Media Violence and Reality

 

Part 1 – Movies versus real life

 

In a superhero movie, you often see the superhero killing or hurting the bad guys and you feel happy about it.  Your good guy is winning the fight or saving the world, right?  But if the movie was real life, what would happen if a good guy hurt or killed a bunch of people (even if they were bad!)  Would the good guy get arrested?  Would he have to go to court?  Maybe go to jail?  How would he feel about what he had done?

Movies, tv shows, and video games do a really good job of helping us to forget about the real world for a little while by telling us an exciting story.  But it is easy to forget that the way violence happens in the media isn’t the way violence happens in real life.  In real life, the consequences of violence are very serious!!

In school, if we pretend to be Spider-man and punch our friend because we are pretending he is Venom, what would happen to us?  How much trouble would we be in, from our parents and our teachers?

QUESTIONS – Choose just ONE to answer in the comments on this blog page

1.In video games you are often shooting or fighting other players to try to defeat them.  This is how you win the game.

What would happen if you used violence to win something in real life?

2. Every action movie seems to have have a crazy car chase, car explosion, or car crash scene.  

In real life what would happen if there was a big crash like this on the road or highway?  

3. In superhero movies the hero always kills a whole lot of villains and bad guys.  

In real life what would happen to someone who did these things?

4. In video games and movies when people get shot or injured they bounce right back and keep fighting.  

In real life what happens if you get seriously hurt?

Part 2 – Violence and Our Feelings

Here is a very violent scene from a movie you’ve all probably seen, Beauty and the Beast.

Watch this scene and then pay close attention to how it makes you FEEL.  Does it make your chest get tight?  Your heart race fast?  Your stomach turn?  Did you close your eyes?  All of these feelings and reactions are your body feeling stress from what you are seeing, and it is important that we learn to notice these kinds of feelings.  I know that watching things that are violent make me nervous and it’s hard for me to sleep at night when I watch them, so I avoid them.  That is an easy solution.  Another solution is to remember that what we are seeing in movies, tv, and video games is not real.  That can be very reassuring to remember.  The people are actors.  Writers have written everything that happens in the story.  In this clip Gaston and the Beast are just drawings made by artists.

If something that you’ve seen really bothers you, always talk to your parents about it.  They can have helpful advice for handling those feelings.

Next time you notice violence in media, remember that it is made to entertain people but is a far cry from how things are done or should be done in the real world.  It is important that we always use our words and not our fists to solve problems in the real world.