TRANSCRIPT
A few people have recently asked that I make a video on the subject of violent films and why so many people are drawn to watch violent films. Well, I’m also going to include violent books here because I had an experience of going back and reading a book that I had loved as a teenager: The Godfather. I later watched the movie and loved that also.
Well, if you want to read about an ultraviolent person, The Godfather and his ultraviolent family, and see violence in a movie, there you can go. And I was thinking about why I loved that book because when I started reading it, it kind of horrified me. I actually had it on a list on my website of great books that I recommended. I have since taken it off that list, but even on my list, I had some caveats about, well, you know, there’s a lot of violence and a lot of perversion, and it comes out of unresolved childhood trauma in the people who are expressing those things. But to me, that still doesn’t justify having it on a list of great books, even though it is a fantastically told story by the author Mario Puzo. He’s created a great narrative; it’s totally believable. But why did I love it?
Well, poor disempowered teenage Daniel coming out of a family where my dad was verbally and physically abusive to me, where my mom was perverse and never defended me, and violated my sexual boundaries in different ways, and constantly defended my dad. I watched my dad do rotten things to me and disempower me, emasculate me even, and took advantage of that by getting me to come closer to her. It was like I was being ping-ponged between these parents who didn’t love me or defend me. I didn’t get to really have a strong self in any sort of interactive way with others as the result of this.
Then I went off into a school where I was a small boy and felt really insecure about myself because of not being properly loved or defended in my family. People picked up on that. I wasn’t popular for it. I got bullied in various different ways. I even got beaten up once in seventh grade when I was, well, 12 or 13, by a girl—a much larger girl who was a year older. Horribly, horribly humiliating. I was full of rage because of what happened with that girl. I was full of rage as the result of what my dad did to me. I was full of rage as a result of what my mom did to me.
And then my mom smoking weed all the time and getting really profoundly drunk at various points and then denying, “Oh no, I’m not drunk,” or “I wasn’t drunk.” Lying, lying, lying all over the place. Me not being able to trust my feelings. I was full of torment. And here was a book, The Godfather, about this guy who controlled his world. He controlled his universe. He lived in a compound with gates around it. Nobody could get in; nobody could harm him. He killed people who bothered him. He killed people who bothered his friends. He killed people who bothered his children. His children defended him and killed people who tried to kill him. He got rich as the result of it. This was another expression of his powerfulness. He was always confident; he almost never cried. And he was everything that I wasn’t. In some ways, he was an ideal of an unconscious disempowered little boy writ large: this super powerful man who could pull the strings of the universe around him.
Well, I think this is true for why people like violent films. They identify with these strong, powerful, violent characters. They identify with the big muscled guys who never do wrong and who can fight. And, well, then there are the evil characters who do violence but then get their justice and get their comeuppance and get shot and killed themselves and get beaten up and thrown in jail. And people can identify with these dynamics, and they want to identify with these dynamics. It’s also a way not to heal—not to heal from what’s really going on in someone’s life.
For me, as a teenage boy reading The Godfather, part of my feeling so disempowered was that I had nowhere to go. I had nobody to talk to about what was going on in my family. I had no allies. I had no support. Certainly couldn’t go to any of my teachers. I couldn’t even tell them about what was happening in school, let alone what was happening in my home life. Couldn’t talk to my grandparents; they defended my parents. They were as much in denial as my parents were. No support. Uncle and aunt losers. They didn’t fight for me at all. Nobody could see what was happening, even though it was totally obvious.
My friends, the people, the boys that I played with, they were the same as me, coming from these same screwed-up, lost, confused families. Some of them didn’t even have dads at all; their dads had abandoned them long before. So I had no hope for healing. There was no room for me to really feel my feelings. Some little, little thread of me stayed alive. Some little thread of me was always outside of my family and could look in the mirror and say, “You are different, Daniel. You are different from them. You are different from everybody you know.” But that thread was very, very small. It sustained my life. It connected to the truth of who I really was in my guts—the truth of the beautiful little baby I had once been. But so much around it was shut down.
And so reading violent, powerful books and watching horrible, violent movies, it was safer. It allowed a discharge of some of my feelings while simultaneously allowing my actual situation to not change at all because, well, I needed my parents. I needed to maintain that close relationship with the people who were primarily harming me so that I could survive.
When I grew older, into my 20s, certainly into my 30s, and I could feel my feelings more, I could have better boundaries with my family. When I set boundaries with my family and saw how much they overtly despised me for setting boundaries and saying, “No, you can’t be perverse, Mom. No, you can’t lie. You can’t get away with that. No, you can’t physically attack me anymore, Dad. Stop it. I will stop you from physically attacking me.” I did it once again against my dad; he never hit me again. And saying, “No, you can’t humiliate me and verbally abuse me, Dad.” Well, they rejected me. My dad wrote me out of his will, etc., etc. Probably my mom has too. They’re both still alive. I have no contact with my mom, very rare occasional emails with my dad that just don’t go below the surface. But I haven’t seen them in, what, 15 years or so?
But now I’m stronger. And what I find is I don’t want to watch violent films. I don’t want to watch perverse films. I don’t want to watch films of horror. I think of this whole genre of horror books and horror films. It’s like I think when people indulge in these things, in this horror, they are getting a chance to safely observe the horror that happened to them when they were young and probably the horror that is still happening to them—maybe the horror that they are even unconsciously, beyond their own awareness, perpetrating on those over whom they wield power. And yet they’re so dissociated from themselves, so dissociated from their own lives and their feelings and their actions and the actions that happened to them with the ones who supposedly loved them the most, that, well, those feelings get a certain relief.
Those buried feelings and the anger and rage and resentment and bitterness and shame, fury, desire for justice—well, it’s kind of a relief to play it out on the big screen. And I also think of these people, the kids and not-so-kids, adults who play violent video games. The nicest people in the world. I know people; they’re the kindest, most gentle adults you’d ever meet. And then yet seeing them play video games where they’re blowing people up and there’s blood and guts and all this stuff everywhere and murder—like, why would they do this? And it’s like, yeah, they’re expressing what’s going on on the inside and what they are splitting off from, what they have buried—the feelings they really hold in their relationships for their beloved partners and their beloved kids and their beloved.
Parents, and this is our world, RIT large. This is our culture, our society, and not just America and the West. I travel around the world, and I’m amazed at totally different cultures. These same Hollywood films of perversity and violence and injustice and horror are everywhere. In normal situations for children to watch, even. It’s, um, riding buses through Africa in the middle of the night, at some overnight bus, and they’re showing horror movies of the most incredible perversity and violence. And it’s like right there for everybody to watch, and people watch it and like it. And they’re very kind and friendly people. Yet, what does it say about our humanity?
I think if we lived in a world—I know it—if we lived in a world where people had more safety to feel their real feelings about what happened to them, especially at the hands and the heart and the voices of the people whose job it was to love them the most. If they could break out of this idea, “Oh, my mother loved me, and she was such a wonderful woman. My father was a great man, and I loved him.” When people could actually really look at these parental figures in the real dimensions of the truth of who their parents really were, maybe still really are, they could feel those feelings. Feel the horror, feel the rage, feel their own powerlessness, feel their shame and humiliation. See how they had to bury it to survive. Cry, grieve, really grieve what they lost as the result of being treated this way, of being raised in an environment of this lack of love, this polar opposite of love so often that had to be defined as love and was defined by society as love.
If people could feel this, if people could grieve it, if people could reconnect with that thread of truth that to some degree I think everybody has. If people could bring their feelings and their truth back to life, if they could be in a world, a society—and I don’t mean a whole world grand society, just even with one friend or two friends or, heaven forbid, a therapist maybe who sees it. Even though my experience is most therapists just completely sucked, they didn’t offer that, but not to me, not to most. But if there was even a tiny little society where people could feel that, begin to feel what they went through, all their buried and split off and denied feelings, the shadow, the shadow within them, they wouldn’t want to watch the horror and the violence. They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t tolerate it. They’d say, “Stop this! Stop this! Why do I want to watch people abuse each other and traumatize each other? Why do I want to?”
And often it’s just bad actors, ridiculous stuff. That’s the other thing. It’s like so much of this acting is so comical. It’s like cartoon actors. And the fact that it’s cartoon actors and the video games are like cartoons, so one-dimensional, it shows that this is like—this is stuff. These are movies and books that are really, um, on an emotional level intended for people who are not very psychologically developed. It’s for children. It’s, it’s, it’s cartoons for children who still are seeing things in a much more one-dimensional way: good, evil, bad, good, right, wrong, punishment, justice, things in very simplistic ways, and none of it being turned back to the self.
I think if people really connected with themselves and really moved forward on their healing process, really connected with how, like I said for me, how powerless they felt long ago—powerlessness being a primary hallmark of psychological trauma—and they started healing from their powerlessness, started becoming empowered by feeling their feelings, they wouldn’t want to watch all this stuff on TV and read these horrible violent books.
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