Does violence on the screen really lead to violence off them?
Violence in movies and video games normalises a culture of cruelty says Dr Henry Giroux, a leading voice on education, media, and democracy.
Dr Henry Giroux, a leading voice on education, media, and democracy, says modern entertainment packages violence as a product, turning brutality into something exciting, routine, and even justified.
“The line between entertainment and everyday life gets blurred in this tsunami of violence, this hurricane of violence, which operates at almost every level of American society,” he told RNZ’s Afternoons.
The United States, he says, is now a militarised nation.
California Highway Patrol officers clear a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus.
Mario Tama / Getty Images via AFP
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“Every aspect of the United States in some ways hangs under the threat of violence and fear, deportation, abduction, universities being turned into police precincts.
“So, it all is part of a larger totality that, unfortunately, you may not want to hear this term, but it seems to me speaks to an emerging Fascism in the United States.”
Tanks and army personnel “in full gear as if they're going into a war zone” in Los Angeles is an example, he says.
This creates “an enormous and powerful culture of fear,” he says.
“It creates a kind of cartography of cruelty and potential violence that now has become an almost daily presence in the United States.”
A line can also be drawn, he says, between the normalisation of violence and celebrity culture.
“Celebrity culture in the United States, generally speaking, is really wedded to a neoliberal culture that basically cheapens and commodifies everything and gives ignorance a stylish glow.”
