Junk culture jive.(Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make Believe Violence )(Book Review)

Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make Believe Violence By Gerard Jones Basic Books, 272 pages, $25

The biggest cultural conflict in America during the past two decades has been between those who believe that irresponsible writers and artists are coarsening American culture beyond reclamation, and those who argue that the Constitution guarantees unfettered "freedom of expression" and that we'll just have to accept the consequences.

Both sides share a basic assumption: That all human beings have natural impulses toward violence, sexual irresponsibility, and vulgarity. While the procensorship camp seeks means of suppressing these urges, the liberationists want to find acceptable outlets for self-expression. Is it possible that neither side sees human beings in all of their complexity or gives full respect to individual free will?

Adding a new twist to the debate, comic book author and screenwriter Gerard Jones investigates, in Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Hemes, and Make-Believe Violence, exactly what young people find so attractive about imaginary violence. Jones argues that young people actually need to fantasize about violence, both in their play and through stories in the media and elsewhere. Doing so, he believes, gives kids an outlet for their anger and lets them see the real consequences of their own minor acts of violence, understand power relationships, and symbolically defeat the brutality they see around them.

Jones suggests that rather than causing aggressive behavior through imitation, violent entertainment provides a catharsis, noting that the baby boomers raised on a steady diet of violent comic books, TV Westerns, cop shows, and monster movies in the 1950s became the pacifists of the `60s. In the `70s, groundswell of sentiment against violent entertainment succeeded in altering the landscape of children's culture,' removing overt violence from children's television and even some prime-time fare. Violent movies were rated R or X to keep the young out. Toy dealers phased out fake guns and swords, and the biggest maker of plastic toy soldiers stopped production. Yet juvenile crime rates increased dramatically.

In the 1990s, by contrast, juvenile crime rates fell, just as the children who grew up among the significantly more violent media products of the 1980s entered adolescence. Hence, Jones argues that we should not ban violent activities and entertainment, suggesting instead that parents ...