Yesterday, I expressed deep concern over an upcoming movie that depicts elitist liberals on holiday literally hunting down and killing Trump supporters. In hindsight and with the advantage of a bit more time to research the film, it seems that I might have been too hasty in portraying the movie's theme.
Evidently, The Hunt is a satire in which the good guys who prevail in the end are actually the hunted "deplorables" and the bad guys are the leftists who relish killing them.
Having said that, I stand by the general claim that violent films (and video games), no matter who is doing the killing, have no place in a sane, morally healthy society.
Human beings, particularly young people, have a way of becoming desensitized to violence, just as they become desensitized to pornography. The more graphic the violence they absorb, whether fictional or in real life, the less horrified they are by it.
We're often told that a person's behavior is not influenced by visual images. If that's true, why do people like Michael Moore make so many movies with political messages and why do corporations spend millions of dollars on visual advertising? The idea that what we consume from the screen does not affect our mental health is as absurd as claiming that what we consume at the dinner table doesn't affect our physical health.
This is not to say that watching violent films turns everyone into a psychopath, but what it does do is erode and diminish our natural revulsion toward violence.
Put differently, human beings reside along a kind of spectrum with complete abhorrence of violence at one end and the celebration of, and participation in, violence at the other end.
Violent entertainment nudges everyone who watches or listens to it or otherwise participates in it incrementally toward the violent end in a kind of psychological red shift. The people already close to the edge get pushed over it, and everyone else gets bumped a little bit closer, especially if they're given a steady exposure to the brutality and killing, and especially if that brutality and killing is glamorized.
I'm glad I might've wrong about the message the movie actually sends, but I'd still rather such movies not be made. The implicit message sent by explicit violence is not one that can conceivably benefit a nation plagued by real and frequent violence.
