A Sydney primary school has asked parents to make sure their children do not watch the popular Netflix series Squid Game, which depicts “extreme violence and gore”, because students are mimicking the games in the playground.On what should I blame the modern parental de-sensitisation to violence being viewed by kids? The parents themselves being de-sensitised by ever increasing violence in movies, TV and video games, I expect.
As someone who remembers as a child in the 1960's seeing some relatively B grade movie in the cinema (I forget what it was now) which featured a guy getting shot with a harpoon in his stomach, and feeling that was really kind of disturbingly violent, it is completely surprising to me that parents do not think that kids can imagine the effect of violence to a more visceral degree than adults.
I haven't watched Squid Games. I saw some of the violent first game while my daughter was watching it and thought it didn't look like my sort of thing. I have seen commentary saying that it is worth watching even if it makes you uncomfortable, but I am not so sure. I have never been one for the dystopia "games played to the death" scenarios. Always seemed a bit silly to me. Unless we're talking gladiator era stories, I guess.
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I was thinking back to earlier eras of TV/cinema in relation to Squid Game too (which I haven't seen either), and it struck me that perhaps there were numerous examples of similar violence I'd seen. Dr Who regularly had characters zapped to death by Daleks, Cybermen, etc. Is it that different? I think it's worth recalling that the classics we now remember of television from the '60s must have been made by people who were often World War II veterans - or who had grown up during the war.
Yeah, Tim, I think it is different.
Back in the late 60's and 70's, it was a Lefty thing to complain about guns and shooting on TV and movies and how this was normalising violence to kids. And sure, I used to watch Combat and played with toy soldiers in mock battles (we had two fantastic sets - one WW2 and one Civil War) which my sister, who had married an American, bought back from the US for us. But of course, the death in fiction in those days was "clean" and fast. Now, Lefties might might say that was harmful in that it didn't show the true effect of bullets, etc. True - but it also meant that realistic depictions of death and wounds were more shocking and more likely to make people understand that violence is ugly and serious. And in the right context, even if shown as a bloodless death, a fictional shooting could still have emotional impact.
The problem is, the realistic depiction of blood and violence that has gradually become more and more acceptable has done nothing other than de-sensitise kids and adults completely to the effect of violence - and for the mentally disturbed, given them a way to pre-imagine the effect of what they might do.
That's a worse thing, by far, I reckon, than the depiction of relatively bloodless death.
bugs Bunny particularly the road runner was very violent but funny.
no-one went out hitting people or trying to kill them as a result.
context is everything
I seem to recall that Tom and Jerry had the weirdest relationship with violence - didn't it have things like characters being sliced and then re-constituted? I never found it funny at all.
That sad, the Simpson's satire of cartoon violence never worked for me too - it was like a Lefty critique of violence that was self defeating.
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