A History of Violence

Image credit: Abbot Genser

JODIE FOSTER IN THE BRAVE ONE ''Maybe the love of violence is an integral part of human nature, undivorceable from our better selves,'' writes King

In the movie of the same name, it's what the main character (played by Viggo Mortensen) turns out to have. It's also true of American movies in general, which were in love with the knife and gun long before James Cagney (although the act of violence Cagney is probably best remembered for is the one he commits with a grapefruit). The discussion of how much all this make-believe bloodshed has influenced American behavior — not to mention the distrustful way in which Americans view the world — started long before Cagney used Mae Clarke's nose as a juice squeezer. It's a question worth mulling over, it seems to me...although I must mull quickly, because I have tickets to a showing of Jodie Foster's new movie, The Brave One. This is the film New York Times critic A.O. Scott summed up as ''a pro-lynching movie that even liberals can love.''

Do I have my own history of violence? Yep. In my novels the body count is usually high, and in two of them — The Stand and Cell — I managed to wipe out almost the entire population of Planet Earth. In one book (Firestarter), a guy is persuaded to stick his hand into a whirring InSinkErator. In another (Cujo), a little boy dies of heat prostration after being menaced for days by a rabid dog while stuck in the family car (a Pinto, of course; Yugos had not yet been invented). In my own defense, I can point out that I have also written heartwarming books where people return from the dead. Usually to eat the living, it's true, but surely that is a quibble — a miracle is a miracle.

I am joking, but it's nervous joking, the kind analogous to whistling past the graveyard. Although the morality of violent entertainment is currently no more than a warm-button issue (possibly because no American politician has been assassinated lately), it still floats to the surface of the newspaper op-ed pages with fair regularity. Sort of like a drowning victim that won't stay on the bottom.

It deserves to keep coming up. And to be discussed, especially in a world where the upcoming Saw flick — which, according to no less a source than Fangoria magazine, is the bloodiest yet — can be released with only minimal furor. Certainly my own lifelong bloodlust puzzles and sometimes disgusts me.

NEXT PAGE: I don't know why movies like The Brave One should appeal to me and so many others. I can only hope they serve as a mental gutter through which our worst fears and impulses are channeled safely out of our emotional systems''