Topic: Movie ratings and children
Over Christmas lunch the topic of movie ratings and how they affect or do not affect children came up. It transpired that one of my nephews was going to be taken to see the third Hobbit movie. He's only 8 years old and so wouldn't likely be allowed in, but had seen the first two movies. His father (my brother) remarked on how violent he thought the Hobbit movies were and how inappropriate they were for children. There's a fair amount of arrows being fired into orc heads, a couple beheadings and takedown moves, most notably during the barrel chase scene. Perhaps it's ok because the orcs aren't human, but it's still technically violence.
So the topic turned to films we watched when growing up and how we saw films that were rated way above our age - Aliens, Predator, High Plains Drifter, the Carry On films, Excalibur and so on. One of my favourite movies is the Vikings, which ends in a spectacular castle battle, as do a number of Bond films. We also had watched a lot of cowboy films with John Wayne (and Eastwood) and the Heston classics. Did these films adversely affect our psyche? Is showing violent imagery to children an automatically bad thing? Children often mirror what they see, but violence is dominant in a lot of stories (Teletubbies aside perhaps) from the old fairy tales (William Tell in the story ends up murdering the bad noble) and classics to the modern cartoons. But does the cartoonish or clean violence (e.g. John Wayne movies etc.) distance children from the reality and consequence of violence? Participants don't feel pain when they're hit, they make the Wilhelm scream when an indian arrow hits, people fall down - the notion of that person no longer continuing to live is usually obscured (except for Optimus Prime).
I guess what I'm asking is whether more realism in violence, e.g. showing what happens when a sword hits someone's body, would actually show children that violence isn't a form of play.
My other brother has a 2-year old that he's been shielding from violent things to the point of obscuring the purpose of guns (in toys etc.) and not promoting play with toys which have weapons - but oddly enough, the little fella will repeatedly collide two cars together and imagine accidents. It got me thinking of whether violence isn't innate.
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