Friday, March 23, 2012

Hunger Games Debate: Is Reading Less Graphic than Viewing?

According to this Boston Globe article, disputes are popping up across the country between parents and children. While the battle may be nothing new, the particular catalyst is. The premiere of The Hunger Games has parents questioning if their children can handle the violence. What's interesting to me is that many of the children have already been exposed to the violence through the books:
A big part of the problem is that many fourth- and fifthgraders have read the novels and therefore feel they have earned the right to see the film.
Personally, I would have a hard time telling my child that she couldn't see the film adaptation of a book I allowed her to read. That's not to say that I accept outright that fourth- and fifth-graders should all be reading the book. It is definitely violent--though I wouldn't say it's particularly graphic. I've only read the first book in the series, but I thought it had a lot of complex messages about social practices and, depending on my child's individual level of maturity and comprehension, I'd let her read it, but I can see how other parents would make different decisions.

However, I'm not sure I agree with the parents (and experts) who feel that seeing the violence on screen is worse than reading it:
Children don’t like to hear it, but specialists say that reading about violence isn’t as scary as watching it. “It’s a gut experience as opposed to a head experience,’’ said Michael Rich, director of Children’s Hospital Boston’s Center on Media and Child Health. “A movie is very direct. You are seeing it, you are hearing it, as compared with translating it from black ink on a page into something in your own mind.’’
I won't argue that our brains don't process words and images differently, but I can't believe that "translating it from black ink" isn't a heart-wrenching and emotionally-involved process.

It makes me think of my first time reading The Giver, another dystopic young adult novel with some very complex social commentary. I read The Giver as a child, probably around fourth or fifth grade myself. I remember the scene where the protagonist views his father injecting a baby (one of a pair of twins, and twins aren't allowed) with a serum to kill it. The book describes the needle going into the vein on the baby's forehead. It describes the baby laughing and cooing and then going still. I vividly saw that scene play out in my mind. I can still vividly see it when I think about it now. Seeing it on a screen could not have been any worse.

In fact, growing up watching films where violence was frequently glorified or played up for pure entertainment value, I have become a little desensitized to seeing it on the screen. Here, for instance, is a scene from Jurassic Park where a t-rex devours a guy on a toilet, legs swinging from his mouth.


Basically, if The Hunger Games are too violent for my child to see, then they are also too violent for her to read. I believe her imagination is capable of more than Hollywood special effects.

What do you think? Is written violence easier to handle than filmed violence? How do you decide what you'll let your children read/view? How do you respond to media violence yourself?

9 comments:

  1. From my own experience (I am a "visual" reader), I know that words are just as powerful as film. When I read Stephen King's _It_, I would read until sun-up because I would get freaked out by some of his written images playing as visual in my head. Stories have brought me to tears as well. Tension in action books raises my heart rate. It's simply ridiculous, and reductive and insulting to writers and readers alike, to restrict one medium and not the other, to say that reading is not as emotionally engaging as film. Has Michael Rich ever read a book?

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    1. I'm glad you mentioned Stephen King's It. I read that book when I was about 14, and then I saw the film. While reading the book, I was filled with horrific images (blood-filled sinks, children's arms ripped off as they went into sewers). When I saw the film, none of those scenes were nearly as vivid as they were in my imagination (except maybe Tim Curry's performance as Pennywise--he was pretty horrifying). Maybe that's just the limitations of the special effects of the time, which--admittedly--have come a long way, but I don't think that's all there is to it.

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  2. I think how much & how verbal and visual representations of violence affect people varies wildly. My PhD is in modern/contemporary British and postcolonial literature--if I couldn't handle disturbing literature, I would never have finished the degree. But film representations of violence--especially of sexual violence and of torture--or anything else that's disturbing TOTALLY traumatize me, indelibly. The handful of scary movies I've ill-advisedly allowed myself to see, even those I only saw in small pieces and/or over a decade ago, haunt me: I don't seem to be able to process the images as effectively as I process the words. Verbal representations *move* me as deeply (much more so, actually), emotionally and ethically, but they don't screw me up.

    My husband's pretty much the opposite, though. We'll just have to help our children discover and work with their own reactions as they develop ...

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    1. That's really interesting, but I guess it makes sense since we respond to media differently in other ways as well. And you're definitely right about having to handle some horrifying descriptions in postcolonial lit. There's a scene from Veronique Tadjo's Shadow of Imana that still haunts me three years later.

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  3. I tend to find visual images more disturbing than written images, and I have nightmares about things I have seen rather than things I have read. I think that for The Hunger Games, it's a matter of being very aware of how your particular child reacts to imagery, and preparing her or him carefully.

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  4. Yeah, I think there's a difference, too. I find films / movies much harder to process than books and I think this is partly that I find it harder to remember that it's not real (it's real people pretending after all).

    However, movies - especially at the theatre - are different in that they enforce a pace. Movies don't stop, even if I get upset. Books I can always put down for a bit, even if it's just a minute or two, and if I start crying I can't read any more. So it's different.

    There's also the treatment of violence in cinema - the books are pretty good about the violence, whereas I can imagine parents being wary of the film if they're expecting a standard Hollywood shooting-people-is-fun-with-extra-sexy portrayal. (FWIW I understand the film has done fairly well on avoiding this but it's certainly one reason why I wouldn't want to see it, and I'm almost 20 years out of middle school)

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  5. I'm in the middle of this debate at home - http://ashinid.blogspot.com/2012/03/media-games-about-hunger-games.html

    However, it's up to the parents to decide what the kids read and what movies they see.

    There are so many great age-appropriate books out there. Kids should enjoy those right now! They can always read YA books. However they're not going to go back to read the stories about 4th and 5th graders.

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  6. I regretfully took my 13 year old son to see the movie. He was very disturbed by the violence. He has read the books but said that it was completely different seeing the brutallity in the movie. Before seeing the movie he had no idea what it would sound like to hear a child's neck snap or to see the look in the eyes of a child who has had their head smashed in. He now does. I think we need to remember that these kids have no frame of reference for this kind of violence when they read the books. Their imaginations will only go so far but the movie puts it boldly and brutally in their faces. I wish I had given this more thought and protected my son from having these images put in his head.

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    1. Thanks for sharing that, and I'm sorry to hear that your son was affected so negatively by the images. I think what you say about imagination only being able to go as far as we have previous references for to be really interesting. It sounds like you've proactively kept your son from seeing violence on screen at other times (which can be REALLY hard in our current media climate), and I think that's an important context to consider.

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