Is TV violence all that bad for kids? The Age (Melbourne, Australia), March 5, 2005 Saturday, INSIGHT; Opinion; Pg. 9, 816 words, HUGH MACKAY LexisNexis Academic 9 Apr. 2008 

This article is a response to a report from The Weekend Australian that asserts a child’s witnessing of violence in media will result in higher levels of aggression. Writer Hugh Mackay refers to a 1960’s American child-psychology experiment which consisted of observing the different ways children would play with a particular object after they watched different videos, ones that either showed children playing peacefully with that toy or children punching and kicking it. The findings were that those who watched a violent video would treat the toy violently, and those who watched the peaceful video would treat the toy peacefully. Mackay makes sure to point out that although the children would emulate the behavior, it has been concluded that the effects are only short-term, and that all long-term personalities remain virtually unchanged. Furthermore, he declares that the search for variables which might shed light on a child’s increased or decreased susceptibility toward emulating violence in the media result only in negligible data that cannot give any indication of why a particular child would be acting more or less violent than any other one. Mackay’s overall point is that although these experiments may show children in the act of emulating violence on television, all large-scale national crime statistics show that the introduction of television into the societies of decades past resulted in severe drops in crime, and that the age-group which watches the least amount of television today commits the highest amount of violent crime. In short, what a child views in movies or videogames has far less positive or negative impact on his personality than the benefits of extensive human interaction, or the dangers of lazy, television-filled inactivity.      

This article is worth factoring into the discussion of Natural Born Killer’s potential effect on inspiring three young couples to committing separate violent murders in Europe and America, all after their viewing (and in one case, repeated viewing) of the 1994 film. Although accusations were made that the filmmakers and producers were responsible, hardly evidence has been found to support them. Mackay also says that at the time of his writing the article in 2005, the violent crime rate in America had been in steady decline for the last 10 years – which would mean the trend began in 1995, one year after Natural Born Killers was released. If violence in the media could truly influence people to emulate the brutality on screen, Natural Born Killers would surely qualify for those results, considering the rare intensity of bloodshed that is present throughout the whole movie. And considering it grossed 11 million dollars in the first weekend, and over 50 million dollars to date, enough people have seen the movie that we can say if there was a slight rise in a person’s aggressive tendencies after watching the movie, no matter how slight, the accumulation across the country would certainly be noticeable.

The relevance of this article has to do with the controversy surrounding Natural Born Killers, over what impacts a film of such incredible violence (coupled with its themes of glorifying such acts) can – and has – and will – have on the societies of its viewers.  Boyle draws on three specific cases of murderous love-duos that occured after the films release. Edmonson-Darras, Rey-Maupin, and Herbert-Paindavoine were all young couples tried for committing horrendous murders as pairs, and all three couples admitted to having been influenced by Natural Born Killers, further adding to the intense question of how acts of brutality we see in the media are linked to real-world violence.      

Timothy P. Rouse “Natural Born Killers” Teaching Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 4, (Oct., 1995), pp. 433-434 American Sociological Association Jstor 9 Apr. 2008

Timothy Rouse’s sociologically oriented review is a neat, swift map of all the great themes waiting to be found, analyzed and discussed in Natural Born Killers. He quickly places the film into the category of the postmodern, quoting Todd Gitlin’s definition of it as “a constellation of styles and tones,” but doesn’t dwell on the issue in order to carry on with his review. He doesn’t bog down his reader with lengthy personal musings or painstaking passages in search of the most perfect way to express himself, instead he explains the scope of the themes he witnessed by merely mentioning the their variety, such as Jimmy Olsen from Superman comics and the American media’s complete disregard for Native American societal conditions, and suggests what parts of the film should be compared to what examples from other areas of academics, for us to contemplate, and moves on: the economic aspect of the film, he says, should be compared to that of the Wizard of Oz, wherein the studio makes sure the driving theme of the genre is the driving theme of its profits: for the Wizard of Oz, fairytales; for Natural Born Killers, brutal action. Half of this short review is Rouse’s own narration of a few scenes from the movie, where he ties together the violent elements of Mickey’s character with the seductiveness of Mallory’s image, and then demonstrates with simplicity the backdrop of the drooling media goon and frenetic prison ward, all the while continually giving credit to Oliver Stone’s filmmaking techniques by picking out a detail of a shot, or a moment of composition, and openly relating what that single trait meant to him as an appreciative viewer.

Rouse is extremely open-minded in his appraisal, acknowledging the need for disclaimers from teachers before showing Natural Born Killers to classes but also immediately looking past the surface of what, for some, may appear to be mindless violence, unnecessary sex and tasteless gore that negatively affects the viewer. The review ends with a list of questions which provide topics of discussion for other classes and seminars almost by the line, all of which breakdown the elements of the film into clear issues with cues for the discussion’s beginning, such as the physical attractiveness of our cinema’s violent heroes, the American media’s blurry distinction between news and entertainment, the effect that uncertainty brings on crime levels and criminal mentalities, the media’s impact on culture and the role of gender in violent media.