Violence in Movies

The amount of violence shown in movies is almost directly proportional to the violence in real life. And many movies are true stories, showing real life violence on reel. Whether or not violence shown in movies has caused an increase in the amount of violence in real life is debatable, but one thing is for sure – they are related.

Over the years, the amount of violence we see in the movies has increased. Commercial films never showed violent and gory scenes in as much detail fifteen years ago, as they do now. This has probably been the reason for people getting desensitized to violence. People can tolerate watching more blood spill, more people injured, tortured or killed nowadays. This is not to say that there weren’t movies about violence made; there were. For example, ‘Life is Beautiful’, which is a film about the Holocaust, possibly one of the most violent events in history, but the audience does not see and bloodshed. But, if I were to take an example of another movie in today’s age that was about something violent, an example would be ‘Blood Diamond’. Of course, there are movies even today, that have disguised violence, but they are few.

These days, there aren’t too many movies that are “too violent” to watch, because repeated exposure to violent movies, and to violence in life itself has increased the peoples’ threshold for tolerance of violence by degrees. There is probably no way of stopping this vicious circle of violence in movies connecting with violence in real life, but it should not become the cause for us being absolutely nonchalant about somebody who’s badly hurt and needs help.