ealth could declare that "the question no longer is whether TV directly causes aggressive behavior in children and adolescents, but how . . . tele-violence leaves a lasting--not just a temporary--imprint on young minds" (Murphy 74).
Granting that there is a linkage between real life and the cultural factual and factitious presentations of violence, understanding how the linkage is structured becomes important. Two different categories of mass-media presentation of violence are immediately apparent: dramatic, or fictional, presentations and the nonfiction presentations of violence via the news, whether televised, printed, or broadcast by sight and/or sound over the Internet. But immediately the categories become problematic because it is not always clear whether the real-life violence reported has a life of its own or is a predicate of fictional presentations of violence. In the case of fictional representations of violence, controversy surrounds the issue of whether the representation is gratuitous, accomplished for its own sake, or laden with moral weight. And violence with moral content--from Medea to Macbeth to Blackboard Jungle to Terminator--is nothing so much as fodder for the culture wars.
The history of the film Blackboard Jungle (MGM, 1955) may be a useful point of departure. Based on Evan Hunter's novel of the same name, the film involves an idealistic high-school teacher's quest to make school administrators acknowledge that the tough urban school needs to address its problems with juvenile discipline. Vandalism, gang activity, racist fights, assaults on students and teachers--all of these features of the film deal with what in the mid-1950s was termed juvenile delinquency. At the time, Hunter (1ff) asserted the novel to be a commentary on a major US social problem of the day and claimed that narrative was based on fact. Violence is undoubtedly embedded in the film: A teacher is assaulted, saved from a gang rape by the ...