Fictional Murder

It's probably swimming against the tide of popular culture to say
so, but I'm sick of the amount of fictional murder we are exposed to
these days. I can understand the attraction, because we all have an
interest in other peoples' lives, but there are enough real murders in
the world to satisfy this prurient streak, surely? Why do writers need
to invent more? Like fast food and cheap reality television shows,
stories involving murder, even mass murder, are getting so common as to
become a hardly noticeable background to our lives.

The parallel with fast food is interesting, because we all know that
it's no good for us, but we enjoy it none the less. In the same way,
can a constant diet of violence towards other human beings, even
fictional ones, be any good for our collective psyche?

In the 1860's, when Raskolnikov commits a graphically-described double
axe murder in Crime and Punishment, it must have been genuinely
disturbing to Dostoyevsky's readers. Sadly, that is no longer the case,
and just like junkies who have to keep increasing their dose to get the
same level of high; to keep shocking their readers, authors must resort
to ever growing levels of violence, which is becoming revolting in both
quality and quantity. I'm not saying fictional characters shouldn't be
allowed to kill one another, but does it need to be so excessive?

Another unfortunate trend explored in Crime and Punishment is
identification with the perpetrator, not the victim. By the end of the
novel, despite his being clearly a worthless murdering scumbag with few
redeeming features, most readers are hoping Raskolnikov will manage to
get away with it. I suspect Dostoyevsky's intention was to deliberately
manipulate his readers' feelings, to show them an uncomfortable truth
about themselves. However, it set a bad precedent. How else can you
explain how hit-men and serial killers have become modern heroes?

It would be easy to see a conspiracy theory in all this. The Romans
developed gladiatorial combat to stop the population at home from going
soft (as they saw it), and remind them that their empire was founded on
bloody conquest. You could argue that today's flood of fictional
bloodletting is intended to desensitize us all to this crime, so that
when we see the real thing on the news, we just sigh and accept it. An
even worse case can be made for shoot-'em-up video games. If everyone
you see on your screen is an enemy, when you're sent to Iraq and there
are real people in your gunsight (or on a weapon system display), they
cease to be human and become simply a target to be destroyed.

The counter argument is, of course, that reading, viewing or writing
about murder doesn't necessarily imply an intention to go and commit
such crimes for real. Some would even argue that, contrarily, these
fantasies are a natural (if often unacknowledged) part of the human
psyche. Who has not thought about killing someone (boss, former lover,
other driver) in revenge for something? There is a parallel here with
pornography - if you could ban it, would there be fewer rapes as a
result, or more?

So what's the answer? Well for a start, I wouldn't want to put myself
in the self-righteous moralist's camp and advocate censorship -
artistic freedom is an important human right - but something needs to
be done. Sadly, in the same way that intrusive celebrity stories sell
newspapers, murder sells books, TV &; films. It would be na?ve to
pretend otherwise. There is no simple or prescriptive answer, and just
as some people will always titillate themselves with pornography,
graphic descriptions of murder will always have an audience. The
challenge is to move the mainstream away from such things. This can
only be possible through a change of public attitude. In the way that a
majority would now find gratuitous sexual violence unacceptable, maybe
some future generation will reject unnecessary fictional killing.

***

Lucien Romano, 2005