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This video talks about the issue of the impact popular culture has to violence in schools.  With popular culture advocating more and more violence in many ways through the media, as a result school violence, and many other forms of violence as well, are increasing.

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In this video, the two hosts talk about domestic violence and how it is portrayed in mass media (popular culture).  It talks about how certain popular songs specifically refer to domestic violence in such a nonchalant manner.

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On the other side of the argument, this article debates the issue of violence in popular culture in saying that it is just an excuse and a distraction.  It is saying that the real problem is the people, not the influence of popular culture.  Although this may be true, I believe that violence in popular culture influences individuals even to a slight extent.

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This article talks about violence in popular culture and how extreme it has become.  The authors debate that something needs to be done about this violence, however argues that nothing will be done because this violence sells.

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Education is a vaccine for violence. Edward James Olmos

Edward James Olmos speaks how it is inevitable for an individual to not have some sort of violence in them especially when educated in our type of culture.

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I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. Hunter S. Thompson

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/violence.html

Hunter S. Thompson speaks about how certain topics, including violence, seem to be a necessity for people at some point or another in their lives.

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This is a screenshot from the video game Grand Theft Auto V, which was recently released in September 2013.  This game was extremely popular and sold millions of copies.  By its, and other video games like it, success, it speaks volumes to how violence is prevalent in popular culture.

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This is an image of the movie poster for Shoot 'Em Up the 2007 action film.  In today's culture it seems like more and more posters are exhibiting violence to their audiences.  Is this type of poster encouraging violence?

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Pushing Grisly Boundaries Since 1895

SEX AND VIOLENCE ARE the twin engines that have long fired up American movies and their harshest critics. This isn’t exactly news — or new. In 1934 Francis D. Culkin, a Republican congressman, riding a wave of political and religious outrage against the movies, declared that “steadily the stream of pollution which has flowed forth from Hollywood has become wilder and more turbulent.”

By July 1934 the industry agreed to enforce the Production Code, deciding that self-censorship was better than risking the federally mandated kind. Yet while movies instituted regulations, the industry made sure that its stories were ambiguous enough to contain vice and its comeuppance too. As the historian Tino Balio writes, as early as 1927, the industry understood that if the code was to work, it had to allow the studios to develop a system that was elastic enough to please and appease different viewers. Or, as one insider put it in 1927, movies that worked for “the sophisticated mind but which would mean nothing to the unsophisticated and inexperienced.” Under the code the bad would be punished, but only after they had spent the entire movie flouting the very morals the code enforced.

I wonder what Culkin would have made of Oliver Stone’s “Savages,” a 2012 release about drugs and dudes that opens with a spooky scene in which a killer beheads some men with a chain saw. One problem for those who would prefer their violence less graphically deployed is that big studios historically play it safe by recycling the same stories, character types and bang-bang, shoot-’em-up, kill-or-be-killed, vengeance is mine, yours, ours distractions. The enterprising Web site All Outta Bubblegum, which racks up the dead, mostly in action flicks, estimates that the “killcount” for “Marvel’s The Avengers,” the highest grossing movie last year, is 964 — which I suspect is higher than that for “Savages.” “The Avengers” received a PG-13 rating: “Parents strongly cautioned.” The more explicit “Savages” was rated R for, among its other attractions, “strong brutal and grisly violence.”

If any of this seems shocking, it shouldn’t be. Movies have been transfixed by violence from their beginning. Among the earliest subjects for nonfiction cinema were war, battles and death, with execution films, as the scholar Mary Ann Doane has observed, a popular subgenre. The film pioneer Thomas A. Edison, in an early example of synergistic branding, advertised two innovations at once in his 1901 exploitation item “Execution of Czolgosz, With Panorama of Auburn Prison,” a re-creation of the electrocution of President William McKinley’s assassin. Far more disturbing is “Electrocuting an Elephant” (1903), in which Topsy, a real Coney Island elephant, was killed on camera with 6,600 volts of electricity with help from Edison’s assistants. (The poor creature had been deemed a menace, having killed several men. Edison had other animals publicly electrocuted in his fight against alternating current.)

By the time he fried Topsy, Edison had already turned death into a spectacle, as in “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,” a wee shocker from 1895, when movies were still watched on viewing machines called Kinetoscopes. Ms. Doane observes that the execution film “manifests an intense fascination with the representation of death,” and that contemporary viewers took notice of the paradox of these images in a medium that, after all, captured bodies in their lifelike glory. It is a paradox that has troubled us for more than a century, as we wring our hands and argue whether bloody life imitates bloody art or the reverse. In the end all that remains clear is that whether in stark black or white or deepest red, American movies have been killing characters since 1895 — and that we like to watch.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/03/arts/critics-on-violence-in-media.html?_r=0#/#dargis

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On 'The Following', and Violence in American Pop Culture

The February cultural slump has set in, a lull between the new show premieres and the Oscars and book awards at the end of the month. To pass the time I’ve been catching up Fox’s new ultraviolent attempt at a hit, The Following. It stars Kevin Bacon as an FBI investigator hunting a serial killer played by James Purefoy. Purefoy’s killer is a former Poe scholar, if one given to rather simple readings of Poe’s work. (There’s a lot of blather framed in blood metaphors, i.e., “it will bleed into your work.”) And through some kind of virtuoso hackery he has become a kind of cult leader on the Internet, with minions now carrying out his violent plan with self-conscious artfulness.

Perhaps for some that does not announce itself as an irresistible premise. I myself began watching out of what is either pity or schadenfreude for Kevin Bacon, I haven’t decided. (He’s a cautionary tale for would-be weekend venture capitalists. Invest it all in Madoff, and in your 50s you’ll find yourself doing crappy network procedurals to keep the lights on!) But it’s also because I have, and share with what I suspect is a large proportion of Americans, an embarrassing fascination with serial killer stories.

But only three episodes in with The Following, already it’s work to keep going. The scripting is inept, the acting barely competent. The cult-by-social-media concept, which in more intelligent hands could have been a nice metaphor for the way that violence creeps into the smaller corners of American life, is too literal to be interesting.

Yet this kind-of-crappy show does, unintentionally, raise the interesting questions about what kinds of violence American culture is willing to confront, and which it isn’t. As the critic Maggie Nelson recently remarked in her The Art of Cruelty, it feels “Tipper-Gore-esque” to even complain about the seriousness of violence in popular culture these days. Wall-to-wall coverage of ultimately-fictional satanic panics and trenchcoat mafias has made us cynics. It’s just that instead of being a matter of television glorifying violence in any real way, it feels like we’re being spoonfed ersatz catharsis these days. You might feel that you’re confronting the horror, but instead you’re just glossing over the real problems at the heart of it.

For example, The Following derives most of its claim to creepiness from buckets of blood and guts. Critics, on reviewing the first few episodes, dutifully remarked on the gratuitousness of it all. Willa Paskin, at Salon, described her experience of watching the first four episodes as “nauseous.” Fair enough; viscera can be gross. But curious thing sometimes happens when we take gore as a stand-in for atmosphere, like Alessandra Stanley at The New York Times seemed to. She argued that because the show was “bleak and relentlessly scary,” it was taking its violence seriously. But is the chief problem with violence that it is gross, or “scary?” Is the “scariness” of violence the way to get people to turn in their guns? Or does it make them cling to them?

The claim to “bleakness” begins to fall apart too, once you see how directly The Following embodies our cultural fetish for a particular kind of “innocent-looking” young white woman victim. The choice of Poe as reference point reflects that. He, too, was fascinated by dead, idealized women, memorializing his lost Lenores and Annabel Lees in beautiful poetry that bore the marks of fetish. So far, nearly every victim the show has depicted is a rote sort of co-ed, blonde as often as not. Damsels in distress provide the proper “dramatic” contrast, between pure good and pure evil. They have done so since the days of the Romantics, who invented this whole idea of murder as an art, an expression of something.

Well, one might say, there ought to be drama in a television show, oughtn’t there? Sure, but our preferences on that score have leaked into fact, the more the news feels some vague impulse to “entertain.” This has concrete effects. Missing White Woman Syndrome is now a widely used term; we are aware of the (real) news media’s obsession with damsels in distress. Their single-mindedness has a habit of eclipsing coverage of the other kinds of violence plaguing America.

Consider, after all, that real-life serial killers do not generally work on a casting director’s schematic. Their victims tend to be, systematically, people who live on the fringes of power. The most obvious category of those are sex workers, the victims both of Jack the Ripper and Robert Pickton. Many of John Wayne Gacy’s male victims fell in that category, too. Even Ted Bundy, who had more of an attraction to the media-friendly co-ed, often picked up runaways.

And it isn’t just the victims who bear no resemblance to real violence. In a funny way, the serial killer narrative feels a bit dated. It has been a long time since the heartland, as one might put it, was terrorized by one. Jeffrey Dahmer died in prison nearly twenty years ago. There are perhaps others operative, I’m not up on the latest investigations. But the terror that plagues Americans today is something more akin what happened last December 14. That is the specter of violence that’s truly haunting us. Yet somehow there is something more unspeakable in James Holmes or Jared Loughner or Adam Lanza than in a crazy guy who rants about Poe and orders beautiful young people around. It’s just not the story America wants to tell itself about itself.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/172777/following-and-violence-american-pop-culture#