Sample Article for critique What Itchy and Scratchy Know by Gerard Jones.
First appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 2000.

At thirteen I was alone and afraid. Taught by my well-meaning, progressive English-teacher parents that violence was wrong, that rage was something to be overcome, and that cooperation was always better than conflict, I suffocated my deepest fears and desires under a nice-boy persona. Afraid to join my peers in their bumptious rush into adolescent boyhood, I withdrew into passivity and loneliness. My parents, not trusting the violent world of the late 1960’s, built a wall between me and the crudest elements of American pop culture. Then the Incredible Hulk smashed through it.

One of my mother’s students convinced her that Marvel Comics, despite their apparent juvenility and violence were in fact devoted to lofty messages of pacifism and tolerance. My mother borrowed some, thinking they would be good for me. And so they were. But not because they preached lofty messages of benevolence. They were good for me because they were juvenile. And violent.

The character who caught me, and freed me, was the Hulk: overgendered and undersocialized, half-naked and half-witted, raging against a frightened world that misunderstood and persecuted him. Suddenly I had a fantasy self to carry my stifled rage and buried desire for power. I had a fantasy self who was unafraid of his desires and the world’s disapproval, unhesitatingly and effective in action. “Puny boy, follow Hulk!” roared my fantasy self, and I followed.

I followed him to new friends- other sensitive geeks chasing their own inner brutes-and I followed him to the arrogant, self-exposing, superheroic decision to became a writer.

Eventually I left him behind, but in my thirties I found myself writing action movies and comic books. I wrote some Hulk stories and met the geek geniuses who created him. I saw my own creations turned into action figures, cartoons, and computer games. I talked to the kids who read my stories. Across generations, genders, and ethnicities it was always the same story: people pulling themselves out of emotional traps by immersing themselves in violent stories; people integrating the scariest, most fervently denied fragments of their psyches into fuller senses of self hood through fantasies of superhuman combat and destruction.

I have watched my son living the same story- transforming himself into a blood thirsty dinosaur to embolden himself for the plunge into preschool, a Power Ranger to muscle through a social competitions in kindergarten. In the first grade, his friends starting climbing a tree at school. But he was afraid: of falling, of the centipedes crawling on the trunk, of sharp branches, of his friends’ derision. I took my cue from his own fantasies and read him old Tarzan comics, rich in combat and bright with flashing knives. For two weeks he lived in them. Then he put them aside. And he climbed the tree.

But all the while, especially in the wake of the recent burst of school shootings, I heard pop psychologist insisting that violent stories are harmful to kids, heard teachers begging parents to keep their kids away from “junk culture,” heard a guilt-stricken friend with a son who loved Pokemon lament, “I’ve turned into a bad mom who lets her kid eat sugary cereal and watch cartoons!”

So I did some research.

I’ve found that every aspect of even the trashiest pop-culture story can have its own developmental function. Pretending to have superhuman powers helps children conquer the feeling of powerlessness that inevitably comes with being so young and small. The dual identity concept at the heart of many superhero stories helps kids negotiate the conflicts between inner self and the public self as they work through early stages of socialization. Identification with a rebellious, even destructive hero helps children learn to push back against a modern culture that cultivates fear and teaches dependency.

At its most fundamental level, what I call “creative violence” – head bonking cartoons, bloody video games, playground karate, toy guns-gives children a tool to master their rage. Children will feel rage. Even the sweetest and most civilized of them, even those whose parents read the better class of literary magazine, will feel rage. The world is uncontrollable and incomprehensible; mastering it is a terrifying, enraging task. Rage can be an energizing emotion, a shot of courage to push us to resist greater threats, take more control than we ever thought we could. But rage is also the emotion our culture distrusts and fears the most. Through immersion in imaginary combat and identification with a violent protagonist, children engage the rage they’ve stifled, come to fear it less, and become more capable of utilizing it against life’s challenges.

Certainly violent entertainment has helped inspire some people to real-life violence. But there’s no doubt in my mind that it has helped hundreds of people for everyone it has hurt, and that it can help far more if we learn to use it well. Our fear of “youth violence” isn’t well founded on reality, and that fear can do more harm than the reality. We act as though our highest priority is to prevent our children from growing up into murderous thugs- but modern kids are far more likely to grow up too passive, too distrustful of themselves, too easily manipulated.

We send the message to our children in a hundred ways that their craving for imaginary gun battles and symbolic killings is wrong or at least dangerous. Even when we don’t call for censorship to forbid Mortal Combat, we moan to other parents within our kids’ earshot about the “awful violence” in the entertainment they love. We tell out kids that it isn’t nice to play fight, or we steer them from some monstrous action figure to a pro-social doll. Even in the most progressive household, where we make a point of letting children feel what they feel, we rush to substitute an enlightened discussion for the raw material of rageful fantasy. In the process, we risk confusing them about their natural aggression in the same way the Victorian confused their children about their sexuality. When we try to protect our children from their own feelings and fantasies, we shelter them not against violence but against power and self-hood.