After September.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher
• Position: Reel World - Violence in mass media

FOLLOWING THE SEPT. 11 ATTACKS on New York and Washington, several media outlets contacted me for my opinion on what I thought might be the future of cinema violence after these horrendous episodes. During the same period, I kept heating remarks that reminded me how media saturated we are as a nation. One person said, "It's like `The Towering Inferno'"! One of the onlookers at the scene of the World Trade Center collapse exclaimed, "It's like `Armageddon.' "(I tend to doubt he was referring to the Bible.) One of the most recurrent remarks, which must be seen as an overarching concept above all reactions to September, is the comment: "America will never be the same." The assumption here is that the U.S. is a stranger to violence, at least when brought to America's shores from another nation.

For those asking me for comments on the future of the media, I could offer some reasonably educated guesswork. Certainly, the film industry will protect its credibility by showing some degree of sensitivity in the short term. The Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Collateral Damage" was pulled from its holiday release. TV shows like "The West Wing" offered preachy, after-school-special episodes on the wrongness of terrorism. Still, will film and television change--and should they?

Last century saw incredible violence, including two world wars, the introduction of nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and countless domestic and foreign atrocities. In reflection of the times, the arts became as violent as at any period of world history. During the Vietnam debacle, the cinema became especially bloody, and people debated the amount of gore on TV's "family hour."

One of the problems of the eternal debate about violence and its potential impact on the public is officialdom's constant failure to make distinctions. Some key films of the 1960s and 1970s, such as "The Wild Bunch" and "Taxi Driver," contained a great deal of bloodshed, but at the same time offered a critique of violence and the motivations behind it. The same issue is true of genres viewed as lowbrow, their products lumped together by people who don't care to watch them, but instead point fingers at their creators and viewers. Movies like "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" are unnerving visions of a society turned upside down, while "Halloween" is for the most part a pale rip-off of the best aspects of director Alfred Hitchcock.

Robert Dole once complained on the...