Violence in Text, Film, and Pictures

It is the “responsibility” of the free press to provide as much non-filtered information as possible, specifically regarding violent images, without consideration of whether the people will care for the information, or what they will think of it (Source B).

I specifically want to talk about one of my body paragraphs from the essay. I’m not going to write the body paragraph here but explain the key points that I hopefully conveyed in the actual essay. Before reading Maus, we read a comic which explained the co-dependence of images and text. There were varying levels, but nonetheless, both images and text could represent the same idea but offer an even greater understanding to the reader if used together in the appropriate manner. Thus, if a violent image depicts something, then text could do the exact same. When we read The Things They Carried, there were no images, yet all the gory visuals that could have been given to the audience in the form pictures were rather given by textual descriptions. So is violent text banned? Not really. Yes, some text is banned in schools and libraries in America, but majority of text depicting violence is free to be read by anyone who wishes. The idea of restricting what people can read to a large extent is one very unlikely to occur in America as not only is text censorship infamously connotated with the fascist Nazi Germany with their book burnings, but it would require some moral superior to judge what is good for the people and what isn’t, and such a superior never has, and never will exist. Using the same logic, why should violent pictures be restricted? The exact same content can be described using words, and the words won’t be censored. I even used the example of films – moving pictures. I don’t know the actual logistics of how videos work, but at the end of the day, whether literally or figuratively, a video is just a string of snapshots of particular instances in time. Therefore, a violent video is just a string of violent images. Are videos depicting the cruelty of war censored? Again, not really. There’s even a time of year when Hollywood releases tons of WW2 movies regardless of whether there is a demand for them. At the same time, nobody really complains. Is it worse to see a picture of someone being shot, or watching the whole backstory of the person, feeling attached to the person, and then watching them get shot? The latter is worse. And why do people not complain? Because they know what is right and wrong, they already have a sense of morality within them so they don’t need some higher power telling them whether what they saw was appropriate. Some people will watch a violent movie and learn something, while others will watch it and never think about it again, but nobody complains about the movie’s existence. In other words, people don’t need a higher power telling them whether films depicting violence should be watched or not. So if text and film do not and will not have heavy restrictions regarding violent content, why should pictures?