This is number 140 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THIRTY YEARS AGO, I was driving through a shopping center parking lot to my company’s mailbox. My three-year-old daughter was safely strapped in the back seat in her car seat, on a fun outing with Dad to the ‘maybops.’ I stopped at a stop sign, then started through. A large white pickup truck came blasting up a cross-street and through his stop sign, turning next to me.
I was shocked and slammed on my brakes, yelling out, “Geez! You don’t even stop at a stop sign?” I paused to catch my breath and be sure no one else was rounding the corner to approach, then proceeded a few hundred feet to the parking space in front of the mailbox rental store. I rolled up my window, got out, and opened the back door to get my daughter out of her car seat.
Just at that moment, the white pickup pulled up across the back of my car and the driver yelled out the window at me.
“Did you say something to me?”
“I was just commenting on how I was nearly hit when you ran the stop sign,” I answered, a little hot under the collar.
“You should be more careful then, shouldn’t you!” he yelled back.
Oh, I was ready for a fight. But I had just enough presence of mind to think of my daughter sitting waiting for me. Was taking on this belligerent and reckless asshole worth the risk of having my daughter grow up without a father?
“You’re right. I should,” I answered. He scowled and peeled out as he drove away.
I recalled this event when I was speaking to a church group later and one of the older parishioners said, “I was hoping you’d finish the story by saying you saw him in a ditch later on.”
That would have served him right. He’d have gotten his just desserts. Righteousness would be rewarded.
And the entire point of the story was missed.
It wasn’t about him getting what he deserved. It was about my daughter growing up with a father who loved and cared for her every day of her life. And still does.
But I think the majority of us believe he should have been punished, no matter the cost. We’ve been conditioned to that all our lives.
Oh, yes. The title of this post. “Pow! Wham! Thwack! Zap!” If you had a television in the sixties, it was hard not to be exposed to the somewhat campy antics of Adam West as Batman. It wasn’t proper to actually show fighting on-screen, so the show adopted fight noise signs (I think they tallied 86 of them) to flash whenever a fight started. “Krunch zlonk klonk bam kapow ouch whamm zap kapow urkkk zok biff zzzzzwap.” That was just in one episode!
Of course, we’d been conditioned to television violence in the mid-fifties when nearly every episode of Gunsmoke featured James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon outdrawing a bad guy on the main street of Dodge City. Maybe you watched Wyatt Earp during that era or The Lone Ranger, even earlier.
I’ve become accustomed to a huge number of ‘reels’ in my feed on social media. And some of them have fairly good storylines, even though the AI generated dubbing and subtitles are often strange. I’m told that many of those reels are based on Chinese telenovels, but the AI translation, dubbing, and subtitles often result in humorous juxtapositions. In nearly every episode I watch, someone gets slapped for being an idiot or offending someone, spits up blood after being hit in a Kung Fu fight, or is simply killed by the stronger of the contesting parties. The violence is a feature, even of stories that are supposed to be romances and period dramas.
I’m sure we could go on with dozens of examples from our lives—entertainment featuring violence. But why?
It’s all about people getting what they deserve, without having to wait for the slow wheels of justice to turn. Punishment is instant and final. If it isn’t final, the perp rises to offend again until he is put in his place permanently.
In entertainment, we’ve come to expect this kind of frontier justice. The one-time popular legal dramas, like Perry Mason, focused on proving guilt or innocence in a court of law. But we don’t see as much of that kind of slow grinding of justice as we see of the instant punishment. The TV episode only lasts an hour or the movie lasts two hours and change. We have to get to a resolution in that time and the quick and easy way to get there is to have the bad guy confess or kill him.
I see other reasons for this, as well.
1. It’s a quick way to resolve an open plot element.
2. It satisfies a natural desire to see evil brought to judgment.
3. It avoids complications that an author doesn’t want to deal with or simply doesn’t have the knowledge to deal with.
4. It’s thrilling and gets the blood pumping.
5. It’s good for an emotional release or catharsis.
6. It’s what we wish would happen in real life.
And when I look at these issues, I have to ask if I fall back on them in my own writing.
Oh, yes. I’m actually ashamed to admit it.
I can’t help but wonder if this has taken a toll on our society. At least in America and possibly worldwide. We know there are evils in our world, and it is much easier to create a superpower to get rid of them, whether legal or not. Why wait for the wheels of justice to turn? Just fucking kill them!
But we lose something in the process. What we fail to ponder is not whether the evil one gets what he deserves, but whether we live a better life because of it. If I had given the truck driver what he deserved thirty years ago, would my daughter have a father?
The biggest danger of a steady stream of violence in entertainment is that we become so accustomed to it that we begin to see it as the acceptable way to resolve conflict or offense. Your colleague is acting like an idiot? Slap some sense into him! An insurance executive raises rates? Shoot him! A protester yells at you? Kill him! A spouse objects to your plans? Beat her! It is the example we see in entertainment every day—and it looks very realistic.
I find it is harder and harder to preach a gospel of ‘de-escalation.’ That was the theme of the fifth LNDtH1 volume, The Rock. How can we de-escalate when our very existence causes increased ire on the part of others—even justification for them to reach a final solution?
How will we face our children when we openly embrace the concept of violence as entertainment? I wonder if there is any other way.
I’m afraid I don’t have an answer.