today are fairly competent in their game mechanics. The question is how to make a more challenging game, and its not one some in the industry may be willing to ask. Seeing it from within a big company, the reality is you go where the money is, said Zeschuk, now spearheading the Beer Diaries, an online destination for craft beer. You can try to change the world, but if you cant create shareholder value while doing it, youre hosed. Todd Martens Follow us on Twitter: @LATHeroComplex RECENT AND RELATED
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The Social Trends Driving American Gangs and Gun Violence

By Ta-Nehisi Coates Learning from University of Chicago Crime Lab's Harold Pollack, a man who helped make the misuse of firearms a public health issue
Outside the funeral for Hadiya Pendleton, the Obama inauguration performer killed by a gunman in a Chicago park on January 29 (John Gress/Reuters)
Like everyone, we at The Atlantic have spent the weeks since Newtown thinking about the role of guns in America. In our ongoing effort to broaden the conversation, I spent some time talking to Professor
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Harold Pollack, who co-directs the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago. Pollack is one of the foremost voices on gun violence from a public health perspective. Pollack and his colleagues at the Crime Lab have done yeoman's work in helping us understand how guns end up on the streets of cities like Chicago, and how precisely they tend to be used. Ta-Nehisi Coates: Hi, Harold. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us over here at The Atlantic. We've had several off-line conversations which have been illuminating to me. I greatly appreciate your willingness to take some time to do this for the Horde, as we say on the blog. Harold Pollack: It's great to correspond with you, Ta-Nehisi, regarding what can actually be done to reduce gun violence. I'm a big fan of your work. I should mention by way of self-introduction that I am a public health researcher at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and codirector of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Here in Chicago, we have become the focus of much national attention because we had our 500th homicide [of the year in 2012]. We're sometimes called the nation's murder capital -- though this mainly reflects the fact that we are a big city. We're more dangerous than L.A. or New York, but we're actually in the middle of the pack when it comes to homicide rates. Still, we're dangerous enough. The declining homicide rates in many prosperous and middle-class neighborhoods casts a harsh light on the high rates facing African-American (and to a lesser-extent) Latino young men on the city's south and west sides. Lots to talk about. I am looking forward to talking. So let's get to it. I don't know if I've told you how I come to this issue, but I should say for everyone reading this that I am from Baltimore -- the West Side, as we used to call it. I came of age in the late 1980s and early 90s, a period in which violence spiked in our cities. I don't know if Chicago today is as bad as it was in, say, 1988, but this was a period of deep fear for everyone in the black communities of Baltimore. And the fear was everywhere. It changed how we addressed our parents. It changed how we addressed each other. It changed our music. The violence put rules in place that often look strange to the rest of the country. For instance, the mask of hyper-machismo and invulnerability -- the icegrill, as we used to say -- looks strange, until you've lived in a place where that mask is the only power you have to effect a modicum of safety. I'm in my late 40s. I was a typical suburban kid graduating high school outside New York. It wasn't as tough for me as it was on the west side of Baltimore, but crime certainly touched my life. On one occasion, I was in Washington Heights on my way to an AP class at Columbia University. A group of middle-school or early-high-school kids jumped me in the subway station, and they attempted to wrest away my watch. My high school sweetheart had just given it to me; I didn't want to give it up. So a kid grabbed me by the hair and smashed my head against the concrete floor until I finally relented. As you know, my cousin was beaten to death by two teenage house burglars a few years later.
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So I remember very well both the fear and the anger that accompanies one's sense of physical vulnerability. Of course this anger often comes with a race/ethnic/class tinge that poisons so much of what we are trying to do in revitalizing urban America. It's odd. I sometimes travel in some pretty tough neighborhoods, and it's been maybe 20 years since someone has laid an unfriendly hand on me. The gray hair seems to put me in a different category. The kids we encounter are sometimes a bit struck that one can be a shrimpy, nerdy guy and be a successful adult man. That option doesn't seem as open to them. I remember when Allen Iverson came into the NBA and people could not understand why he walked around with twenty dudes. I totally understood, and I suspect a lot of black males did too. But one thing that's become clear to me, and that I've tried to grapple with in my blogging, is that cultural practices that offer some protection in one place are often quite harmful in another. Iverson's clique may have saved him countless times in Virginia Beach. But in that broader world, they sometimes empowered his worst urges. So much of my work is about how young black males negotiate violence, and how those negotiations affect them when they interact with the broader world. I get a sense of that when I talk with young men in Chicago who participate in violence prevention efforts. Kids are wearing that ice-grill for some very real reasons in their world. It's just a tough assignment to be a 17-year-old kid in urban America. We often hear some version of this story: "Dr. Pollack, I'm so glad you are doing this. There are too many guns, too much fighting out here. My friend was shot. But you have to know something: If some guy gets in my face in the hallway, I'm going to have to kick his ass because I can't afford to allow anyone to mess with me." Your comments are right on the money that kids' approaches can be protective in one context, but quite harmful in another. If another 17-year-old gets in your face, you might have to be tough. If that's your automatic response, things won't go well when your 11th grade English teacher gets into your face over a missing assignment. The academic literature also suggests that aggression-prone kids aren't very good at deciphering the unspoken intentions of other people. Psychologists speak of "hostile intention attribution bias," whereby youth interpret other people's ambiguous behavior as more hostile and more threatening than it actually is. Some of the best interventions help kids with social-emotional and self-regulation skills so that they can deal more safely and productively with each other and with adult authority figures. We've found in randomized trials that such interventions can reduce violent offending. But you can't tell kids "Don't fight." That's not realistic in their world. I do believe that kids are exposed to some pretty toxic messages about adult masculinity. Their lack of a decent roadmap is reinforced by crummy pop culture from Chief Keef to video games to BET. Much
more important, though, many of these kids don't have adult men in their everyday lives available to show them how it's done. One could write 500 Ph.D. dissertations about how hip-hop or pornography mis-socializes young men in their relationships with women. I'm not thrilled about some of what the kids are listening to or viewing. Yet the Tipper-Gore-style anxieties seem misdirected. Media dreck is much less important than the ways youth observe adult men in their lives actually treat women. Much of the hip-hop that adults dislike reflects kids' real experiences. It isn't pretty to hear, but what's coming through people's ear-buds isn't the real problem. Why Chicago? What, specifically, do we see in the history of the city, in its style of governance, in its organization of neighborhoods, in its geography, in its policing which makes it different from New York City? It is one thing to note the high homicide rate. But why? Why Chicago? There's no simple answer. I should say at the outset that we are hardly the most dangerous city in America. We're in the middle of the pack for large cities. There's nothing happening here that people in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, or Milwaukee aren't seeing. Our homicide rate is also below what it was 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago (see the graph). But you can see that our homicide rate is a bit over half what it was in the early 1990s. The uptick in 2012 partly reflected random factors such as high homicide rates linked with warm weather during the early months of the year. We still face some serious challenges. We have many more guns on the street than New York does. Per capita, CPD seizes roughly six times the guns that NYPD does. My Crime Lab colleagues are exploring opportunities to disrupt underground gun markets. We believe that there are some real opportunities to deter straw purchasers, identify corrupt gun sellers, and more, Obviously, more work needs to be done there. New York may be a bit ahead of Chicago in implementing innovative law enforcement strategies. Our new police superintendent is implementing some of these strategies now, and he seems on the right track. He bears some historical burdens, including such episodes as the Jon Burge police misconduct cases. Chicago also has a pretty entrenched set of gang issues -- which is sometimes a factor in youths' gaining access to lethal weapons. Law enforcement has done a pretty good job in recent years of decapitating the major criminal organizations. Ironically, this creates new risks of violence. When once we had hierarchical organizations with a strong stake in avoiding mayhem, we now have a set of much more fractionated cliques that feud with each other and have less of a stake in containing violence.
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And, of course, we have a highly segregated city with a tough history of educational failure, and deep poverty. This history was exemplified by high-rise projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes, which so scarred the landscape along highway 94. Many of these high-rises have been torn down. I believe this had to be done. It also created new challenges. I haven't seen solid numbers on this. It's clear that the relocation of so many low-income families has disrupted gang boundaries and has stressed neighborhoods within Chicago and within the collar communities just beyond the city line. We can't use these fundamental factors as an excuse to wait in reducing crime. Indeed, crime reduction is essential to address business development and improved educational opportunities in our toughest neighborhoods. I take some heart from New York's experience. New York witnessed deep crime reductions in very poor neighborhoods that experienced many of the same economic and educational problems we see in Chicago. The New York Times [recently had] a front page story up about Chicago, wondering how a city with "strict" gun laws can have so many guns on the street and so many murders. I found the piece a little puzzling, because it felt like the answer was right in the article -that being that Chicago can't really control the gun laws of neighboring jurisdictions. That was also the day that Gabby Giffords comes up to the Hill along with (though not accompanying!) Wayne LaPierre. But before jumping to that stuff I want to pick up on two points you raised toward the end of your reply. Can you talk more about the effort "to disrupt the underground markets?" What does that actually mean? What are the details that go into that? Is this mostly a matter of more arrests, targeted arrests? And also can you talk more about -- if I may say this -- gangs as an uneasy (and unsustainable) check on rampant violence. I'm glad that you mention that [New York Times] piece. The underlying analysis of trace data was actually performed by my terrific University of Chicago Crime Lab colleague Seth Bour. An impressive fraction of seized crime guns came from one place: Chuck's Gun Shop, located just over the city line. [January 29 was] an especially sad day in the neighborhood just north of my office. Not far from President Obama's house, a student at King Prep high school was shot at 2:30 in the afternoon near the school. She had performed at the Inauguration. She was apparently hanging out with her volleyball team. She was fatally shot in the back when a gunman fired into a crowd of students. A study I did with a student found that about 20 percent of Chicago gun homicide victims were clearly not the specific targets. This seems like another one of those cases. [On the issue of underground markets,] I defer to my colleagues Phil Cook, Jens Ludwig, and colleagues who are national authorities here. Here is a terrific paper for those
interested. A few basic points. First, many of the people we most worry about getting hold of guns are pretty unsophisticated consumers. We have good opportunities to stop these often-young people with relatively simple measures such as reverse buy-and-bust operations. Second, the criminal justice system has traditionally not taken the underground/illegal gun market all that seriously as a distinct issue. The legal risks are pretty low on straw purchasers and on people who sell guns to people they have reasons to know might be felons. It's easy to claim that a gun was lost or stolen if you give it to someone else who then uses it in a crime. Committing a specific violent crime with a gun is taken very seriously. Yet just being caught with a gun -- or being involved in the supply chain of the illicit gun market -- isn't taken as seriously as it should be by many in law enforcement and the courts. If one hasn't specifically used that gun to commit (another) crime, we don't always respond with the urgency that we should. If judges don't take something seriously, and if the penalties are pretty light, these offenses will receive low-priority in the queue for police and prosecutorial resources. We must treat the illicit gun markets with the full range of tools and with the same determination applied to illicit drug markets. Some practical measures can make a real difference here. For example, President Obama is directing federal prosecutors to give these cases higher priority. I think this will help. When an 18-year-old kills someone with a gun, very often some adult had something to say about that young man having access to a gun, or whether, when and where that young man might be carrying a loaded gun when some otherwise manageable incident escalates into a shooting. If these young men are in some way gang-affiliated, homicides are often called gang homicides. Some homicides result from explicit conflict between criminal organizations. Yet in many, many cases, the actual altercation was over some personal or family beef quite peripheral to any larger gang issue. I tell people that the typical Chicago murder follows the equation: Two young men + stupid beef + gun = dead body. Remove the gun from that equation, and you prevent many dead bodies. There is some evidence that focusing on these adults can be helpful in reducing certain kinds of gun crime. If, for example, a young man is gang-affiliated, we want to ensure that the adults in leadership positions within these organizations understand that they will face personal consequences if that young person commits any kind of gun crime. I am a big believer in violence-oriented policing in considering (for example) how to
manage the supply-side of the illicit drug market. No one gets a free pass. But when I prioritize resources in going after drug-selling organizations, I'm not so interested in which organization sells the most grams of heroin in a given week. I care about that, but that's not the most important thing. I want each organization to understand that if anyone affiliated with them shoots someone, if anyone hires juveniles for street selling, if anyone intimidates the neighbors, or is otherwise an especially bad actor, the entire group will be held accountable. If these organizations get the message that violence is bad for business, I believe this will change who they hire, who in the organization is asked to be armed or to carry out violence, how they deal with disputes with other criminal organizations. There's suggestive but hardly definitive evidence that such approaches are helpful. High Point, North Carolina, is the paradigmatic example of where such drug enforcement strategies worked pretty well. But the city of High Point is maybe the size of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's not clear how such strategies can be translated to (say) Englewood or East Garfield Park here in Chicago. Our new police superintendent Garry McCarthy iscognizant of these issues and is pursuing some promising approaches. Many people around the country are examining novel strategies such as those developed by David Kennedy. There's no magic bullet, but it seems to me that the quality of policing is getting better over time, and that law enforcement is taking a more discriminating approach that is more focused on evidencebased strategies to curb violence. So let's zoom out from Chicago and talk about national policy. One of the things I've seen reported that amazed me, and a lot of other folks, was that the CDC was effectively barred by law from doing research on guns and their effects because such information could be construed as aiding gun control, or some such. Obama recently loosened some of the restrictions around research. Will that change anything? After reading this piece by Brad Plumer at Wonkblog, I'm left skeptical. Can you talk some about the constraints around gun violence research? This isn't a cure-all. But loosening the constraints on research would help. The chilling effects of congressional meddling also goes beyond the letter of the law. At times, policymakers and figures in the executive branch and in the public-health community have done the NRA's work for it. We've allowed second-amendment absolutists to intimidate everyone else. Researchers and public health officials saw what happened to Art Kellerman. They saw the difficulties that CDC has faced in getting pertinent research funded. Many people decided it would be easier to pick different fights.
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The specific Congressional language says the following: None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control. Pretty much the same language was added to the NIH budget and related health agencies. We should take Congress's words pretty literally here. In my book, researching where crime guns come from is not promoting gun control. Conducting a randomized trial of different interventions to deter straw purchasers or to prevent gun suicide among veterans is not "advocating or promoting" gun control. Clarifying the descriptive epidemiology of real and alleged defensive use of weapons isn't advocating or promoting gun control, either. We shouldn't internalize a defensive "but what would somebody say" mentality in approaching these issues. I hope President Obama's executive orders give us greater backbone in this area. Here's another example. Some very useful economic studies of discrimination employ random audit studies. Researchers send potential employers carefully tuned resumes of two classes of applicant. All applicants have the same formal qualifications, but one group is signaled to be African American. One can then examine whether that group is less likely to be invited for an interview. In similar fashion, well-designed audit studies could be very useful in examining the integrity of licensed or unlicensed gun dealers, and in answering other questions about underground gun markets. Increasing the research dollars would be helpful, particularly in conducting rigorous intervention research. That's often where the research will have the biggest payoff. We've chipped away at so many causes of death and injury in America by methodically identifying and pursuing evidence-based interventions. That's true of lung cancer, sudden infant death syndrome, motor vehicle accidents, and more. We've made less progress in firearms deaths. When one considers the tens of thousands of Americans who die every year from firearms, the CDC's budget for firearm safety and research is pathetically low. Where does the Crime Lab stand in terms of other centers of gun violence research around the country? Some of the questions which we can't seem to answer look pretty basic -- "What percentage of gun owners even commit crimes?" for instance. Is this going to change? These questions are indeed pretty basic, and pretty politicized. By the way, our ignorance about guns is not so unusual. Particularly in matters of intimate or stigmatized behaviors, we in the public health community often lack good answers to embarrassingly simple questions. If you ask: "How many Americans regularly inject
heroin?" we're pretty uncertain. If you ask: "How many men have sex at least once per month with other men?" we're uncertain there, too. We don't always need to know these answers. We need to know enough so we can design rigorous intervention trials to see what is helpful to protect men and women in these key at-risk populations. In gun policy, Congress creates maddening obstacles to researchers who seek to support police, judges, and prosecutors with basic law enforcement tasks. ATF's travails are also related. We mention some of those in the researchers' letter. The agency faces some truly strange restrictions on its ability to perform what we in public health would consider basic shoe-leather epidemiology in collecting and disseminating computerized data regarding crime guns or gun dealers who may be contributing to the problem. ATF needs more field agents. It needs a permanent director. It needs the same political and budgetary support we provide to the FBI for its critical law enforcement mission. I want to come back to something else for a moment. You asked why Chicago is doing worse than L.A. or New York. As I mentioned, we're not doing worse than many other cities -- Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, many others. It's not Dodge City here, despite the tone of much recent coverage. Yet we are doing worse than the two cities with which we are most often compared. No one has a definitive answer here. I would point to a few factors. First, many Midwestern cities have been hit harder by the financial crisis and the Great Recession than New York and L.A. have. New York is a much wealthier city with more extensive public services. As I mentioned, New York is certainly ahead of us in getting a handle on illegal guns. Chicago also has a particularly nasty history of poverty and segregation in the city's south and west sides, where so many of the homicides among young African-American men and women are occurring. That history is exemplified by high-rise public housing developments such as Robert Taylor Homes. The buildings are gone, but we are still living with that. I am sorry to keep bringing this back to Chicago, but you sort of just baited me. I'm reading The Making of the Second Ghetto right now, and I have to ask -- given how racially segregated the violence in Chicago is, is there any connection between public policy in Chicago and gun violence? I'm glad that you are offering some props to Making of the Second Ghetto. It's an excellent book. My own university played an ambiguous role in this story. We play a much more positive role now. You ask the broad question: is there any connection between public policy in Chicago and gun violence? That's a tough one to answer with any generality. It is certainly true that our high rates of poverty, segregation, and pervasive education failure reflect the
legacy of failed public policies and discrimination. Some of these policies go back a long way. The warehousing of African-American families in public housing and overt discrimination within Chicago Public Schools still cast long shadows. (Kathy Neckerman's Schools Betrayed describes the history of Chicago Public Schools.) Chicago is sometimes called the City That Works, a backhanded tribute to the political machine that dominated city politics for decades. In so many basic respects, the City didn't work for many people here. Some of this problematic legacy stems from a more recent past. Police need active community cooperation to solve many crimes. Episodes such as the Jon Burge case really hurt that effort. Several years ago, I spoke with Louis Farrakan about youth crime issues. He offered the thought that nothing happened at Abu Ghraib that hadn't happened in station-house basements at CPD. These abuses occurred in a different time. Their effects linger. Chicago's political economy -- like that of many cities -- channels resources to the most organized and prosperous neighborhoods. That's life in urban America. Every mayor in America -- whatever his or her ideology -- must cater to mobile affluent families and firms that support the tax base and a city's economic life. If we aren't careful, the end result can be to channel disproportionate police manpower, disproportionate educational, recreation, and other investments to upscale communities rather than to the places that need these resources the most. This would be a disaster -- particularly in a time of limited federal support for urban job programs and other supports we desperately need. To its credit, CPD has instituted processes such as Comstat that counter this political inertia. The "cops on the dots" approach holds everyone accountable to place the police where crimes actually occur. Frank Zimring's book, The City that Became Safe, noted the same democratizing pattern in New York. New York's crime rate went down in its toughest community. One reason for that was the real improvement in police protection for these places. Two other issues deserve mention. Failed national housing policies have really hammered Cook County's African-American communities. The same heavily-segregated African-American communities that top the homicide statistics dominate the list of communities checker-boarded with foreclosed or abandoned properties. It's hard to stabilize a community to address crime when this is the economic reality. I myself live in a predominantly African-American neighborhood within the south suburbs. Many houses on our neighborhood stand empty or are in various stages of foreclosure. It wouldn't surprise me if median household wealth among African Americans here has gone negative.
We send out many other large and small messages that marginalize young men and women of color. A friend of mine runs a sports intervention for low-income youth. He noted something I had never noticed, hidden in plain sight. Milennium Park and its surroundings-- genuinely beautiful triumphs of Mayor Daley's tenure - include wonderful gardens, tennis courts, an ice-skating rink. They don't include a single basketball court. The Chicago Parks District website indicate no outdoor basketball courts in the Loop area. Young couples of every income and color stroll to Buckingham Fountain and its environs. By and large, though, this is pretty upscale turf. Few amenities are designed to draw minority teenagers down to the Loop. I do want to ask you about some cultural matters. What shall we make of the tougher edges of hip-hop and pop culture consumed by young people? One can over-react to this. Much of the raunchiness of hip-hop is a reflection rather than a cause of the tough conditions in urban life. Still, I do worry that American youth are fed some pretty toxic messages about gender, violence, and other matters. I've always thought that immigrants and outsiders enjoy a real advantage because they are a bit more insulated from the dreck of American youth culture. It's not crazy to worry that African-American and Latino youth are particularly harmed by this stuff. The youth workers I know are quite concerned, for example, when rappers such as Chief Keef clown around with guns on video. As a parent and as a social commentator, how do you think about these issues? Are they overblown? Is there some sensible sense that avoids Tipper-Gore-style prudishness but that also avoids nave cultural complacency? So glad you asked this question -- especially given my full-throated endorsement of Kendrick Lamar. I don't think they're overblown, so much as I think they're misunderstood. I can't really vouch for Chief Keef. I haven't given him a good listen. But one major mistake that I think people make with hip-hop -- and perhaps with pop culture at large -- is that they tend to think of it as promoting certain values. It's easy to make that assumption given the actual lyrics which do involve exulting the life of the urban outlaw and all its attendant aspects. Mastering and dispensing violence is a large part of that. But I think it's worth asking, "Why do kids listen to violent hip-hop?" I highly doubt the answer is "To find an applicable value system." As someone who had NWA's first album, and gas fond memories of the Geto Boys, I would suggest that what the kids go there for -- beyond the beat of the music -- is fantasy. I don't think hip-hop so much reflects these violent neighborhoods, as it serves as therapy for the young boys who live in them. It offers a vicarious world where every puerile desire is instantly met. If you listen really closely to music, you will hear it
pulsing with teenage insecurity and the angst of the youth. In hip-hop, young people are able to express sentiments and feelings, many of them negative, which they can't really express elsewhere. Living, from the time you are born, with the threat of existential violence is stressful. Stress leads to anger and fear. We don't generally express our anger and fear by saying, "I love the world" or "I pray for an end to world hunger." Living around violence might make you say those things. But the stress of it more often will probably leave you with a string of curse words on your tongue. Moreover, it might even make you want to convert all of those negative feelings into a persona which can't be killed by other males, which never feels rejection from females, and is generally free to engage all its hedonistic desires. I think that's right. Of course, much of the critique of hip-hop confuses effects for causes here. The nihilism in the music stems from the nihilistic real-world environment, not the other way around. There's also certain troubling feedback loop, whereby the music you turn to for release and otherwise-forbidden expression of your reality may be psychically problematic. Adults figured out a long time ago that there's a buck to be made on MTV or BET from calibrated excesses that hit the lowest common denominator in youth culture. You can make more money hawking sex and violence than you can by depicting what happens two years after the bullets go flying, when a shooter sits in an 8x12 cage, and the victim is left wearing a colostomy bag. I have to say, I'm 37 now. And there's certainly stuff I can't listen to. But when I was in the target age rage I was boiling over with angst. Hip-hop was where I went to work it out. My son listens to a lot of bad music that does the same for him. I would never stop him from doing that. But I do try to engage him. I'll tell you a story: When I was 14 I had an NWA album which included a song about oral sex which was really degrading to women. I was listening to it in my Walkman one day in the car, while my dad was driving. He asked what I was listening to and then told me to put it in the tape-deck. I reluctantly did this. We listened and then he gave me a long forceful talk about how women should be regarded. But more importantly, he handed the tape back to me. He left me with a choice and the choice wasn't over where to get my values from, it was over what fantasies I would countenance and what fantasies I wouldn't. This is a great story, which underscores (among other things) the role of the actual adult human beings in kids' lives. We're the ones who ignore, moderate, or aggravate whatever broader influences reach our kids from other places. As I mentioned, I have two daughters, age 18 and age 16. I hate to think that their boyfriends and future marriage partners are learning about women from music videos or the Sports Illustrated bathing suit issue. Yet what really matters is what these young men hear and see among the adults around them. My great fear is for kids who just don't have an adult around them to show the way.
Again as I mentioned, we recently performed a successful randomized trial for an intervention called "Becoming a Man, Sports Edition." This program is fielded by two local nonprofits, Youth Guidance and World Sport Chicago. It features once-per-week group sessions with well-trained adult mentors and coaches for after-school sports programming. We found that the program significantly reduced violent offending, and significantly improved school engagement. Just today, Mayor Emanuel is announcing $2 million in city funds to expand this program. We on the research team have been struck by one simple question: Why is this rather modest, non-intensive intervention so effective? There are many reasons. But the most basic is that young men in tough Chicago neighborhoods have such limited access to appealing and engaged adult men who can help them navigate the tough world in which they live. I think it's worth asking whether we as adults are any different than our kids. America consumes massive amounts of pornography. Why? Isn't a some of this about male frustration at having to actually "work" for the sexual attention of women? Porn constructs a world where no work is needed. It's all right there. If we know broad swaths of men seek out such fantasies, why do expect kids -- laboring under much more stressful circumstances -- to be different? Yes indeed. I would also note that the same market actors who hawk alcohol and tobacco on 67thh street in Chicago are only too happy to market "titles do not show up on your hotel bill" films eighty streets uptown on Michigan Avenue near the fancy convention spots. Is pornography actively harmful? I don't know. I certainly hope the young men in Evanston and Hyde Park have some adult men showing them the way, too. This article available online at: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/the-social-trends-driving-american-gangsand-gun-violence/273170/ Copyright 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
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latimes.com
Depictions of violence in theater: Revelation, not nihilism

Critic's Notebook: Disturbing actions can awake an audience's empathy, but lines blur if events tip into a mere celebration of destruction.
by CHARLES MCNULTY, LOS ANGELES TIMES THEATER CRITIC FEB. 15, 2013
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In one of the most infamous scenes in modern drama, a group of young men in a London park stone a baby to death in its carriage. What begins as roughhousing escalates to all-out sadism until a rock is thrown at point blank range, ending the child's pitiful cries for good. Edward Bond's "Saved" provoked outrage when it was produced in 1965 by the Royal Court Theatre as a private club offering, a designation used to slip past the Lord Chamberlain's Office. Although "Saved" isn't revived often, it's considered a modern classic, and not just because it was instrumental in overturning Britain's strict theater censorship laws. The play had a formative influence on playwrights Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane, and it's hard to imagine the flamboyant thuggery of Tracy Letts and Martin McDonagh, two of contemporary theater's sharpest stylists, without Bond's pathclearing example. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Art | Film | Television | Hollywood Even by today's standards, "Saved" is shocking. Bond, who once acknowledged that he writes "about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners," captures the murder in all its bleak sociological detail. Against a seedy urban
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background of utter futility, the young mother's temporary abandonment of her baby is made chillingly plausible, as is the pack-like behavior of the men who torture the baby for perverse distraction from their aimless lives. While seeing the play off-Broadway in a production directed by Robert Woodruff in 2001, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to withstand the spectacle of a baby being smeared with its own excrement and nakedly throttled. I had barely survived an earlier scene in which the child's intensifying cries went unanswered in a London household too bogged down in its own misery to respond. The real world being sufficiently generous when it comes to doling out violence, I don't intentionally seek it out in drama. Additionally, I have found it harder in my middle years to detach blows from the physical and mental suffering they entail. (Sadly, the unreality of youth doesn't last forever.) Yet I would have been in solidarity with those who stood up for "Saved" against those who were loudly condemning the work as obscene when it was first done. What is the line between acceptable and unacceptable violence in art? If gruesomeness is the criterion, much of Jacobean drama would have to be banned, including Shakespeare's "King Lear," with its graphic scene of Gloucester's eyes being mercilessly plucked out. Some may believe they can identify pornography at a glance, but violence places keener demands on our sensibilities. Its artistic validity isn't a function of how many liters of blood are spilled or how many limbs are dismembered. The question is one of gratuitousness. Or to put it another way: How does the brutality fit into a work's larger vision? The task is uniquely challenged. Make-believe violence is a tool that all too easily becomes an indiscriminate weapon. It is a form of knowledge of the body's vulnerability, of the aggression that lurks in the hearts of men but it can also be a pernicious seduction, luring artists and audiences toward a nihilistic celebration of the destruction of meaning itself. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Video Games | World Cinema The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has spoken of the "inured, detached horror" that comes as a result of being glutted with images of human suffering. "The sadomasochistic solution to this is to find it all incredibly exciting and gripping and to want more and more of it," he explained in Bomb Magazine. "That is a catastrophe created by a culture that makes suffering and exploitation bearable by making or cultivating a sadomasochistic pleasure."
In the "Poetics," Aristotle takes up the question of why human beings delight in contemplating objects that in reality bring them pain. His answer is that man is essentially an imitative animal who learns by copying the world around him. Yet Aristotle doesn't claim that this instinct alone justifies the portrayal of any kind of atrocity. The crux of his argument is that the dramatization of certain types of calamity can have a positive moral effect. In fact, rather than feeding the unruly passions (one of Plato's big beefs with poetry), these depictions have the power to calm the emotional waters by stirring them up. Like Freud, Aristotle thought that repression carries more dangers than representation. Yet his theory of catharsis for him, the raison d'tre of tragedy isn't unlimited. There are experiences better left undramatized. The test of an action's moral suitability, however, lies in its artistic ends, not in its inherent balefulness. Yes, even the stoning of a baby can be dramatically justified. Bond, a key figure in Britain's impressive band of postwar political playwrights, wrote "Saved" as a cautionary tale about the dehumanizing effects of inequitable social conditions. The wanton killing in "Saved" may seem shamelessly sensationalistic, but it is embedded in a work that closely examines the corrosiveness of economic injustice on human dignity. Revenge has historically been the motive behind a good deal of violence in the theater. Where there's a cold corpse onstage, there's usually a claim for selfimposed law and order. Indeed blood and gore have been bound up with the question of justice since Clytemnestra hacked her husband to death in his bath in Aeschylus' "Oresteia." THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: On-screen history | Theater | Research Contemporary playwrights, influenced more by Hollywood than by Shakespeare and the Greeks, have become increasingly comfortable in detaching violence from the conflict that is at the complicated heart of justice, the arbitration of unequal loss. Guns, knives and other weaponry are in danger of becoming attentiongrabbing accessories in the homicidal diversions that our popular culture can never get enough of and that are perhaps the purest manifestation of a society that would rather sacrifice schoolchildren than amend firearm laws. The bone-crunching, hand-burning comedies of McDonagh are undeniably hilarious, but they are part of a disturbing trend that celebrates work more for its
style than for its mind, more for its artistry than for its artistic vision. The scene in Letts' "Killer Joe" in which the title character sexually assaults a double-dealing woman with a drumstick is one that might have impressed the playwright's 17th century English forebears, but the theater is on a slippery slope when it tries to compete with the lurid tactics of moviemaking. (No surprise that William Friedkin exploited the moment in his film version for all its animal ferocity.) Theater is fundamentally a metaphorical space, one inviting critical inquiry. Words have an equal footing with images, unlike in film, and the very limitations of the stage open up intellectual advantages. Harold Pinter's comedies of menace, which lay bare the territorial nature of human beings in language that is as sharp as a switchblade, have a revelatory quality that engages me on a deeper level than McDonagh's bruising farces, which strike me as more indebted to the films of Quentin Tarantino, whose desire to entertain outstrips his ability to think. (The hyperventilating praise for "Django Unchained" was for me one of the more depressing end-of-the-year occurrences, particularly in the righteous justification of a work that undermined the credibility of its historical depiction of the barbarity of slavery by treating violent death as a tediously repetitive pop-cultural joke.) This might sound prudish, but I had no trouble appreciating Sarah Kane's "Blasted," in which, perhaps in an attempt to outdo both "Lear" and "Saved," a pair of eyes and a baby are eaten in an apocalyptic drama that brings war into an intimate hotel room setting. But then I think it's important to note the vantage point of an artist who makes violence her subject. Kane, who took her own life at age 28, filled the stage with unbearable torment. But the nightmare images of her plays are deeply inhabited by the author, who never failed to register the emotional cost of horror. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Art | Film | Television | Hollywood The same can be said for Belarus Free Theatre, the courageous troupe that made a devastating and all-too-brief recent appearance at the Segerstrom Center with "Minsk, 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker." This company creates harrowing imagistic productions with an urgency that is in direct proportion to the oppressive situation its members find themselves in back home. In a series of vicious theatrical snapshots, "Minsk" conjured a cityscape that draws analogies between political torture and sexual commerce, between totalitarian domination and self-abasement. My response was twofold stunned amazement at the performers' liberated craft
and a wish that the real-world hell stoking their collective brilliance would end immediately. In considering the question of who is bearing witness, it can be useful to note whether the repair work is included along with the destruction. Those who have felt a boot against their throat are unlikely to leave out some intimation of what it's like to overcome this suffering. The plays of Adrienne Kennedy ("Funnyhouse of a Negro," "The Ohio State Murders") and Maria Irene Fornes ("Mud," "The Conduct of Life," "Fefu and Her Friends") are among the most eloquent ever written on the shattering effects of violence. These dramatists go beyond the recording of trauma they articulate the numbed, fractured space left in its wake. "Nature's above art," Shakespeare asserts in "Lear," in producing "side-piercing sights." But then he proceeds to unfurl one of the most heart-rending scenes in literature, the meeting between the old king, whose mind has cracked from furious sorrow, and the blinded Gloucester. Victims both, they are neither innocent nor commensurately punished, but together they grope toward a theatrical poetry worthy of their wounds. charles.mcnulty@latimes.com
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-mcnulty-drama-violence20130217,0,5580723.story
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latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-betsy-violence-essay-20130217,0,4459685.story
latimes.com
The culture of violence
Critic's Notebook: Movie violence must not be stopped

The problem isn't Hollywood, it's real life, where killing long predates film. What we see on the silver screen can be helpful.
By Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Film Critic 8:00 AM PST, February 15, 2013 I abhor violence. As a rookie police reporter years ago I saw the damage guns, knives, broken bottles, metal pipes, hands humans can inflict. From the terrifyingly premeditated to the unfortunately accidental, those images still have the power to shake me to the core. They will never leave me. I don't, however, believe the movies are to blame for these acts. As good as Hollywood is at reimagining the intrinsic brutality that roams our streets, burrows into twisted minds, plays havoc with our world, nothing I've seen in movies comes close to what I witnessed firsthand. Perhaps that is why movie violence doesn't offend me. I may be unsettled by it, but no matter the saturation level, I rarely turn away. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Art | Film | Television | Hollywood I want to ride the superhero roller coaster. I want to cheer as the bad guys bite the dust. I like the line between good and evil sharply drawn by a super sleuth like James Bond or blurred by an everyman like Michael Douglas in "Falling Down." I want Steven Spielberg to keep reminding me in "Lincoln," "Saving Private Ryan" and "Schindler's List" what evil looks like and the fortitude it takes to face it down. I want Kathryn Bigelow to continue assessing the psychological cost of global conflicts in "The Hurt Locker" and "Zero Dark Thirty." And yes, I want Quentin Tarantino to keep spraying the canvas with blood, even when it is just in fun. Whatever else the movies make me feel horror, hubris, humor, humanity at its best and worst I know it's real life, not Hollywood, that's the killer. You can't tell that to the politicians or the talking heads on TV. They see in Hollywood an easy, highly visible and disturbingly simplistic target after tragic events like last summer's slaughter during a showing of "The
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Dark Knight Rises" in Aurora, Colo., and the more recent killings of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Like history, the argument keeps repeating itself. When bullets tore through bodies in Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" in 1969, there was shock. When Arthur Penn kept the camera running for the ballet of death that ended "Bonnie and Clyde," there was outrage. When Tarantino began his paean to blood-drenched movies with "Kill Bill," he was condemned; his latest, "Django Unchained," with its defiant blast at antebellum slavery, kicked up more furor. And when Bigelow showed the bloodless but chilling waterboarding of prisoners thought to be Osama bin Laden operatives in her Oscarnominated "Zero Dark Thirty," public anger fueled congressional hearings. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Video Games | World Cinema To denounce movies for the violence of our times, when unimaginable atrocity has been with us since the dawn of mankind, is at best misguided, at worst damaging. Hollywood is not the reason for the wreckage made by madmen with guns. The troubled will always be with us. To fault films for forcing us to consider that humans commit atrocious acts, that evil exists in far too many hearts, is to blame the messenger. It's classic displacement theory. "Zero's" Beltway brouhaha echoes the backlash that hit Michael Cimino's fabled "The Deer Hunter" in 1978 for its portrayal of Vietnam-era American POWs forced to play Russian roulette. I'm not suggesting filmmakers have no responsibility for what they make they do. But that responsibility is to the art as well as the audience. Within the mayhem, there is nearly always a message. Movies are our cautionary tales, fictional reminders of the true nature of humanity's baser basic instincts. And moviemakers by that I mean every name above and below the title, for it takes a village are the seers, the interpreters, the illusionists, the entertainers. They are not the instigators. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: On-screen history | Theater | Research The topic has been a hot button for so many years that we don't even know how to discuss it rationally anymore. Consider 1994's "Natural Born Killers," a provocative, satiric indictment of mass media's glorification of savagery and the way violence so often overtakes the TV news cycle. The controversy "Killers" triggered was about the movie's images extremely graphic in showing the execution-style cross-country killing spree of the lethal lovers played by Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson not its messages about the sometimes outrageous lengths the media uses to capture footage of real-life violence for mass consumption and the audience's appetite to watch it. Directed by Oliver Stone and with a story by Tarantino, it was still, 15 years later, among the top 10 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 25 most controversial films ever. Positive force One question that always surfaces in the debate: What possible good can come from any depiction of the horrific on screen? Let's start with the obvious. A good deal of movie violence is designed as a way for us to experience it vicariously. Whether the topic is war, high-flying superheroes, cops and robbers, comedy or Freddy Krueger films are packed with plots whose main purpose is to deliver payback.
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That is why "Taken" had such mass appeal. It was easy to empathize with Liam Neeson's desperate father, his anguish when his daughter is kidnapped by ruthless international sex slavers. It was easier still to forgive the brutal swath he cut getting her back. Take that raw revenge and put a superpower at the other end of the barrel and you find a steady stream of good guys with guns we want in our camp Bourne, Bond, the Terminator, Transformers, G.I. Joe. For the vast majority of moviegoers, fantasy, fairy tales, the hyper-realized worlds of comic books, even the darkest of parables, offer a safe escape from modern problems not an excuse to create more. If anything, playing with metaphorical extremes is a platform for the medium's artistic possibilities exotic character designs, extraordinary special effects, all the arsenals of technology and no earthbound restrictions. It's exhilarating to watch Peter Parker scale buildings, Clark Kent leap them, Batman zoom around them. Even as the buildings crumble and the bodies of their adversaries pile up, the consistent take-away is that there are repercussions for breaking the rules. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Art | Film | Television | Hollywood What tends to get lost in the rhetoric is how many film classics have risen from the machinations and the muck. The list of the legendary is long, but I can't imagine a film library without Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" or "Apocalypse Now." Or Jonathan Demme's unsettling masterwork of the macabre in "The Silence of the Lambs." The disturbing visual eloquence of Brian De Palma in "Scarface," or "Carlito's Way." Tarantino arguably Hollywood's current blood-splatter expert always strikes me as his own creature when it comes to brutality. There is an excess of the red stuff in virtually every movie he makes, but that very excess is what turns it surreal. In his Oscar-nominated "Django's" final showdowns (yes, plural), Jamie Foxx's bounty-hunting freeman is about to take retribution on the South's most egregious slaveholder. By this point, a runaway slave has been torn apart by dogs, countless backs have been lashed into bloody ribbons, and there has been a string of other punishments so brutal they almost defy description. The gun battles that ensue seem appropriate in their excess, a relief and a release an exclamation mark on the director's dissertation on slavery written in bullets and blood. It is when movies turn realistic that the brutality is the most difficult to watch and to forget. Why not encourage filmmakers to make it less gruesome, less graphic? To me, this is the scariest proposition of all. Consider Jodie Foster's rape victim in "The Accused." Her desecration, her humiliation, is searing. Or the chilling examination of a twisted criminal mind in the farmhouse killings captured by "In Cold Blood." Oliver Stone's brilliant "Platoon" exposed in gruesome detail the many ways war scars soldiers. In "The Godfather's" dissection of mob machinations, there is a treatise on power's corruption as well as organized crime's devastation. Why should any of that be softened? None of it is pretty. It takes more than a few blows on a face for skin to give way to bones and viscera. When gunshots end a life, bones shatter, blood pools, the dying cry out. I don't want the impact squeegeed away. Revenge, and justice, is too often written in pain. I don't want Hollywood to clean up the mess. I don't want it to silence the screams. betsy.sharkey@latimes.com
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latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-violence-tv-20130217,0,1355588.story
latimes.com
Acceptable level of TV violence is ever shifting for viewers, execs

Unlike sex and language issues, which the FCC regulates, TV violence is decided by the networks. Some have standards departments to guide them, other let viewers decide what is permissible to show.
By Scott Collins 12:15 PM PST, February 15, 2013 To any viewer who thinks "Sons of Anarchy" is too violent, consider the bright side: At least the castration scene got um deleted. Kurt Sutter, creator of the drama about a California motorcycle gang, presented the idea of showing a character getting the unkindest cut early in the run of the show, now FX's highestrated. But he backed off after the network's chief objected. "I have no filters," Sutter said with a laugh. "I just assume everyone feels the way I do about things." THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Art | Film | Television | Hollywood In the wake of December's Connecticut school shootings, TV violence has moved back into the policy debate. The head of the National Rifle Assn. controversially attacked the entertainment industry including music videos and video games for portraying "murder as a way of life." The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the broadcast networks, has rules meant to curb language and sex on TV, but despite the persistent debate over real-life violence, it has no specific prohibitions on media violence. So the networks attempt to govern themselves through so-called standards and practices departments that read every script and watch every episode on the lookout for violence as well as sex and language deemed excessive. The departments typically have around 10 full-time staffers, many of whom are lawyers or have legal training. Networks have long preferred to keep the process shrouded in mystery, perhaps to avoid laying down public precedents that could then be challenged. None of the four major broadcasters would allow a standards and practices official to talk on the record for this article, although some executives did not want to speak on the record.
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THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Video Games | World Cinema While some show runners complain that the rules are arbitrary and amorphous, some critics argue that the "S and P" units aren't doing their jobs at all. Some of the most popular series on TV right now are also among the most violent, including AMC's "The Walking Dead," Showtime's "Dexter," CBS' "Criminal Minds" and Fox's new hit "The Following." ABC's terrorism thriller "Scandal" recently drew criticism with a lengthy torture scene. Network chiefs were put on the defensive last month as reporters asked about the many serial-killer shows slashing their way through prime time, including an upcoming NBC drama based on fictional murderer Hannibal Lecter. Some networks seem to be more permissive than others. A recent study by the Parents Television Council, a lobbying group and frequent entertainment-industry critic, examined prime-time programming on all five broadcast networks for two weeks this year. Heavily dependent on crime hits such as "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and "NCIS," CBS was deemed the most violent network, with 33 scenes with violent gunplay during the period. It was trailed by ABC (14), Fox (nine) and NBC (four). CW had no violent scenes during the period. The study did not look at FX and other cable networks, which are not regulated by the FCC and where the standards tend to be much more permissive. "If you were to ask the average viewer on the street, I think they would be surprised to hear that networks still have standards and practices departments at all," said Melissa Henson, the group's director of communications and public education. "They have this reputation of coming down all the time, but they really don't do much" to stem violence on TV. But networks say they rely on viewers to tell them where the boundaries are and in any case, no definitive evidence proves that violent depictions cause real-life violence. (Some studies, however, have suggested that TV violence can desensitize certain viewers, especially young children.) "I don't think you can make the leap of shows about serial killers causing the violence that we have in our country," NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt recently said, in the kind of demurral typical in the industry. TV veterans like to point out that onstage violence far predates the invention of their medium. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: On-screen history | Theater | Research Network executives say they are constantly weighing how much violence they can show despite what some skeptics might think. That is especially true when a mass shooting such as the one at Sandy Hook Elementary casts an unwelcome spotlight on the subject. "This has come up repeatedly, usually once a decade or so," said Tim Brooks, a TV historian and former research executive for Lifetime and USA cable networks. But producers complain that the rules are always changing so it's often hard to know where the boundaries are. "For me the frustration is that it's so arbitrary, and it changes from season to season," Sutter said. Still, there are some lines. Neal Baer, the former show runner of NBC's "Law & Order: SVU," said CBS has a prohibition against showing a bullet entering the human body, although showing the aftermath of a shooting is fine. (CBS declined to comment.) NBC's Hannibal Lecter series will reportedly follow a similar path: Lots of bodies, but not many killings shown. CBS will air Baer's next show, "Under the Dome," an adaptation of the sci-fi novel by Stephen King about the social breakdown of a small town cut off from the outside world. The Sandy Hook shootings have made him think hard about how violence will be depicted, but Baer said he hasn't changed anything because of the tragedy. "We're thinking about the social ramifications and how do we present that in a compelling way," he said.
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THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Art | Film | Television | Hollywood Brooks said the networks' S and P offices have wielded power since the early 1960s, after a public uproar over the now-forgotten series "Bus Stop." Critics were outraged that the pop idol Fabian played a psychopathic serial killer, arguing that it presented the wrong image to teenagers. Congress responded with the "'Bus Stop' hearings" designed to stem TV violence. Spooked, the networks decided to regulate themselves and began pulling back on the gritty stuff. But as any viewer today knows, violence has come back bigger than ever, especially as cable programming has exploded over the past decade. The antihero of "Dexter" dreams up ever-more-chilling ways to dispatch his badguy victims. Zombies munch on human flesh in "Walking Dead." Even on CBS the most-watched network and also the oldest-skewing the "CSI" franchise is built around the up-close autopsies of crime victims. Although viewers sometimes complain about violence, they tend to get more irked by raw language or sexuality. Often they rationalize violence as long as it's familiar to a genre, such as horror, or has a moralistic message attached. Brooks recalls a focus group 20 years ago when he worked for USA Network. Some parents talked about how much they liked the show "Walker, Texas Ranger," which featured Chuck Norris as a crime fighter who took out the bad guys with martial-arts moves. When the moderator pointed out that research had determined "Walker" was one of the most violent shows on TV, the room fell silent. Then one woman piped up and said that might be true, but it was OK because Norris played a good guy who helped people in trouble. Sutter said that principle applies even on "Sons of Anarchy," where the boundaries between good and evil are much murkier than on "Walker."Still, he is astonished by what he sees as hypocrisy over on-screen violence. "I'm amazed sometimes at the level of violence we get away with on my show," he said. "Yeah, it's OK to watch a girl burn to death, but God forbid I show a piece of her nipple. The sex boundaries are much more delineated and adhered to than the violence." scott.collins@latimes.com
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latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-mn-violence-research-20130217,0,7603324.story
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Violent entertainment and behavior: Study results are mixed

One conclusion says such media numb people to others' pain and suffering; another calls harsh movies a deterrent; a third says video games don't predict criminal violence.
By Rebecca Keegan 12:00 PM PST, February 15, 2013 As part of a broader gun control plan he announced last month, President Obama said he will push Congress to fund research into the causes of gun violence including, potentially, the role of entertainment. Researchers have been tackling the subject of links between violent entertainment and violent behavior for years, often coming to divergent conclusions. Here are a few intriguing findings: In a 2009 study called "Comfortably Numb," psychologists at the University of Michigan, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and Iowa State University found that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain and suffering of others. In one part, 320 college students played a violent or a nonviolent video game for 20 minutes. Afterward, while they completed a lengthy questionnaire, participants heard a loud fight in which someone was injured outside the lab. Those who played the violent games took 450% longer to help the injured victim, rated the fight as less serious and were less likely to hear the fight in comparison to participants who played nonviolent games. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Art | Film | Television | Hollywood | Video Games | World Cinema In the second part of the study, 162 adults attending violent and nonviolent movies witnessed a young woman with an injured ankle struggle to pick up her crutches outside the theater. Those who had just watched the violent movie took 26% longer to help than those who hadn't. In 2008, economists at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego presented a paper that credits violent films with actually making the nation safer, because of a phenomenon they called "voluntary incapacitation" essentially, when potential criminals were in dark theaters chomping on popcorn, they were less likely to commit acts of violence. Studying crime data and film release schedules between 1995 and 2004, the researchers found that on weekends when violent films were in theaters, the number of assaults in the U.S. decreased by about 1,000. "The results
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emphasize that media exposure affects behavior not only via content, but also because it changes time spent in alternative activities," the researchers wrote. In 2008, psychologists at Texas A&M University studied 428 undergraduate students, measuring their aggression levels, video game habits, exposure to family violence and violent criminal behavior through a series of questionnaires. The strongest predictors of violent criminal behavior were a male gender and exposure to physical abuse. Once those factors were controlled for, playing violent video games was not a predictor of criminal violence. But, researchers wrote, aggressive individuals already prone to committing violent acts may use games as a "stylistic catalyst," effectively modeling their violence on a game they've played. rebecca.keegan@latimes.com
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latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-music-and-violence-rap-hip-hop-20130217,0,4941196.story
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In hip-hop, violence is taking on a diminishing role

Nowadays gangsta rap doesn't hold the same sway as in the days of Tupac and Biggie. For artists like Drake and Nas, the battles are of ideas and emotions.
By Mikael Wood, Los Angeles Times 1:37 PM PST, February 15, 2013 Among the most important rap albums released over the last year or so, one contains a song about Nas' complicated relationship with his teenage daughter. Another has a track in which Killer Mike outlines President Reagan's contribution to the prison-industrial complex. A third disc finds Drake pondering the impossibility of real-life romantic connection in the age of the nip-slip Twitpic. The title of Drake's record, which last week won the Grammy Award for rap album? "Take Care." To say that hip-hop has evolved over the last 25 years since the days when rappers such as Ice-T and Ice Cube were terrorizing the likes of Tipper Gore, who famously lobbied for the adoption of the Parental Advisory sticker seems an almost-laughable understatement, equal to saying that the Internet has had some effect on the way we consume music. Once perceived as a site of uncut nihilism, hip-hop has made room, in a way that outsiders can't ignore, for practicality and ambivalence and staunchly middle-aged concerns. Achievement too. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Art | Film | Television | Hollywood And it's become more peaceful, at least on the surface. At a moment in which the depiction of violence in other forms of media appears increasingly graphic, much of the conflict in hip-hop has moved inward, its players fighting battles of ideas and emotions. How did this happen? In a sense the music forced itself to change. The back-to-back slayings of 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. (in 1996 and 1997, respectively) served terrible notice that gangsta rap with its ever-intensifying cycle of threats and reprisals had gotten all too real, a verbal arms race turned dangerously corporeal. No longer were rappers working in the shadowy in-between-world of showbiz persona, portraying characters on record but retreating to
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safety outside the studio. Avatars of a gang-related West Coast-East Coast feud, Tupac Shakur and Christopher "Biggie Smalls" Wallace died the deaths of their alter egos a dramatic indication that in music, as distinct from movies and television, the separation sometimes disappears between art and artist. Try to imagine Oliver Stone, who last year took up the horrific Mexican drug war in his film "Savages," in anything approaching the same kind of jeopardy. But the diminishing role of violence in hip-hop also reflects the genre's shifting circumstance. One of rap's central victories is that it can move freely now through subject matter; it doesn't have to adhere to an enforced set of topics at least not any more than country or R&B or rock 'n' roll has to. And that's opened the music to artists without the kind of street experience that once seemed required of them. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Video Games | World Cinema Drake, for instance, spent his adolescent years as the star of a Canadian teen TV show, while Kanye West (who's done as much as anyone in recent years to destabilize old hip-hop verities) grew up in suburban Chicago the son of a prominent English professor. Do these performers know violence firsthand? Possibly. But it doesn't seem to define their outlook, nor is it the thrill we seek vicariously in their records. "The traditional gangsta-rap narratives don't hold the grandiose power they used to," said Nelson George, an author and filmmaker whose work includes "Hip Hop America," as well as the Chris Rock gangsta-rap spoof "CB4." Those narratives have been weakened in part through overuse, George said. But he added that violent thrills are emigrating to other forms, such as video games. "If you're 17 years old, you don't want to listen to a guy shooting somebody," he said. "You want to be the guy." In response, hip-hop's allure, more often than not, has turned aspirational, as on ASAP Rocky's 2013 major-label debut, "Long Live ASAP." Here this young Harlem MC describes a tantalizing lifestyle populated by beautiful women and filled with high-end luxury goods; one track, "Fashion Killa," basically amounts to a laundry list of fashion labels: "She got a lot of Prada, that Dolce & Gabbana / I can't forget Escada and that Balenciaga." Eventempered and sleekly realized, the music on "Long Live ASAP" feels uninterested in (or perhaps unimpressed by) the rough concerns of the corner. The same goes for "Finally Famous" by Big Sean, a West proteg with little use for struggle. "I'm just doing better than what everyone projected," he boasts in "My Last," "I knew that I'd be here, so if you ask me how I feel / I'm-a just tell you it's everything that I expected." THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: On-screen history | Theater | Research If ASAP Rocky and Big Sean float above gang culture, as though its crude distractions had become pass, other rappers seem stationed outside it. On last year's "good kid, m.A.A.d city" named the best hip-hop album of 2012 by many critics Kendrick Lamar details plenty of violence in his native Compton, where gangsta rap was more or less invented by N.W.A. in the late '80s. But Lamar presents himself as an observer, not a participant, a stance the Roots also took for their 2011 album, "Undun," which recounts the short life of a smalltime hood in painstaking reverse-chronological order. "I turned 20 and realized that life wasn't getting anyone anywhere," Lamar told The Times in October. "You hear stories from the '80s about people selling dope and becoming millionaires, but in reality it'd just be guys walking around with $70 in their pockets. I knew I wanted something else." There are, of course, exceptions to this disarmament. The teenage Chicago rapper Chief Keef the most visible member of that city's so-called drill scene spent a portion of 2012 under house arrest as a result of gun
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charges; he later made headlines when he appeared to joke about the murder of a rival MC on Twitter. And Rick Ross, that rotund purveyor of good-life extravagance, has been drawn into gang matters of late: Last month, he was caught up in a drive-by shooting in Florida, the apparent target of a group reportedly unhappy with Ross' lyrical references to a gang leader. Yet that development seemed to surprise even Ross, who's happily (and successfully) made himself into a caricature in the years since a website revealed his background as a former corrections officer. The violence on Ross' records plays like Grand Guignol; it vibrates on an entirely different wavelength than N.W.A.'s did. The intrusion of actual gunplay into the rapper's actual life felt weirdly old-fashioned. mikael.wood@latimes.com
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A world of difference in reactions over foreign, U.S. film violence

Though films in other countries can be just as bloody and brutal as American movies, the U.S. cultural debate over what's on-screen stands apart.
By Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times 1:05 PM PST, February 15, 2013 Genre filmmaking helps make sense of the world, creating codes by which the seemingly irrational ways of human behavior can be understood. With storytelling modes that travel from country to country the crime picture, the horror film, the action movie genres cross borders and barriers with audiences the world over. On-screen violence can be seen as an international language. When people decry or defend the graphic depiction of violence on screen, it is usually in reference to mainstream American movies. Many films from other countries are equally if not more explicit than their American counterparts, yet both in their home countries and in the U.S. they are seen in a somewhat different light. American filmmakers have in no way cornered the market for blood and action on-screen, with influence and inspiration moving in both directions. Indeed, the borrowings between filmmaking cultures and the dynamic interplay and development of the grammar of violence on-screen creates an entirely new window through which to look at this difficult, tender subject. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Art | Film | Television | Hollywood Yet the intense brutality and bloodshed of films such as South Korea's "Oldboy" or "I Saw the Devil," Japan's "Outrage" or "Lesson of the Evil," Sweden's "Let the Right One In" or Britain's "Kill List" lead much less often to the same kind of finger-pointing cultural conversations on media that periodically erupt in the U.S. "Those kinds of questions aren't connected to violence in the same way they are here when something like Columbine or Newtown happens," said Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. "It doesn't become a social issue, it's not a subject for the kind of public discussion that we're having here now. They don't make that leap to blaming media for something." Is there something different about the portrayal and reception of on-screen violence in other countries to how we
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see and perceive it in America? Consider: Films from South Korea are often heavy on knife-fighting, which creates an atmosphere of bloody intimacy to this up-close form of screen violence. There is a real-world reason behind this tight restrictions mean guns are relatively hard to come by in that country. Whether there is a connection between real-life violence and media is a frequent talking point with lawmakers and opinion makers in the U.S., particularly after outbreaks of spectacular violence. Yet with the international reach of American cultural production it would stand to reason that if such a causal effect existed, it would be inciting similar incidents all over the world. That distinction does not go unnoticed elsewhere. "Especially when it comes to the media, we're watching the same things you guys are," said Colin Geddes, who as a programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival oversees the Midnight Madness section. As to whether the same cultural conversation on violence and media occurring in the U.S. is happening north of the border, Geddes added, "That's not happening up here. People watch American movies all around the world, and it's not the same." THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: On-screen history | Theater | Research On the other hand, the aesthetics of how violence is portrayed in other countries have a way of working themselves onto more mainstream American screens. South Korean filmmakers Park Chan-wook, Kim Jee-woon and Bong Joon-ho are all trying their hands at English-language films made with Hollywood stars, in "Stoker," "The Last Stand" and "Snowpiercer," respectively, bringing their idiosyncratic portraits of violence to American audiences. Numerous Nordic/Scandinavian filmmakers including Niels Arden Oplev, Tomas Alfredson and Baltasar Kormkur have likewise recently directed English-language action pictures, with "Dead Man Down," "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and "2 Guns." As noted by Nitin Govil, assistant professor at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, the transnational cycle of influence among filmmakers around the world means that thematic and stylistic ideas can move, for example, from Japan's Akira Kurosawa to Italy's Sergio Leone to America's Sam Peckinpah to Hong Kong's John Woo and then back to Americans such as Quentin Tarantino. "We're in an age now of global cinema," said Tim League, co-founder of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema theater chain as well as founder of the genre-centric festival Fantastic Fest. The Drafthouse Films distribution arm will soon be distributing in the U.S. South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk's "Pieta," winner of the top prize at the Venice Film Festival with its brooding mix of sexual, religious and violent imagery. It would be easy to assume that the violent South Korean films that make their way to American screens make up a majority of the country's cinematic production. But according to Nam Lee, assistant professor of film studies at Chapman University, there are many comedies and family dramas that do well at South Korea's domestic box office and never receive distribution in America, causing a misperception here of South Korean filmmaking. THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Video Games | World Cinema "The depiction of violence is a little bit different from that of Hollywood cinema," Lee added. "In many Korean films, the violence is justified, where in Hollywood entertainment movies it's more cartoonish, violence is depicted as a joke, and it doesn't have a social subtext. Generally I don't think Korean audiences perceive violence as fun. It's very uncomfortable to watch the violent films because it's very real."
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That consideration of cultural context is perhaps the toughest thing for American audiences to grasp onto when watching an extreme foreign film. The 2010 movie "A Serbian Film" pushed the envelope with its graphic depictions of rape, incest and sexual horrors for which there are simply no polite descriptions, yet according to League, "there is obvious political context " in the film's allegory of surviving the depravity of abusive power. (He was nevertheless quick to add, "however, I'll never let my mother see it.") Welsh-born filmmaker Gareth Evans, who co-directed a segment in the upcoming anthology "V/H/S/2" has an interesting vantage point living and working in Indonesia. Evans noted that as his own "The Raid: Redemption," which featured a machete-wielding gang of thugs fighting off a squadron of police, played around the international festival circuit the response would be largely the same there would be "walkouts or cheers regardless of where we screen the film." "Of course it's not for everyone and that's fine," said Evans, putting the issue in simple terms. "We all have a right to leave a cinema, turn off a DVD or change channels." mark.olsen@latimes.com
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Christ on the cross: a violent image as an act of commiseration

The Isenheim Altarpiece is shocking yet comforting. As movies and video games are taken to task, it's important to remember images' many powers.
by CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT, LOS ANGELES TIMES ART CRITIC FEB. 15, 2013
http://www.readability.com/articles/ywjgjyg7
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No image I know in the history of Western painting is more brutal than the crucifixion scene in the Isenheim Altarpiece. Its violence would make Quentin Tarantino blush. When German Renaissance artist Matthias Grnewald first set brush to limewood panel to paint the mammoth altarpiece around 1512, however, his intention was not to gross out viewers. Shock them, perhaps, but not disgust them. In fact the artist had something entirely different in mind something generous and committed. The cruelty and unspeakable anguish in Grnewald's altar turned the volume up high, but the image had a benign purpose. This is a violent picture that was meant to console, offering a viewer some comfort. After the horrific slaughter of 6- and 7-year old children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December, the debate about safety in a society awash in guns has taken on a new urgency. Setting aside actual weaponry, it's easy to finger brutal images as culprits. It's also a diversionary error. Arguments today about movies, video games, graphic novels and other popular
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forms of art that revel in violence often proceed from an assumption about the inevitability of causing psychic harm. But the Isenheim Altarpiece, with all its soulcrushing blood and gore, begs to differ. Grnewald's altarpiece is huge. A giant machine with a dozen panels that open and close in various configurations for specific feast days, it took four years to build and paint. (Niclaus of Haguenau carved the elaborate decorations on the back.) Even when its multiple panels are closed, the painting is nearly 9 feet high and just over 10 feet wide Christian Cinemascope, as it were. On various panels ragged hermits struggle in the wilderness. A figure of St. Sebastian, heroic captain of pagan Rome's Praetorian guard, has miraculously survived being riddled with arrows for advocating his new Christian faith. A young and ascetic St. Anthony faces fearsome desert torment by shrieking devils who beat him with clubs and tear at his limbs, but he stays serene. Originally the work decorated the high altar of a hospital's chapel in an Antonite monastery, so St. Anthony gets special consideration. A second panel shows him as a stoic church elder, survivor of a world of hurt now standing atop a pedestal a living statue for the ages. Grnewald also painted elaborate scenes from the life of Jesus. Each unfolds in a dazzling blaze of gem-like color. When the altarpiece wings are opened, the story is told from left to right. First is the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary, who swoons at the news of her divine pregnancy; then a lush celebration around the Nativity; and finally a dramatic, almost hallucinatory vision of Christ's triumphant ascension from the tomb. Through lavish design this exquisite sequence tells of coming life, the start of life and eternal life. And when the wings are closed to hide it which is most of the time the altar's front portrays the opposite: A shockingly gruesome crucifixion displays a barbarous death. "It is as if a typhoon of art had been let loose and was sweeping you away," wrote the great 19th century decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans of this harrowing scene in the darkness at Calvary, "and you need a few minutes to recover from the impact, to surmount the impression of awful horror made by the huge crucified Christ."
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The figure hangs heavily on the cross, its dead weight told by the slight downward arc of the horizontal post to which his mangled hands are nailed. He is roughly lifesize. Jesus' scarred and putrefying body relates directly to the painting's viewer. But simultaneously the near-corpse is monumental, more than a head taller and commensurately bulkier than the grieving figures that surround him. Grnewald's brilliant composition makes Jesus at once mortal and massive, both part of humanity and larger than it. We are implored to recognize that we might become the same. Jesus' family and friends St. John, the Virgin and Mary Magdalen bend away from the cross at the left, as if pushed back in a wave of revulsion at the noxious sight. The alarming crucifixion, surrounded by gloom, is a concentrated vision of hysteria. A spectral John the Baptist, long-since dead, stands at the right pointing with a bony finger. An admonishing Latin inscription declares that the Baptist's prophetic role is now over and Christ's redeemer role has begun. Grnewald didn't show Jesus as a classically idealized man of sorrows, the way an Italian painter might. Instead he made him a physical ruin muscles stretched, splayed fingers as jagged as the sharp thorns in his crown, palms and feet hammered bloody with nails, excruciating flesh turning blue-green as life drains out of it. The torso's downward sag contrasts with the arms' upward thrust, culminating in explosive hands. The figure feels torn in two.
THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: On-screen history | Theater | Research Grnewald didn't show Jesus as a classically idealized man of sorrows, the way an Italian painter might. Instead he made him a physical ruin muscles stretched, splayed fingers as jagged as the sharp thorns in his crown, palms and feet hammered bloody with nails, excruciating flesh turning blue-green as life drains out of it. The torso's downward sag contrasts with the arms' upward thrust, culminating in explosive hands. The figure feels torn in two.
The entire scene is shoved into a foreground from which there is no visual escape. It is brightly illuminated against the blackness, as if glimpsed in a flash of lightning. The altarpiece is today displayed in the Unterlinden Museum, a former convent in the small Alsatian city of Colmar, France, about 15 miles down the road from its original home in Isenheim and near the modern borders of Germany and Switzerland. As a painting made for a hospital, though, establishing a powerful identification with the hideous suffering and death of Christ was essential to the artist's task. Grnewald gave it all he had. The monks at the hospital ministered to victims of ergotism Saint Anthony's fire a horrible illness now known to be caused by a fungus that grows on rye. Epidemic in its day, ergotism infected people who ate tainted bread. Its debilitating, often deadly symptoms include convulsive seizures, degeneration of the central nervous system, gangrene in the extremities and sloughing of skin. On Jesus' wracked body, Grnewald shows all of them and more. This appalling crucifixion offers deep solace to a suffering patient. Partly that's because the image is a projection of the viewer's own brutal agonies, thus representing an acute understanding. Partly it's a matter of faith. In the United States last year there were seven mass shootings and a record number of gun fatalities more than 30,000. Mother Jones compiled a list of 61 mass murders carried out with firearms in the last three decades, the killings unfolding in 30 states. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center has found substantial evidence that more guns means more murders, undercutting those who advocate for an acceleration in the number of armed citizens. Another response to the carnage has been to blame pictures, pitting the 2nd Amendment against the 1st. It's true that picture-makers want their images to have an effect, but it's a fallacy that the effect of every violent image must be negative. The alarming violence of the Isenheim Altarpiece offers a lesson. Intensified by Grnewald's gruesome depiction, the story of the crucifixion is a story of Jesus' radical refusal to match with equally ferocious force the violence brought to bear against him. The Passion's brutal narrative asserts the ultimate power of nonviolence. We don't know all that much about Matthias Grnewald even why his likely birth name, Mathis Gothart Nithart, fell by the wayside and the shadowy biography we
do have has been repeatedly revised since the artist's rediscovery in Huysmans' day. From his astounding altarpiece, however, we do know this: His belief in the ameliorating capacity of the violent image was profound. christopher.knight@latimes.com
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-knight-isenheim-violence20130217,0,3844552.story
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The Social Trends Driving American Gangs and Gun Violence

Depictions of violence in theater: Revelation, not nihilism

Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-mcnulty-drama-violence20130217,0,5580723.story

Critic's Notebook: Movie violence must not be stopped

Acceptable level of TV violence is ever shifting for viewers, execs

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Violent entertainment and behavior: Study results are mixed

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A world of difference in reactions over foreign, U.S. film violence

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Christ on the cross: a violent image as an act of commiseration

Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-knight-isenheim-violence20130217,0,3844552.story

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