the timboucher experience

I just revisited one of my favorite articles, “Violent Media is Good for Kids” by comic book author, Gerard Jones. He later expanded this article into a full length book called “Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence“. The book, however, doesn’t really pack the punch that this article does in just a few short paragraphs.

This article basically explodes the notion that kids ought to be kept away from any media depictions of violence, whether they be comics, movies, games, music, whatever. He talks about how society disallows kids from encountering & expressing their negative emotions, but how media & stories can help kids do just that in an appropriate form. I like this passage where he talks about how reading the Incredible Hulk helped him through his awkward passage through adolescence.

The character who caught me, and freed me, was the Hulk: overgendered and undersocialized, half-naked and half-witted, raging against a frightened world that misunderstood and persecuted him. Suddenly I had a fantasy self to carry my stifled rage and buried desire for power. I had a fantasy self who was a self: unafraid of his desires and the world’s disapproval, unhesitating and effective in action. “Puny boy follow Hulk!” roared my fantasy self, and I followed.

For me, the characters that served the same purpose were the Punisher, Wolverine & Batman.

“Fear, greed, power-hunger, rage: these are aspects of our selves that we try not to experience in our lives but often want, even need, to experience vicariously through stories of others,” writes Melanie Moore, Ph.D., a psychologist who works with urban teens. “Children need violent entertainment in order to explore the inescapable feelings that they’ve been taught to deny, and to reintegrate those feelings into a more whole, more complex, more resilient selfhood.”

In fact, the only thing that I don’t like about this article is its insistence that these are functions which stories serve only for children. In fact, I would argue that all people use stories in much this same regard, whether their focus is rage & violence, or some other types of emotions and experiences. Maybe the way people use stories & media is as sort of emotional proving grounds - either to integrate new content into their lives, or to support and maintain how they already are. In fact, I think buried somewhere in this soil is the seed of a better, more useful definition of mythology & religion. And I aim to dig it up, and then beat the living hell out of it.

MORE

> I have posted a follow-up to this article, based on some comments I received.

• Sex & Violence in Media
• Rudolph & Fairy Tales
• Violence is good for you!
• Terrorism & Theatrical Violence
• Hate & Nonviolence