Killing Monsters
Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence
by Gerard Jones
Basic, 261 pp., $25
THE OTHER DAY, Joe--my fiancee's five-year-old nephew--decided to let me in on something. "Can I tell you a secret?" he asked. "My grandma bought me a special present." He paused. "It's called a gun."
I knew full well his grandmother had bought him no such thing. Joe isn't allowed to play with guns. "She bought you a gun, did she?" I said.
"It's a real gun, with real bullets," he said. "And I'm not kidding." "Oh," I said.
Then Joe added: "But grandma told me I could only shoot things that are already dead."
Earlier in the day, Joe had told me stray cats had been leaving droppings in his grandmother's flower bed. She was angry about it. Joe decided these acts of feline trespass were an outrage, and he said he wanted to kill the cats. In response, Joe's aunt told him that it wasn't right to kill living things--and Joe put it all together.
His hunger for a gun gave rise to the fantasy of being presented with one by his gentle and giving grandmother. But he didn't want the gun without conditions. He wanted the gun to come with moral strictures and boundaries.
Gerard Jones's "Killing Monsters" is an original and surprising new book that tries to cut through parental and societal hysteria regarding childhood play to explain why Joe's fascination with guns and his hunger for a moral framework are complementary impulses. Jones's work comes with
the year's most provocative subtitle: "Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence."
"Killing Monsters" is a book that demanded to be written, if only to provide a moment's respite from a piece of conventional wisdom that goes almost completely unchallenged. Over the past thirty years it has become axiomatic that depictions of violence in popular culture are utterly without redeeming merit. Critics on the left (such as Peggy Charren of Action for Children's Television) and critics of the right (such as Michael Medved) are in full-throated agreement on the evils of fantasy and fictional violence as depicted on television, in the movies, in comic books, in popular music, and in video games.
THESE CRITICS believe that, at best, fantasy violence is a cause of bad manners and the general coarsening of American life--and, at worst, that cultural depictions of violence are responsible for the explosion of violence in the United States after World War II. These beliefs have become so commonly accepted that Congress passed legislation in the mid-1990s compelling all manufacturers of television sets to install a special piece of hardware that would make it possible for parents to prevent their children from watching offensive programming.
Proponents of the legislation, in seeking the broadest possible coalition in favor of it, dubbed it the V (for "violence)" chip. They could have called it the S (for "sex") chip, using the argument that depictions of sexual acts on television cause young people to engage in salacious behavior. But they didn't. Keeping kids from watching violent programming on television seemed to be a better rallying point.
Val:Y
|
