'The pornography of violence'

There are a couple of movie scenes that have been stuck in my head for years: the scene in which Edward Norton's neo-Nazi character kills an African American man via curb stomping in American History X, and the scene in which Hillary Swank's Brandon Teena is murdered in Boys Don't Cry (I suppose that would be a spoiler if Teena weren't a real person, buried 15 years this month).

But despite the true story underlying Boys Don't Cry, these are movies, featuring actors I've seen in romantic comedies, who donate money to progressive causes and have messy love affairs that my husband gobbles up on gossip blogs. (He just loves celebrity gossip.)

Reporter John Barry has a Newsweek Web Exclusive this week reflecting on another kind of violence that haunts his thoughts: videos of actual torture he watched decades ago. In it, Barry suggests that Jose Rodriguez destroyed videos of CIA torture because it is easy for us to turn a blind eye to such acts when it remains hidden in euphemisms, pretty language that we can debate, like "water boarding." After all, it is pretty much impossible to suggest that drowning is "enhanced interrogation" and not torture.

I'd like to believe that a mass broadcast of the CIA torture tapes would have created such outrage that everyone but the backwoods militiamen would pour into the streets and demand that our leaders relocate their moral centers. But I worry that when movies pack such violent punches - and as we, as a society, allow violence to seep further into all of our forms of entertainment - that images of actual torture will be anticlimactic.

I wonder this as a cynic, someone who has always believed that violent television doesn't make kids violent if parents give appropriate background on fiction versus reality and appropriate versus what-the-hell. Headlines today make me wonder if I have been wrong to doubt... or if, worse yet, morality guidance has fallen from many parental priority lists...