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Natural Born Killers Essay, Research Paper

Violence is a constant on our screens whether it be an anvil falling on

a cartoon character, a war zone on the news, a fight in an action movie

or a pub brawl in a soap opera. But does this screen violence produce

behavioural effects in the viewers? This is one of the most frequent

and heatedly debated arguments in mass media. Is it the case that

audiences are effected by what they see and that the producers of media

texts are instigating or increasing violent behaviour, or do audiences

have the ability to understand what they have seen without being overly

influenced? It has to be ascertained as to whether audiences are

passive or active. This subject has caused controversy within several

of different schools of thought and ideologies over the years. They

have either wide or only slight variations of opinion so it is

difficult to come to one definite conclusion as each one also has valid

and understandable explanations. It is difficult to deny that ‘the

whole point of communicating is to influence one another by conveying

information’ (Vine, 1997), but to what extent does this influence take

control? To investigate this matter and come to a conclusion as to

whether or not screen violence does instigate violent behaviour in the

reader, we will be critically looking at two of the major ideological

models as well as using some specific media texts to validate and/or

criticise these theories.

First there is the Hypodermic Needle or Hypodermic Syringe effect. This

theory has it’s root in 1950’s America when dominant businesses and the

then government wanted to discover how far the public were influenced

by what they saw on television. The Hypodermic Theory came from this

Media Effects model, which had a heavy emphasis in psychology.

Businesses and the government alike wanted to know how much ‘media is

supposedly ‘injected’ into the consciousness of an audience’ via

television (Price, 1993). They wanted to know if through this

relatively new medium the public could be persuaded unquestioningly to,

for example, vote for a certain political party or buy a specific brand

of washing powder.

The Hypodermic model proposes that the media has a very direct and

extremely immediate effect on the general public, who accept the

injected message without question due to their passiveness. It is the

idea that producers of media texts can persuade us to do what ever they

want and we will unquestionably comply. When we bring the subject of

violence into this field, a follower of this ideology would say that

the violent behaviour witnessed on screen would be influentially

accepted by the audience without question. For example, if a reader was

shown the notorious and much discussed film ‘Natural Born Killers’

(Oliver Stone 1994), the Hypodermic model would say that due to it’s

alleged glamorization of motiveless violence, where the main

protagonists are seen as romantic folk heroes who get away with their

crimes in the end, the reader would simply take in the message, accept

it and then violent behaviour would stem from that. ‘Natural Born

Killers’ is notable for the fact that the story spins the idea of

heroes and villains onto its head. Traditionally those who commit the

violence are the villains who are punished for their crimes, while the

police are seen as heroes who save the day. In this instance the police

are overly violent, indeed one of them is a murderer himself, and these

authority figures end up being punished. The main characters of Mickey

and Mallory Knox (Woody Harelson and Juliette Lewis) are the ‘natural

born killers’ who violently slaughter without apparent reason, yet due

to Mallory’s abusive upbringing and witty one-liners they gain sympathy

and, in a sense, likability.

One of the Hypodermic model’s faults is that it assumes the audience

will take in what they’ve seen and will be influenced by it in a

negative way. There are positive aspects which can influence but these

are largely over-shadowed and conveniently forgotten. This model would

say that the confused messages of right and wrong within ‘Natural Born

Killers’ would inject the reader to accept the violence of the film and

then imitate the behaviour. If the killers had been seen ultimately

punished in the end, it would be a positive reading, as the reader

would know not to mimic as punishment is where that behaviour leads.

Ultimately it is children who are seen to be the most at risk from

these effects. David Buckingham suggests that children are regarded as

not being mentally equipped to understand that what they see is not

what they should do:

‘Thus imitative violence, which has remained the central focus of

anxiety in such debates, is largely seen as arising from the inability

to distinguish between fiction and reality. Children copy what they see

on television because they lack the experience and the intellectual

capacities that might enable them to see through the illusion of

reality which the medium provides.’ (Buckingham, ed. Barker and Petley,

1997, p33)

But it is not just children who need protecting, according to the

Hypodermic model.

Another problem arises for the Hypodermic Needle when one considers a

text which has a message,

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