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• Compare two of the following essays:
Essay 1 or 2
1. King, “Why We Crave Horror Movies” (RC 356-60)
2. Stossel, “The Man Who Counts the Killings” (handout)
Checklist
1. Does your introduction clearly identify your subjects?
2. Does your thesis statement present an overall opinion about similarities and differences between two (or more) objects of comparison?
3. Does this opinion reflect the relationship between similarities and differences?
4. Have you limited your discussion to three or four basic categories?
5. Have you organized your paper by the point-by-point method (i.e., you discuss similarities and differences between two objects of
comparison)?
6. Do you discuss the same qualities of each subject?
7. Do your paragraph divisions indicate the major sections of your essay?
8. Are your paragraphs between seven and twelve sentences?
9. Does each topic sentence clearly state the main point of the paragraph and show how the paragraph relates to and develops the thesis?
10. Does the conclusion restate the thesis, sum up the main points, and suggest a broader context or the implications of your subject?
Violence and Television: A History
IN 1977 Ronny Zamora, a fifteen-year-old, shot and killed the eighty-two-year-old woman who lived next door to him in Florida. Not guilty,
pleaded his lawyer, Ellis Rubin, by reason of the boy’s having watched too much television. From watching television Ronny had become
dangerously inured to violence. Suffering from what Rubin called “television intoxication,” he could no longer tell right from wrong. “If you
judge Ronny Zamora guilty,” Rubin argued, “television will be an accessory.” The jury demurred: Ronny was convicted of first-degree murder.
Although few anti-television activists would agree that excessive television viewing can exculpate a murderer, a huge body of evidence —
including 3,000 studies before 1971 alone — suggests a strong connection between television watching and aggression. “There is no longer any
serious debate about whether violence in the media is a legitimate problem,” Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, said in a speech last year. “Science and commonsense judgments of parents agree. As stated in a year-long effort, funded by the
cable-TV industry . . . ‘there are substantial risks of harmful effects from viewing violence throughout the television environment.'”
The study cited by Hundt reveals nothing new. Researchers have been churning out studies indicating links between television violence and
real-life violence for as long as television has been a prominent feature of American culture. Just a few examples demonstrate the range of
the investigations.
A 1956 study compared the behavior of twelve four-year-olds who watched a Woody Woodpecker cartoon containing many violent episodes with that
of twelve other four-year-olds who watched “The Little Red Hen,” a nonviolent cartoon. The Woody watchers were much more likely than the Hen
watchers to hit other children, break toys, and be generally destructive during playtime.
In 1981 Brandon Centerwall, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, hypothesized that the sharp increase in the murder
rate in North America beginning in 1955 was the product of television viewing. Television sets had been common household appliances for about
eight years by that point — enough time, he theorized, to have inculcated violent tendencies in a generation of viewers. He tested his
hypothesis by studying the effects of television in South Africa, where the Afrikaaner-dominated regime had banned it until 1975. He found
that twelve years after television was introduced there, murder rates skyrocketed.
In 1960 Leonard Eron, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, studied third-graders in
Columbia County in semi-rural New York. He observed that the more violent television these eight-year-olds watched at home, the more
aggressive they were in school. Eron returned to Columbia County in 1971, when the children from his sample were nineteen. He found that the
boys who had watched a lot of violent television when they were eight were more likely to get in trouble with the law when older. Eron
returned to Columbia County a third time in 1982, when his subjects were thirty. He discovered that those who had watched the most television
violence at age eight inflicted more violent punishments on their children, were convicted of more serious crimes, and were reported more
aggressive by their spouses than those who had watched less violent television. In 1993, at a conference of the National Council for Families
& Television, Eron estimated that 10 percent of the violence in the United States can be attributed to television.
Although Eron’s study did not make a special effort to control for other potentially violence-inducing variables, other longitudinal studies
have done so. For example, in 1971 Monroe Lefkowitz published “Television Violence and Child Aggression: A Follow-up Study,” which confirmed
that the more violence an eight-year-old boy watched, the more aggressive his behavior would be at age eighteen. Lefkowitz controlled for
other possible variables, directly implicating media violence as an instigator of violent behavior.
Shouldn’t the weight of thousands of such studies be sufficient to persuade broadcasters, required by law since the 1930s to serve the public
interest, to change the content of television programming? Especially when polls — such as one conducted by U.S. News & World Report last
year — indicate that 90 percent of Americans think that violent television shows hurt the country? We don’t want to become a nation of Ronny
Zamoras, do we?
Periods of increasing popular agitation about the effects of television on children (usually inspired by a rising crime rate or by a
sensational story like Ronny Zamora’s) lead to spasms of political posturing. Studies are commissioned. Imminent legislative or regulatory
action is threatened. The broadcast industry filibusters. Within a few months the politicians turn their attention to something new, and the
broadcasting industry slips quietly away, barely chastened.
Since 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson convened the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, commissions, hearings,
and a Surgeon General’s report have all found that television is a “major contributory factor” in violent behavior in society.
WHY WE CRAVE HORROR MOVIES
Playboy, 1982
Stephen King (1947–)
I think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better-and maybe not all that much better, after
all. We’ve all known people who talk to themselves, people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one
is watching, people who have some hysterical fear-of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop…and, of course, those final worms and
grubs that are waiting so patiently underground.
When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare,.
Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is
not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster
twists through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been
the special province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one’s appetite for double twists or 360-degree loops may be considerably
depleted.
We also go to re-establish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as
the horrible melting woman in DIE, MONSTER, DIE! confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford
or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness.
And we go to have fun.
Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn’t it? Because this is a very peculiar sort of fun indeed. The fun comes from
seeing others menaced-sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur’s version of combat, then the
horror film has become the modern version of the public lynching.
It is true that the mythic, “fairytale” horror film intends to take away the shades of gray…It urges us to put away our more civilized and
adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide
psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely.
We are told we may allow our emotions a free rein,…or no rein at all.
If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the
Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh);
if, on the other hand your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you’re under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus,
then you are left alone to go about your business…though it is doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.
The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (excluding saints, past and present; but then, most saints have been crazy in their own ways),
and every now and then, he had to be let loose to scream and roll around in the grass. Our emotions and our fears form their own body, and we
recognize that it demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these emotional muscles are accepted – even exalted –
in civilized society; they are, of course, the emotions that tend to maintain the status quo of civilization itself. Love, friendship,
loyalty, kindness – these are all the emotions that we applaud, emotions that have been immortalized in the couplets of Hallmark cards and in
the verses (I don’t care call it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy.
When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement; we learn this even before we get out of diapers. When, as
children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, “Isn’t he the
sweetest little thing?” Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often follow. But if we deliberately slam the rotten little
puke of a sister’s fingers in the door, sanctions follow-angry remonstrance from parents, aunts and uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered
graham cracker, a spanking.
But anticivilization emotions don’t go away, and they demand periodic exercise. We have such “sick” jokes as, “What’s the difference between
a truckload of bowling ball and a truckload of dead babies? (You can’t unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork…a joke, by the
way, that I heard originally from a ten-year-old.) Such a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out of us even as we recoil, a possibility that
confirms the thesis: If we share a brotherhood of man, then we also share an insanity of man. None of which is intended as a defense of
either the sick joke or insanity but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, mange to be
reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.
The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity
unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized…and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For those
reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of the – DAWN OF THE DEAD, for
instance – as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in
that subterranean river beneath.
Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that
all you need is love, and I would agree with that.
As long as you keep the gators fed.
