V for Violence

I've written about a couple of movies and television shows celebrating twentieth anniversaries this year, but I've avoided the one TV show that arguably made the biggest impact: Haim Saban and Shuki Levy's localization of a cheesy Japanese sentai show, "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers." I was in middle school by the time this thing hit the airwaves, but I had younger siblings and cousins, and I saw a good chunk of the show's early seasons. And I was also old enough to be very cognizant about the worries among parents about how the fantasy violence was affecting their kids. I remember a news magazine show rather ham-fisted showing possible causality between youngsters watching "Power Rangers" and increased aggression, violence, and behavioral issues.

Well, now it's two decades later, the TV Parental Guidelines have been with us for fifteen years, and V-chips for ten. The original "Power Rangers" generation has grown up into technology obsessed twenty-somethings, and "Power Rangers" is still churning out new episodes. The franchise was acquired by Disney in the buyout of the FOX Kids holdings back in 2002, and Haim Saban eventually regained control of it around 2010. The controversy over the show's content has all but vanished, as "Power Rangers" viewers didn't grow up to be any more violent or disturbed than any previous generation. Mention of "Power Rangers" has lost the menacing overtones it once had among parents, and has instead acquired something of a nostalgic vibe, especially among Millennials.

This shift in perception is emblematic of how debate over violence in the media has mostly disappeared. A recent study from the American Academy of Pediatrics pointed out that PG-13 movies contained more incidents of violence than R-rated ones, and the reaction from the public seemed to be a collective shrug. Oh, there was some hand-wringing from the usual watchdog groups, but hardly much uproar from the mainstream. After all, we live in an era of superhero movies battling it out for box office dominance every summer, and violent anti-heroes like Tony Soprano and Walter White making television worth tuning in for. The "Hunger Games" sequel just had a massive opening weekend and garnered remarkably positive critical notices. Not bad for a film about teenagers forced to participate in bloodsports for the amusement and distraction of an oppressed populace.

I have very mixed feelings about violence in media these days. On the one hand, I like that the envelope is being pushed, that we can have movies like "Hunger Games" and "Ender's Game" that use violence and its repercussions to tell interesting, meaningful stories for young adult audiences that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. On the other hand, there are so many, many films that lean on violence as a crutch, that use it badly, and far, far too often. The recent Superman reboot, "Man of Steel" went completely overboard on the the violence, sacrificing pacing, suspense, character development, and story to an endless brawl between two combatants who could hardly even feel the effects of the carnage being wrought. Zack Snyder is particularly guilty of this. I still maintain he ruined the "Watchmen" movie by pushing the content to ridiculous, indulgent extremes.

Ah, but "Watchmen" wasn't aimed at children and adolescents, and that's true, but it was made with the kind of sensibility that we see much too often in mainstream films for that audience, the one that assumes that violence is inherently interesting on its own. It's not. In fact, violence can be downright boring when executed badly, when it's unoriginal, perfunctory, prurient, and the filmmaker is too preoccupied with slick production values. Tamer PG-13 violence can be more problematic than the gorier, R-rated kind because it doesn't show consequences. It's "fantasy violence," to use the TV term, where nobody bleeds, nobody suffers a concussion from being knocked out, and nobody ends up paralyzed from a misaimed punch. It undercuts what actually makes violence compelling, which is the potential for serious harm.

And that takes us back to "Power Rangers." Personally, I never saw much harm in the show. The laser guns and karate chops didn't seem that much worse than the POW! and BIFF! type fisticuffs I used to watch on the old "Batman" TV series. The biggest difference to me was that the focus of the stories was almost always on the fighting, on the repetitive, escalating battles that always ended with a towering Godzilla-style monster being blown to smithereens. I keep being reminded of that pattern in a lot of bad mainstream action films for kids and young adults, particularly the "Transformers" movies. What bothered me about the show wasn't that it was silly or violent or foreign. It was that it was lazy. And I suspect it conditioned a lot of kids early on to expect laziness out of their media.

That's the part I still have a problem with.
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