Blood, guts, and entertainment: a sanguine take on sanguinary diversions.

• Author: Peters, Justin
• Position: Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment - Book Review

Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment, by Harold Schechter, New York: St. Martin's Press, 208 pages, $24. 95

IN JULY, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed into law a bill that prohibited the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. Parents' groups and assorted cultural commissars applauded as the Democratic governor, citing research that purportedly showed links between real-life violence and its pixelated counterparts, promised to make Illinois a safe haven for children. "These are the games that undermine the values that we as parents want to teach our children, the values that we find in the Bible," said Blagojevich. "This law is all about empowering parents and giving them the tools they need to protect their kids."

Panics about violence and misanthropy in popular entertainment are a regularly repeating part of our modern media life. These cries often ring hollow, partially from a sense that those condemning the violence haven't themselves played the games or seen the movies, partially from a suspicion that the links they posit don't exist. I have spent hundreds of hours playing various editions of Grand Theft Auto--those roundly condemned video games that simulate a day in the life of a gun-running, pedestrian-violating, traffic-signal-disobeying car thief--and I have yet to exhibit such antisocial behavior on America's real-life roadways. Perhaps I am the exception; perhaps all others who partake of these games are bloody, slavering things who, after an hour of joystick stimulus, go and skulk about in dark alleys, waiting to cudgel unsuspecting passers-by.

"The problem with moral crusaders," writes Harold Schechter, "is an almost willful blindness to the fundamental realities of human behavior, accompanied by a sweeping ignorance of cultural history that prevents them from seeing supposedly unique manifestations of modern depravity for what they really are--i.e., simply the latest versions of perennial phenomena." This is the thesis of Schechter's provocative Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment. Schechter, who in addition to teaching 19th-century American literature at Queens College is the author of several mass-market true crime books, takes a new angle on the cultural violence issue. Rather than claiming that media violence has no impact on consumers, Schechter argues that violent entertainment is good, indeed necessary--a way to sublimate the vestigial primal urges left over...