SAW movies

[tk21769]

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Also, public censorship a lost cause? It damn well better be! Censorship of any kind is a terrible thing, fit only for Nazis.

Censorship, like any other policy, has a wide range of expression. It encompasses everything from informative labeling to book burning. I’m not a prig or a Nazi; personally, I’d rather err on the side of permissiveness than restraint. And I don’t believe that a well-adjusted person will turn into a serial killer after watching Saw. </p>

<p>However, in my childhood during the early 1960s, even many educated liberals accepted the concept of censoring explicit sex and gory violence in television and film. Among them were people who had risked their lives fighting Nazis. Most adults were able to make rational distinctions between the right of free political speech and the license to expose young people to obscenity and gratuitous violence. </p>

<p>As for the question of scientifically proving causative links between media and behavior, the Supreme Court addressed this issue in the case of Paris Adult Theater I v. Slaton:

If we accept the unprovable assumption that a complete education requires the reading of certain books … and the well nigh universal belief that good books, plays, and art lift the spirit, improve the mind, enrich the human personality, and develop character, can we then say that a state legislature may not act on the corollary assumption that commerce in obscene books, or public exhibitions focused on obscene conduct, have a tendency to exert a corrupting and debasing impact leading to antisocial behavior? “Many of these effects may be intangible and indistinct, but they are nonetheless real.”

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<p>That opinion was written in 1973. Maybe the balance of research since then should indeed reassure us that movies like Saw are perfectly harmless entertainment. In any case, the media genie is not about to go back in the bottle regardless of what any of us think about its effects on behavior, or about censorship.</p>

[cartera45]

<p>I saw the first two. I thought the premise was interesting. Over the top gore doesn’t bother me. It’s more like a cartoon. I am much more affected by violence that is more real. For example, the scene in the Sopranos in which Dre was killed really haunted me. She was so scared and crawling along the ground - gives me chills just thinking about and I found that much more disturbing than anything in Saw.</p>

[CloseToTheEdge]

<p>So because a court, composed of lawyers and not scientists who have no experience at all in the fields of relevant research, has an opinion on the matter, that makes that opinion true? I think you fail at a fundamental level to understand what evidence is.</p>

<p>Furthermore, how does one identify what classifies as “obscene” in the first place? It is also merely subjective and what one person considers obscene someone else will not, so trying to regulate it in any way is impossible, not to mention can lead to gross violations of freedom of speech (such as the case of Christopher Hadley, who was arrested for possession “obscene” drawings). I do not need some big brother telling me what is obscene or not and what I can be permitted to watch on television or in movies. As for exposing young people, things like movies and video games have age restrictions for a reason you know. If people wish to ignore them, that is their own perogative and you have no right to tell them otherwise.</p>

[tk21769]

<p>^ Courts do consider expert witnesses. The Supreme Court opinion I cited was a reflection on expert social science testimony and the limits of that perspective. The court concluded, at that time, that the weight of scientific evidence (or lack thereof) did not override the judgments expressed in long-established local law. </p>

<p>I cited a balanced review of the literature that presented evidence of linkage, the limitations of that evidence, and the need for additional research. So I don’t believe this is a settled issue. Perhaps the balance of recent evidence has accumulated in favor of a view that there are no strong cause-effect links between media content and behavior (in which case maybe we’ll soon see an end to commercial advertising?) </p>

<p>What has really changed, it seems to me, is the public willingness and confidence to make consensus judgment calls on complex questions that have no clear-cut scientific answer. Thankfully, we reject extremes on the right and the left, but we also fail to stand up for prudent choices in the middle that are characatured as “fascist” or “socialist”. So vested interests drive the decision-making. Extreme media violence is a money-making industry. Its purveyors just love arguments that it is nothing but harmless entertainment.</p>

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I do not need some big brother telling me what is obscene or not and what I can be permitted to watch on television or in movies.

You don’t have one. You have your wish. We have a society awash in obscenity and extreme violent media. It is now up to parents, and parents alone, to try to shield their kids from it or (more likely) give up. I hope we are both correct that in the vast majority of cases, people don’t turn into serial killers after watching too many movies like Saw.</p>

<p>I understand evidence well enough to understand that on this issue it is complex and there are limits to what we can conclude. I understand the civil liberties concerns and respect individuals like you who stand up for their rights. But as a father, I also have other concerns. Consider the words of serial killer Ted Bundy shortly before he was executed. I think he could just as well have been talking about “gore porn”.<br>

My experience with pornography generally, but with pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality, is once you become addicted to it — and I look at this as a kind of addiction like other kinds of addiction — I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Until you reach a point where the pornography only goes so far, you reach that jumping off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give that which is beyond just reading it or looking at it.

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