Killing Monsters Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones Basic, 261 pp., $25 THE OTHER DAY, Joe–my fiancee’s five-year-old nephew–decided to let me in on something. “Can I tell you a secret?” he asked. “My grandma bought me a special present.” He paused. “It’s called a gun.” I knew full well his grandmother had bought him no such thing. Joe isn’t allowed to play with guns. “She bought you a gun, did she?” I said. “It’s a real gun, with real bullets,” he said. “And I’m not kidding.” “Oh,” I said. Then Joe added: “But grandma told me I could only shoot things that are already dead.” Earlier in the day, Joe had told me stray cats had been leaving droppings in his grandmother’s flower bed. She was angry about it. Joe decided these acts of feline trespass were an outrage, and he said he wanted to kill the cats. In response, Joe’s aunt told him that it wasn’t right to kill living things–and Joe put it all together. His hunger for a gun gave rise to the fantasy of being presented with one by his gentle and giving grandmother. But he didn’t want the gun without conditions. He wanted the gun to come with moral strictures and boundaries. Gerard Jones’s “Killing Monsters” is an original and surprising new book that tries to cut through parental and societal hysteria regarding childhood play to explain why Joe’s fascination with guns and his hunger for a moral framework are complementary impulses. Jones’s work comes with the year’s most provocative subtitle: “Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence.” “Killing Monsters” is a book that demanded to be written, if only to provide a moment’s respite from a piece of conventional wisdom that goes almost completely unchallenged. Over the past thirty years it has become axiomatic that depictions of violence in popular culture are utterly without redeeming merit. Critics on the left (such as Peggy Charren of Action for Children’s Television) and critics of the right (such as Michael Medved) are in full-throated agreement on the evils of fantasy and fictional violence as depicted on television, in the movies, in comic books, in popular music, and in video games. THESE CRITICS believe that, at best, fantasy violence is a cause of bad manners and the general coarsening of American life–and, at worst, that cultural depictions of violence are responsible for the explosion of violence in the United States after World War II. These beliefs have become so commonly accepted that Congress passed legislation in the mid-1990s compelling all manufacturers of television sets to install a special piece of hardware that would make it possible for parents to prevent their children from watching offensive programming. Proponents of the legislation, in seeking the broadest possible coalition in favor of it, dubbed it the V (for “violence)” chip. They could have called it the S (for “sex”) chip, using the argument that depictions of sexual acts on television cause young people to engage in salacious behavior. But they didn’t. Keeping kids from watching violent programming on television seemed to be a better rallying point. Fantasy violence has become the cultural equivalent of fast food. It has no defenders, though millions consume it on a daily basis. Tastemakers and trendsetters revile it. It is deemed unhealthy and bereft of positive value even as it is condemned for being dangerously addictive. The hunger to suppress fantasy violence goes beyond the V-chip and the motion-picture ratings system. It also takes the form of parents (like Joe’s) refusing to buy their children toy guns. And yet almost every gun-banishing parent has had that eye-opening moment when her sweet little boy takes a piece of toast and chews it into the shape of a pistol, or picks up a stick from the yard and starts shouting “Boom boom boom!” There’s more going on here than can be explained away by glib reference to television programs or toy weapons. “The point from which any discussion of children and violent fantasy should begin is that most of them do like violence of one kind or another, and they know it,” Jones writes flatly in “Killing Monsters.” “Respecting that is where communication, guidance and understanding start.” At first, Jones’s treatment of the subject seems distressingly light and fluffy. His two previous books were about television situation comedies and comic-book heroes, and he was for a time a writer and editor of comic books himself. “Killing Monsters” seems at first the random thoughts and generalizations of someone who enjoyed fantasy violence as a child and has made money off it as an adult. But despite its glibness, the book gradually becomes intellectually daring and honest, overflowing with fascinating and challenging arguments. Jones describes how, at the age of thirteen, he found revelation in the comic-book character called the Incredible Hulk: “He was a government scientist who had to struggle desperately to maintain his altruistic self-restraint–because his own anger set off a reaction in his body that transformed him, uncontrollably, into a brute of raw, destructive power. . . . Suddenly his body would explode with muscles that ripped through his clothes, and he’d hurl himself bare-chested and free through the walls around him.” The Incredible Hulk shares with all fantasy legends for young people a consuming obsession with power and strength. The young Jones responded to the Hulk because as a depressed thirteen-year-old he knew that he was “repressing rage and pride and the hunger for power over my own life.” THIS SPECIFIC FANTASY spoke to Jones, and not because he was a victim of the entertainment industry. “The comic books were made by others and sold to me as a commodity,” he admits, “but the desire to read them was mine.” That desire was not manufactured. That kind of desire cannot be manufactured, no matter what parents may wish to believe. “A lot of us stumble over that as parents,” Jones writes, “blaming what our children see for making them want things, forgetting that it’s our children themselves who are doing the wanting. . . . Either children connect with a fantasy at the profoundest emotional levels or they quickly toss it aside.” “Killing Monsters” grapples with important questions about the ways adults perceive and misunderstand kids’ thoughts, actions, and feelings. How can we understand children and what they need if we refuse to understand why they want what they want? Or, as Jones asks, “Why do they love what they love?” Blaming the entertainment industry for the fact that children are transfixed and transported goes against everything we know about human nature. “Each child’s fantasies and emotional needs are very much his own,” Jones writes, “even if he shares them with millions of other kids. When we burden those needs with our own anxieties, we can confuse and frighten children about their own feelings.” The problem is that enlightened Americans don’t really want to believe that kids have the Incredible Hulk buried within them. Parents want their children to be happy and thoughtful and caring and wise. It’s understandable, though wrong, to imagine that when kids go around whopping each other with sticks after they’ve been told not to, there’s an external force to blame. WHICH IS WHERE the scapegoating of the entertainment industry comes in. This is a particularly American madness that has lasted for more than a century. Most recently, the scapegoat has taken the form of televised violence and video games. Fifty years ago, the scapegoat was comic books, which were the subject of congressional hearings following the publication of Dr. Frederic Wertham’s now-notorious expose, “Seduction of the Innocent.” One hundred and twenty years ago, the scapegoat was dime novels about cowboys and Indians in the Wild West. The censor Anthony Comstock called the editors of these books “Satan’s agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young.” The nature of the complaint against violent fantasy is that children will not be able to tell th
e difference between fantasy and reality. Jones believes that the problem here is with the adults, not with the children: “We don’t help children learn the difference between fantasy and reality when we allow their fantasies to provoke reactions from us that are more appropriate to reality. When a child is joyfully killing a friend who loves being killed, we don’t make things clearer for them by responding with an anxious, “You shouldn’t shoot people!” Instead we blur the very boundaries that they’re trying to establish. We teach them that pretend shooting makes adults feel threatened in reality, and therefore their own fantasies must be more powerful and more dangerous than they thought. The result for the child is more anxiety and self-doubt, more concern over the power of violent thoughts, less sense of power over their own feelings, and less practice expressing their fantasies.” In the book’s most original and telling insight, Jones suggests the problem arises from a failure to comprehend the nature of childhood play, which he believes is almost entirely metaphorical. Through invented games and stories, children work through their anxieties and express their secret wants. Since children are among the smallest and most powerless creatures on earth, their fantasies inevitably revolve around size and power. It’s part of the very nature of fantasy that the power gets used. The gun must be fired. The Hulk must break through walls. At every moment, the play of children is shot through with the knowledge that they are playing. They are not powerful. They are not big. And they are often very angry and frustrated because they cannot work their will as they would like to. When they play, they can express these feelings and release some of the tension and anxiety they provoke in others. But not if they are led to feel that their aggressive or angry feelings must be bottled up lest they provoke adult fear: “As adults we spend so much time taking deft steps away from our most powerful fantasies and emotions that getting whacked by the raw, visceral imagination of a child can be unsettling.” But these fantasies aren’t merely about doing harm. If they were, they wouldn’t have any resonance. Children place their hunger for violence in context. Jones tells the story of a little boy who told him about an imaginary world called Stuffyland, where all the stuffed animals live and everyone is safe. It all sounded sweet and lovely until, “with a huge, innocent smile, he explained, ‘That’s because there’s a machine like a trap at the edge of Stuffyland and if a bad guy ever tries to come in it chops him right in half!'” Stuffyland turns out to be a far more complicated and interesting place once we learn about the anti-bad-guy machine. It’s also a more intrinsically moral place. The good guys are nice and gentle, just like the little boy who made them up. Nice and gentle people need protection from harm. And whoever comes to do them harm will deserve the punishment he’ll get from the chopping machine. The enjoyment people take from fantasy violence cannot be understood as mere enjoyment of violence. The power comes from the meaning behind the act. If a bad guy is hurting a good guy, the violence provokes outrage because it is unjust–and if, later, a good guy hurts that bad guy, the violence is satisfying because justice has been served. Indeed, Jones could have carried the point further, for the really frightening thing would be if injustice weren’t punished. Children aren’t really scared by the death of monsters. What scares them is the continuing life of monsters. “Killing Monsters” offers some common-sense correctives to alarmist notions thrown about by our anxious culture. “Many critics have argued that entertainment teaches children that violence is a good way to settle problems,” Jones writes. “Reality, however, is a good corrective to that. The first time a child imitates a Power Ranger by kicking a playmate and is rewarded with a crying friend, angry parents, an abrupt end to the game, and a sore foot, he learns that make-believe and the real world operate on fundamentally different laws.” JONES UNDERSTANDS and respects the seriousness of the critics who want to suppress violent play. What these liberals and conservatives have in common is a hunger to educate and improve the young: “Because they are teachers, they believe deeply in the literal power of stories, and they want entertainment to teach the lessons that will improve us.” But while entertainment can improve children, Jones shows that it does so in more complicated ways than moralizing critics grasp. John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
