In this day and age, movies and television are a crucial part of everyday society. It has evolved beyond just a part of our daily or weekly routine. Understanding the most recent popular movie or show is almost required to stay up to date with current pop culture and maintain your social status. For example, if you have not seen Project Hail Mary, the most recent film to take theaters by storm, you’re going to be missing out on everyone talking about it while it’s still popular. More specifically, you’re going to be really confused why people talking about it online keep giving it a thumbs-down even though they’re praising the film. It’s not a mistake; you need to watch the film to understand. This is an example of how not being up-do-date with pop culture causes you to miss out on social experiences as well.
A byproduct of this need to keep up with current entertainment trends is that you consume more TV than before. This also means that you are watching more and more suffering through TV. In a study conducted by Ohio State University’s Professor Brad J. Bushman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, the rates of violent sequences in films from 1950 to 2013 have Over doubled, going from a rate of 6 events per hour to over 16. Gun violence specifically in PG-13 films have more than tripled from 0.8 events per hour to over 2.5 since the rating’s debut in 1985.
This means that, by watching more TV to keep up with the social norms, you are also exposing yourself to more than double or triple the amount of violence. However, this is not even the worst offender. Suffering takes many forms, especially on screen. In addition to violence, the most prevalent form of suffering you consume is emotional distress, including grief and trauma. The unreal popularity of shows like Euphoria and You, where it feels like the only purpose of these shows is to watch people go through traumatic experiences, has caused people to view suffering as nothing more than entertainment.
The real danger here is that overexposure to suffering, even fictional suffering on TV, has a noticeable psychological impact on our ability to emotionally relate and empathize with one another. The natural emotional response to seeing someone suffer is to have compassion for them. However, studies done by the Cleveland Clinic have shown that there is only so much compassion we can give. When we’ve seen too much suffering, we experience a sort of compassion burnout leading towards a psychological phenomenon they coined: vicarious trauma.
Vicarious trauma is the experience of absorbing the pain of others to such a degree that it affects your own well-being, and it is entirely possible to experience it with characters on TV. Too much exposure to suffering actually causes your mind to believe it has experienced the trauma you viewed. Because of this, your brain begins to numb itself to the natural emotional responses to suffering. However, because you’ve built up the association between suffering and entertainment, your mind is simultaneously numbing itself to pain and craving it for recreation.
This causes a paradoxical response where the more suffering you watch, the more you want to watch. What was once intense now feels normal, so your brain looks for the next more intense show to satisfy that desire, like an addict chasing a high. In doing this—in flooding your psyche with violence and suffering—your outlook on the world is warped. Sociologist George Gerbner coined the term “Mean World Syndrome” to describe it. It is a sort of confirmation bias applied to your worldview. The more violence you are exposed to, both in real life and in entertainment, the more violent you believe the world is.
You can see the inverse of this effect through trends like hopecore on TikTok, where people intentionally seek out hopeful or joyful content to help them believe there is still good in the world. This is the exact same process as how violence and suffering make you have a grim outlook on the world. The only difference is that one is an intentional trend to spread positivity and the other is a natural part of our entertainment that goes both unsaid and unnoticed, making it far more prevalent and far more effective.
This article is not trying to convince you to give up movies and TV. Nor is it trying to spark some great change in the entertainment industry. All it is trying to do is speak about the unspoken and let you—the reader—make your own decisions about your viewing habits. Television is getting more and more violent, but there are also more and more hopeful pieces of media coming out as well, such as the aforementioned Project Hail Mary. Hopefully this article will spark some good in your habits, and happy watching (literally).
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