Violence in Movies

If you watch movies these days you know you're sure to see some sort of violence whether it be a killing, beating, or some kind of cruel act. Now every time you watch TV, you are likely to see a commercial promoting a new movie with a catch title such as "Scream" or "Fear." Whether you think these movies are necessary or not, production companies know they will get the viewers and this is why they keep making them.

I was watching a movie the other day, with my lovely girlfriend of course, by the name of "The Matrix." The title caught both our eyes as we browsed the aisles of the movie store searching for something good to watch. Seeing that my girlfriend does like violence in movies and thinks its unreal, it seemed like a good enough choice for me. The back of the box showed nothing of violence and the description gave no hints to shootings and killings. The beginning of the movie went well but about a half hour into it, as soon as we could blink our eyes, one of the characters pulls out about twelve machine guns planning to kill the whole city I guess. After blasting all 10,000 of the bullets into the ten guys he was trying to kill, my girlfriend got right up, marched over to the VCR in disgust, and pushed stop before I could get one word of protest out. As you can see, these days there's not much you can do to get away from watching a movie with even a little violence in it.

Why is it that violence attracts us to watch certain movies? Is it the adrenalin rush we get when the good guy pulls out his machine gun and blasts away twenty of the bad guys? Is it the suspense you can feel in your bones before the killer pops out of the shower? Whatever it is, it brings us back time and time again to watch these violent movies. Today even movies with Disney hitched to their names contain small amounts of violence that is driving these thoughts of aggression into our heads like a nail into a board.

Everyday I watch the news, and everyday I see some new story of a child who shot another kid or choke slammed another kid breaking his back or some other meaningless act of violence. It seems that in more and more of these cases though, the children are blaming there stupidity on what they saw in a movie the night before or what they watched on Monday Night Nitro. Are these just excuses for there acts or is this the main reason why these kids are doing these things?