Page 280 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

Chapter 10

Effects of Media Violence

GLENN G. SPARKS
CHERI W. SPARKS
Purdue University

In December 2000, government officials, officials from the entertainment
industry, parents, and their children were busy playing out an all too
familiar script. In this case, the setting for this latest episode of the media
violence controversy was Japan. Movie director Kinji Fukasaku had
released an incredibly popular movie, Battle Royale. The film deals with
conflict between junior high school delinquents who are sent to an island
and told to battle to their death with automatic weapons. One viewer,
who reacted to the film by noting that it “makes you think,” still declined
to see it a second time because “it was just too grotesque” (Schaefer, 2000).
Japan’s education minister, Nobutaka Machimura, discouraged owners of
theaters from showing the film at all and clearly implied that its contents
were “of a harmful nature.” The Motion Picture Code Committee
restricted admission to children who were under 16 years old. However,
this restriction did little to diminish the film’s popularity. It made world
headlines, partially due to the fact that young viewers camped out on
sidewalks for 2 days in order to gain admission to the opening showing.
Part of the controversy was fueled by an apparent “copycat” crime in 1998
that involved a Japanese TV show titled Gift. Characters on that show car-
ried butterfly knives and were blamed by parents, educators, and govern-
ment officials for inspiring a 13-year-old boy to stab his teacher to death—
with a butterfly knife (Schaefer, 2000).
For scholars of media violence, the Battle Royale episode includes many
of the elements that have been present in the media violence controversy
in the United States since the rise in popularity of movies in the 1920s
and, especially, since the rise of television in the 1950s. At the same time
that a segment of the population finds electronic depictions of violence
highly entertaining, other segments of society express concern about the
potential harmful effects of such depictions. More recently, the contro-
versy has extended to violent video games in the aftermath of the
Columbine High School shootings, where authorities discovered that the
perpetrators had an appetite for this sort of entertainment. To what extent

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