The notion that violent movies cause violence among their viewing audience is a joke.
While Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker character may incite violence in “Joker”, violent movies do not create aggressive tendencies within
their viewers.
Phoenix walked out of an interview with The Telegraph, a London-based daily newspaper, while promoting the movie after he was asked if the film would inspire “an unstable, self-pitying loner with a mass-shooter mindset.”
In a later interview with IGN, Phoenix said, “I think if you have somebody that has that level of emotional disturbance, they can find fuel anywhere. I just don’t think that you can function that way.”
Is it possible that watching “Joker” might cause someone to commit a vicious act?
It absolutely is, but it’s incredibly unlikely that the two things would have a direct correlation.
It is also highly unlikely that a person without previous violent sensibilities would walk into a film, take it in, and walk out with a completely shifted mindset that suddenly causes the person to feel the desire to create havoc.
Films are meant to entertain and let the viewer escape into another reality until the credits roll.
Numerous studies have found either little to no direct correlation between violent movies and
violent behavior.
A 2014 study by the Public Library of Science hypothesized that a person’s “reaction to violent media is critically dependent on personality/trait differences between viewers, where those with the propensity for physical assault will respond to the media differently than controls.”
Essentially, the study found that only people with a violent history reacted to the violent media in an aggressive manner.
In this study, aggressive simply means that some of the participants’ blood pressure steadily rose as the film progressed.
It in no way suggested that the person was going to cause violence upon completion of the film.
A June study by Psychiatric Quarterly looked at the relationship between violence in PG-13 movies and actual societal violence.
It found that there was an inverse effect when relating the two, although the authors suggested it was best to interpret their findings as having no actual correlation.
A study by the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2009 found that on days with a high audience for violent movies, violent crime was actually lower.
The study also accounted for time variability, finding no real world impact one, two or three weeks after the audience’s initial exposure to violent media.
All of these studies seem to suggest that there is no cause and effect relationship between violent films and legitimate violence.
Because of the time you can devote to them, it would make sense if violent video games had some kind of negative effect on its players, but even that isn’t true.
A 2017 report by the media psychology division of the American Psychological Association said, “Scant evidence has emerged that makes any causal or correlational connection between playing violent video games and actually committing
violent activities.”
Dr. Chris Ferguson, who led the committee that created the report, said in an interview with the New York Times, “The data on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive.”
If I can turn my console on and shoot people all the livelong day playing the latest hit shooter, then follow it up with a nighttime viewing of “Joker” and leave it all feeling entirely normal, then anyone saying that violent media causes real-world violence is bananas.
