TV violence
Sir: What has happened to the good old doctrine of catharsis — the .purging of the emotions by seeing them enacted on the stage — which was prescribed by Aristotle and believed by the ancients to allow for the imaginative release of feelings of anger and violence, thereby reducing the likelihood of people expressing them in real terms?
In my young days there was violence aplenty in the films of cowboys-andIndians; in Treasure Island and other books, especially about pirates; and in Shakespeare. We played at these things, taking on ourselves the roles of 'goodies' and `baddies' according to the type of story inspiring the play. We tied rustlers to trees in the park, attacked the 'stockade' with cabbage runts, shot and stabbed pirates in the spirit of `bang — you're dead'. But we never committed acts of violence against real people. Any real fights that took place (and there were more than a few), or acts of bullying, had nothing what ever to do with what we had been reading or seeing in the cinema.
Is there not a danger that our researchers are missing the real — and very important — point, namely that the violence we saw was, as someone has said recently, `mythical'. The warriors seen by the ancients were gods, or demi-gods, or `heroes', who were, by definition, other than merely human. In our day, wrong as it may now seem in these days of racial equality, 'Indians' were not 'people' in the sense of 'people' such as we met every day. The whole gamut of cowboys, Indians, pirates, rustlers, clan feuds, etc was at least one degree removed from our reality and so did no harm. The gratuitous violence in Laurel and Hardy was part of the comic set-up and it was comic precisely because it was not what people normally did. I can remember that, in the Thirties, the complaint was that because young people saw an actor knifed in a film on Saturday and appearing again in another film the next Saturday, they might fail to realise that if you stick a knife in someone he is apt to stay dead.
The violence on TV that is dangerous today is that committed by people who otherwise look and behave like the people we meet on the street, in the home, at the school, every day. They are not sufficiently remote in terms of reality-andimagination for their activities to be seen in that cathartic perspective. They are apt to make young people (and old) believe that this is now normal behaviour, and it is this last that should be the touchstone by which we judge their suitability. But when psychologists start telling us that Tom and Jerry should be banned because of the effect of their 'violence' on young viewers, then it seems that psychology itself has gone mad. Alastair Shanks Port Ellen, Islay
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