How Much On-Screen Violence Is Too Much?

I’ve always been a little sensitive about films that depict school shootings. But Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama was an outlier.

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in The Drama . (A24)

When the clock struck midnight on May 1, the far-right conspiracy website Infowars went offline with a whimper. The organization was dissolved after multiple successful defamation lawsuits were filed against its founder, Alex Jones, and eventually no one could pay the $81,000-per-month rent for the website’s studio space. Jones owes more than a billion dollars after he spent years claiming that the deadliest K-12 shooting in history was a hoax perpetrated by the government to promote the passage of strict gun-control laws. The victims’ families were subjected to relentless harassment and death threats by Jones’s followers, who believed that they and their dead children were “crisis actors.”

Neither my blood pressure nor my sanity can countenance the conspiracy theories that hucksters like Jones peddle as if they were dietary supplements or survivalist supplies. But as much as the Sandy Hook truthers are blinded by hateful ideology, I have to believe some of their fervor stems from how bewildering that particular tragedy was. School shootings are as endemic to 21st-century America as the common cold: Roughly 233 of them occurred last year, though that number isn’t definitive, since there is no standard definition of the term “school shooting.” But even taking into account our acquiescent gun culture and the current adolescent mental health crisis, the mere idea that someone would shoot 20 6- and 7-year-olds with a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle can short-circuit even the stablest of minds.

I have been prone to depression for most of my life, and I have managed it, sometimes more successfully than others, with self-medication and irregular emotional support. Hence, my depressive periods tend to blend together in my memory. (Frankly, they aren’t severe or notable enough to be worth remembering at all.) But the months following Sandy Hook were a different story. The shooting happened at the tail end of finals during my sophomore year of college. I had plenty of time to absorb, and be affected by, the tributes and debates that took place throughout the winter break and the subsequent spring semester.

I felt vaguely embarrassed by how affected I was and brushed off queries from my friends about my low mood. I had no personal connection to anyone who was killed. I didn’t even have younger siblings whom I could project my secondhand grief onto. I suppose part of the reason I was so unnerved by the whole affair was that I knew in my heart that nothing would change, culturally or politically, in its aftermath. Sure enough, those forebodings were confirmed when numerous states passed laws that weakened gun restrictions in the months after the shooting. If 20 dead kids weren’t enough to alter the terms of the gun-control debate in this country, then the debate was over.

My distance from the incident could not heal my raw nerves. I remember my mother offhandedly mentioning that, since it was two weeks before Christmas, the victims’ parents almost certainly had presents for their kids already stashed away in their homes. The heartbreaking banality of that statement undid me like a zipper.

The first time I was first paid for my writing was in my junior year of college when I reviewed a David Spade standup-comedy special for The A.V. Club . It would be another few years before I could call myself a film critic. I settled instead for developing an inchoate cinephilia.

Current Issue

Like most burgeoning cineastes, I embraced a permissive attitude toward on-screen violence as an outgrowth of a generally progressive view of art. But even as a young man, I found it distressing to watch depictions of children getting gunned down to manufacture drama. I remember barely being able to stomach Battle Royale (2000), a pre– Hunger Games dystopian action film about junior-high-school kids who are forced to fight one another to the death by their authoritarian government, when my college roommates screened it in our apartment. Years later, I was asked to review Paul Greengrass’s 22 July (2018), a docudrama about the 2011 domestic terrorist attacks in Norway, and I distinctly remember thinking that the film offered nothing substantial enough to justify its graphic recreation of those brutal events. I have similar difficulties with films I otherwise adore, like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), in which an unproductively sour taste floods my mouth when a gunman’s bullet blasts through a little girl’s vanilla ice cream and into her chest, leaving her covered in blood.

My fragility around this issue has compounded in recent years as contemporary cinema reflects the normalization of wholesale slaughter as a hazard of American life. Vox Lux (2018), for example, capitalizes on the trauma of mass shootings to lend sociocultural heft to a ru…