from Hacker News

Percentage of top grossing US films by decade that depict killing

by calvinf on 8/10/10, 5:06 PM with 42 comments

• by pchristensen on 8/10/10, 7:55 PM

  Wow, I got it totally wrong. When I read this in my RSS, I read "firms" instead of films and I was wondering what all these businesses were doing portraying killing.

  Then when I read the title correctly on HN, I remembered the graph going downward and thought it was weird that films were showing less killing. I clicked through and was surprised to see that the x-axis was descending chronological order.

  So now that I finally get the graph, let me throw out a WAG: with the end of the military draft, the almost complete departure of workers from agriculture, and increasing safety in society, violence of any form and especially death is not a real part of most peoples' lives. It is therefore fair game for fantasy and storytelling because there is little negative emotional experience attached to it, but there is a high degree of novelty.

• by diiq on 8/10/10, 7:24 PM

  As martijn points out in the comments, no conclusions can be drawn without data about the pool of all movies.

  If it makes you feel better about the world, actual murders per capita is not significantly higher now than it was in the 1960's; I guess we've all figured out that life lessons don't come from blockbuster movies --- just fun explosions.

• by anigbrowl on 8/10/10, 7:25 PM

  What is there to conclude, other than that people are more tolerant of killing being portrayed in films? After 1980, there's an inverse correlation between the frequency of murder or violent crime in the US and depiction of killing in film - the former goes down while the latter continues to increase. (http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm)

• by pvg on 8/10/10, 10:00 PM

  It's a silly and misleading graph.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

  Alternatively watch something like Howard Hughes's Hell's Angels (1930)

• by twp on 8/10/10, 10:57 PM

  The lesson taught in almost every movie is that your problems are only permanently solved by the death of your action antagonist. Even kids' movies have this lesson, e.g. A Bug's Life where the bad-guy grasshopper is eaten by a bird. There are few movies where the action antagonist does not die, and these invariably involve morally ambiguous lead characters (e.g. The Dark Knight).

  It's shame that more conciliatory outcomes are not considered. And you wonder about youth violence, but if this is the message taught by every film what do you expect?

  P.S. counter examples please!

• by tmsh on 8/10/10, 11:34 PM

  I think this gets at the distance between US culture, as it were, and the realities of violence. War is not the only source of violence. But it is a big one, which affects the entire culture pretty significantly.

  So the 70s correspond to Vietnam. And the 40s correspond to WWII. Today, we also have wars. But we are somehow increasingly disconnected from the realities of what that means.

  Anyway, it's a nice chart. But if you ever watch old movies right after WWII (in the 40s, early 50s), you can almost feel the trepidation around anything but those undervalued, safe moral environments. In some ways, it's a more mature audience / understanding -- it's more focused. But because a lot of the country has seen real horrors, it seems like now they crave some kind of careful normalcy (which doesn't have much violence). Perhaps the 70s also had that incentive. A lot of social change and some violence in the late 60s might've prompted it. Or, alternatively, people actually might've believed in non-violence for a while, and that might've stimulated other subjects.

  I don't know. But obviously, according to the chart, it's a self-perpetuating phenomenon. So this can be explained by saying that US culture (perhaps increasingly in the form of high grossing films), left to its own status quo momentum, gradually disconnects us from the realities of violence.

• by afterburner on 8/11/10, 1:29 AM

  So more lenient movie moral codes wrt censorship and larger budgets for action, combined with a growing expertise in stunts and fight choreography, and a growing movie industry eager to entice audiences into theatres with blockbuster escapist theatre, result in a greater percentage?

  There, I drew my own conclusion. Provided the data is true.

• by cellularmitosis on 8/10/10, 9:42 PM

  my brain wants very badly for the data to flow chronologically from left to right, rather than its current arrangement.

• by shrikant on 8/10/10, 10:33 PM

  If you enjoyed this blog post, you might enjoy my travel book for people interested in science and technology: The Geek Atlas

  Is that a boilerplate footer for every blog post? Because I didn't really see the connection between gore in movies and the book :)

• by code_duck on 8/11/10, 5:00 AM

  So, killing animals that can't "speak" doesn't count? That's odd, I'd pay good money to see people slaughtering those obnoxious anthropomorphic CG animals Hollywood is so in love with.

• by callmeed on 8/10/10, 7:55 PM

  It would be interesting to see if a similar curve exists for movies depicting sex (not necessarily nudity).

• by mrkurt on 8/10/10, 7:23 PM

  Big budgets mean big ticket sales. They also mean action. Thus, killing.

• by gojomo on 8/10/10, 7:55 PM

  Can similar percentages be calculated for cursing, sex, blasphemy, atomic-mutated monsters? (At least one of those probably peaked in the late 50s.)

• by zokier on 8/10/10, 8:13 PM

  Could some correlation be with average age of movie-goers?

• by mhb on 8/11/10, 4:12 AM

  How did the author know which depict killing?

• by sabj on 8/10/10, 5:07 PM

  What will happen after 100%?