X2 & Violence

I was going to respond to one of Rachel’s comments in the comments section, but then the response got longer and I decided to just make it a blog entry.

Yes, X2 was considerably more violent than the first movie. In the first one, I think only the bad guys killed anyone. (Unless Toad was killed by Storm’s lightning strike. (But I doubt it. Supervillains are notoriously hard to kill. (Assuming Toad can be considered “super,” that is, which is a somewhat dubious assumption.)))

In X2, Wolverine presumably killed some members of the strike force that attacked the mansion. And, it looked like he killed Deathstrike by injecting her with molten adamantium. (But the actress who played her is supposed to be in a sequel, so… see my comment above re the difficulty of killing supervillains.)

But I don’t have a problem with that. I felt the use of force was justifiable. After all, if someone broke into your home to kidnap your children, you’d be justified in using deadly force to prevent that.

The subject of movie and television violence is one that comes up from time to time. You’ll see statistics like “By the time a child is eighteen years old, he’ll have seen X thousands of murders on TV.” Most of the time, this is brought up in a context that implies it’s no wonder we have kids who go out and kill each other.

But usually lacking from any such discussion are the ideas of justification and consequences.

Of those thousands of murders on TV, the vast majority were probably in the context of a police/detective crime drama. And in most cases, the murderer would have been caught or killed, and therefore brought to justice for his crime.

So, does that teach kids to murder, or does that teach kids murder is bad, and if you do it you’ll get caught?

The context matters. What are the reasons for the violence? Are they good reasons (self-defense, protecting the innocent, etc.) or bad reasons (greed, cruelty, etc.)? If they are bad reasons, does the perpetrator get punished?

It really boils down to a question of what the moral message of the movie or TV show is. The portrayal of violence in the service of a good moral message is not a real problem, in my opinion.

(Note that the question of how graphic the violence is is a different matter. The violence in X2 really wasn’t very graphic. You know Wolverine’s claws are going into someone, but you don’t see the flesh being sliced apart, the blood gushing out, etc.)