VIOLENCE AND THE MEDIA: A PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS - Term paper / research paper writing service

Our preoccupation with violence is, indeed, an undeniable fact and one that touches our lives in very basic ways. When we hear of violence in our streets, in our schools, in our families (Javier, Herron & Bergman, 1994); when we see the news clips on television, in newspapers or magazines showing people being beaten and abused, (e.g. the Rodney King incident or the Haitian militia clubbing its citizens to death; the horror of the Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian war: spousal and child abuse; gang-related killings; the Central Park rapes, etc.) we tend to have a visceral reaction of disbelief and indignation as if we are dealing with an aberration.

A look at recent publications in Time and Newsweek magazines (Newsweek, April 1, 1991; August 2. 1993) depicting America as a society besieged by violence, gives us a clear indication of the critical nature of the problem. However, this is a problem not only in America, but throughout the world as events in Haiti, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Uganda, and until recently, in South Africa clearly attest (Herron, 1995; Javier & Rendon, 1995).

The fact is that we can no longer afford to look at violence as someone else's problem. It is hitting closer and closer to home for many people. We are frequently left with a feeling of fear and bewilderment, wondering if we will be the next victim; wondering if our children will ever survive to adulthood; if our parents and siblings will ever return home from work, from school or from a visit to friends and relatives; wondering if our cars and home will still be there undisturbed by someone who wants the precious possessions we have worked so hard to attain.

The fact is that our prisons are becoming more and more populated with younger and younger criminals, as shown by a recent report by the FBI statistics of juvenile arrests (office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Justice Department) for whom a pencil or a book has been replaced by a gun. According to this report, 17% of all violent crime arrests in 1991 and three of every ten juvenile murder arrests involved a victim under the age of 18.

Because of the alarming increase of guns in our schools, more and more schools in many metropolitan areas are forced to install metal detectors, and our youngsters, especially the poorest among us, continue to have their lives shortened and their dreams truncated. The presence of violence and acts that are blatantly destructive or, at the very least, disrespectful of the rights of others, are indeed too pervasive to be ignored. In desperation, people have demanded action from politicians, from the legal system, from our educational, religious, and mental health institutions. Let's build more prisons and lock up all the criminals or find more effective neuroleptic medications to control our mental patients; let's place metal detectors in all our schools, let's regulate fire arms or lock up these insane individuals. Yes, let's find a quick solution and eradicate this anomalous condition from our midst. This comes partly out of our need for a quick fix inherent in the American character as depicted by John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Silvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Terry Hulk Hogan in their movies.

CAN VIOLENCE IN THE MEDIA IMPACT ON BEHAVIOR?

It has been suggested, most recently, that the media (e.g.: television, video, film, music, newspapers and books) has made it possible for violence to become so pervasive in our midst; that it is the media that is poisoning our children's minds, making them violent. After all, the average person watches up to seven hours of television a day and children between the ages of two and five approximately 28 hours a week (Johnson, 1990: Hoffman, 1990).

It is true that since the deregulation of broadcasting in 1980, there has been a proliferation of media content that has tended to encourage violence and other antisocial behaviors against the self and/or others (Fox, Kaslow, Lewvant, McDaniel, Norton, Storandt & Walker, 1994) than was the case before when violence was imbedded in humor and cartoons (i.e. the Three Stooges, Tom and Jerry, Road Runner). Now we have T.V. programs like the Power Rangers, Beavis and Butt-Head: video games like Mortal Combat: films like the Terminator, Missing in Action, Deadly Force: and music from Public Enemy and Ice-T, all of which involve the use of violence. The message in many of these programs is that violence action is the only honorable way to win the contest and preserve one's dignity (Fox et al., 1994).

While we recognize that children constantly exposed to violence in the media are likely to incorporate it in the learning process (Bandura, Ross & Ross, 1963; Cannon, 1989; Lande, 1993; Wilson & Hunter, 1983) we believe that the phenomenon of violence is much more complex and that factors such as what is going on in the individuals themselves, their families, educational and religious institutions, and society at large, needs to be explored. Children learn from what happens around them, from the people most important to them, like parents, aunts and uncles, teachers, priests and ministers, etc. because it is in that context that they develop a sense of themselves and others, a sense of right or wrong, and learn respect for themselves and others (Piaget, 1932; Sullivan, 1953; Winnicott, 1965). But if they live in a society which supports inequality, selfishness, competition, and domination, it is likely that violence will become part of their personal equation (West, 1993). Similarly, it is more likely that children will be exposed to violent or sexually explicit material in the media when the kind of supervision and guidance usually expected in the child's life are not there and children are left alone to fend for themselves. Our families have to work longer hours to meet their needs, and more and more families and children are living in poverty (1992 Census): there is an increase in the divorce rate, single parent households, and adolescent pregnancy and delinquency (Javier & Herron, 1993; McBee, 1982; Vitz, 1990; N.Y.C. Police Department Crime Statistics, 1990).

The fact that the lives of our youngsters are now more likely to become seriously affected by the use of alcohol and drugs (Evans, 1987; McBee, 1982) and that they are more likely to cheat as an acceptable way to advance in school, (Greene, 1992; Greene & Saxe, 1991; McBee, 1982), are indications that something fundamental in today's society has shifted. It is as if we are now guided by a different set of moral principles than those that have traditionally governed the very nature of human interaction. According to Cornel West (1993), this erosion has been taking place for some time, but only now is affecting the larger society.

Thus, notwithstanding the merit of the argument regarding the extent to which a relationship is found between violence and the media (Freedman, 1984; 1986), it is important to examine such a relationship in the context of each individual's specific psychology and the fundamental changes in society. Part of the reason for this is that, although we can all agree that exposing children to violent content is likely to have an impact, the extent and nature of the impact cannot be easily explained by looking at one factor alone. In fact, the existing evidence may be construed as rather contradictory in this regard depending on whether we look at the laboratory evidence or evidence from field and correlational research. According to some laboratory findings, for instance, there is evidence that viewing violence increases the probability of subsequent maladaptive behavior (Evans & McCandless, 1978). According to Bandura and associates (Bandura et al., 1963), this was especially the case when violence was rewarded. Andison's (1977) findings from his analysis of laboratory research, on the other hand, suggest that the effects of television on aggression are not necessarily greater in children when compared to adult viewers. Indeed, he found that such effects were slightly stronger for adults than they were for preschool children. These findings certainly challenge the widely-held notion that aggression on television should have its greatest impact on children as they are the more easily influenced.

Findings from the field and correlational studies provide us with another important perspective on the issue. According to these findings, aggressive content on television could have a paradoxical impact on the viewer depending upon his/her intrinsic characteristics. For instance, boys who watched only nonviolent television programs were generally more aggressive than those who watched violent television programs (Feshbach & Singer, 1971), although violent programs were more popular than the nonviolent programs. The findings by Friedrich and Stein (1973), on the other hand, suggest a complex interaction between viewing violent television programs and interpersonal aggression. They found that high-aggressive subjects who saw violent films declined less in aggression over time than did high-aggressive subjects who saw either the neutral or prosocial films. Low-aggressive subjects who watched either the prosocial or neutral films increased in aggression more than did those who watched the violent films. Thus, even films with a nonaggressive and prosocial message could have a deleterious impact on the individual under certain conditions (Gadow Sprafkin. 1989), including programs such as Sesame Street or Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (Coates, Pusser & Goodman, 1976). It is these kinds of paradoxical findings that leave us with a great many questions as to the true causal nature of television on aggression. It has even been suggested that it is the number of hours rather than the nature of the program that is important. According to Belson (1978), viewing nonviolent television was as highly related to aggression as was watching violent television; general television viewing was found to be more highly related to aggression than viewing violent television alone.

EFFECT OF VIOLENCE IN THE MEDIA: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL EXPLANATORY PARADIGM

Thus, it is clear that the effects of violence in the media can only be understood by considering a multiplicity of factors and the more specific personality factors of the individual. That is, we are suggesting that only by using a multidimensional approach to examine the individual and societal characteristics, the problems with our family institutions, and the social forces encouraging violence, are we going to be in the best position to find more appropriate and comprehensive solutions to the problem of violence in our society. With that in mind, we will turn our attention to a discussion of the various factors that social and behavioral scientists have identified as contributors to violence.

St. John's University has been concerned with the exploration of important social issues affecting our society for some time. For instance, in 1991, it dedicated a conference to the issue of child abuse and in 1992 to the critical problems affecting our families. In 1993, another conference to the explored issues assumed to contribute to domestic violence. All these issues took a multicultural perspective since we live in a multicultural society, and believe that only by including such a perspective in our exploration could a more accurate explanation of the issues at hand be found. (We would like to direct the reader to the 1992 and 1994 Special Issue volumes 1 and 3 of the Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless where most of the proceedings from these conferences were published). We believe that a similar approach should be taken in looking at the problem of violence in the media, although at this point our focus will remain general in the interest of brevity. Although we can all agree that "any aggressive behavior that results in physical and/or psychological damage to an individual may be construed as violence" (Javier, Herron & Bergman, 1994, p.2), the perception and degree of seriousness may differ among ethnic and cultural groups (Wyatt, 1994; Brice-Baker, 1994). We suspect that the impact of violence in the media may also differ among the ethnic and cultural groups.

That notwithstanding, we propose that violence and violent expression can be triggered in various ways by any number of factors separately or in combination and can, in turn affect individual behavior regarding violent expression in various degrees. There are physiological/chemical factors that have been associated with violent behavior as well as factors belonging to the more social and psychological realm. Figure 1. attempts to depict the multiple influences on violence that are being discussed below.

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

1. Physiological/chemical Factors

Studies of the physiological and chemical characteristics of aggression have provided an important dimension in our understanding of such an important emotion. They point to the fact that human behavior could be affected by physiological and chemical influences which could be triggered by environmental stimuli (Eichelman, 1987). A case in point is that of Mr. Blake whose violent and homicidal behavior was found to be linked to an undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy (Siegel, 1993). The fact of the matter is that all emotions have been found to be controlled by specific brain functions in the limbic system and other parts of the brain. This has been supported by numerous research with animals and observations of brain injury patients. It has been found that the hypothalamus, the anterior poles of the temporal lobes, the amygdala, and the orbital frontal context are all involved in controlling aggression (Allison, 1993) and that an injury to these parts of the brain will impact on aggressive behavior (Silver & Vydofsky, 1987a; 1987b). That is not to say that all aggressive behaviors are to be explained by some kind of brain injury although histories of severe head injury have been found among some criminals and among men accused of abusive behavior (Allison, 1993).

Similarly, a low level of serotonin or 5-HIAA (a brain chemistry) has been found in servicemen discharged for aggressive behavior and in individuals who have committed suicide by violent means. Animals with a low level of serotonin have been found to be more likely to engage in aggressive behavior (Eichelman, 1987). But the fact that not all aggressive acts can be explained in this manner suggests that biological and physiological explanations are important but not adequate to explain such a complex phenomenon.

2. Mental Illness

It is not unusual to assume that anyone who commits a violent act against another person (s) or against someone else's property has to be suffering from some kind of mental disorder. No national person would willingly go against specific societal expectations regarding code of conduct. Indeed, high rates of physical assaults have been reported in psychiatric hospitals and 7% to 10% of patients were judged to be physically assaultive immediately before, at the time of admission, or in a three-month period following discharge (Silver & Vydofsky, 1987; Tardiff & Sweillam, 1980; 1982). In general, however, although some small relationship has begun to emerge with regard to the role of mental illness in aggression (Monahan, 1992), such a belief has only received limited support in the literature. Regardless of the nature of the evidence, however, this belief has been greatly promulgated by the media in many of its television programs as demonstrated by an analysis of television programs by the NIMH (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1981; Monahan, 1992). Of the programs who portrayed mentally ill characters in their shows, 73% were portrayed as violent and 23% as homicidal, in comparison to 40% and 10% respectively of those presented as normal characters. Similar content analysis of stories from the United Press International database found that in 86% of all print stories dealing with former mental patients, a violent crime (such as murder or mass murder) was the focus of the article (Monahan, 1992).

It is clear, however, that before a more definite statement can be made about the role of mental illness in aggressive and destructive behavior, more systematic investigation is necessary. This notwithstanding, Monahan's analysis suggests that mental disorder may be a consistent, albeit only a modest, risk factor for the occurrence of violence.

3. Social-Structural Conditions

The view that there are fundamental factors in a society which tend to encourage violence against certain individuals was amply discussed by West (1993), by Holzman (1994) and by Herron, Javier, McDonald-Gomez and Adlerstein (1994). According to these authors, we live in a society whose very structure is based upon inequality, exploitation, and by domination of one group by another, all essentially endorsing social-structural violence and providing the potential for personal violence. From this perspective, family violence, delinquency, rape, high levels of alcoholism, cheating and the increase in crime and divorce rates etc., are logical extensions of this societal condition. The media then can be said to function as a vehicle of expression of a violent culture, rather than being the cause of it. The fact that programs with a greater percentage of violence tend to generate higher rates of television viewing suggests that there is an appetite for this type of programming and a high level of tolerance for it in our society.

That there are societal conditions affecting violence was recently demonstrated in a poignant analysis by Richard Nisbett (1993) who found regional differences in the U.S. in the expression of violence. He found that those regions originally settled by southerners (those guided by a herding society) are more violent than the rest of the country. The homicide rate is higher, and individuals coming from the south, especially the rural areas, are more inclined to endorse violence for protection, in response to insults, and as a socialization tool in training children. This pattern of findings could not be predicted on the basis of poverty levels or other related factors, but rather as part of a "culture of honor."

According to these findings, since violence can be socially endorsed under certain conditions, the morality of the act may be difficult to assess. Thus, the influential roles of social institutions (e.g.: religious and educational institutions, the family and penal systems, etc.) with regard to the establishment and implementation of moral codes of behavior in the individual may be context-specific.

4. Individual Psychology

Whatever the nature of the external circumstances, ultimately it is the individual's basic personal dynamic which determines the extent to which these factors impact on behavior (Javier & Yussef, 1995). If the individual is psychic structure is characterized by a primitive and immature organization and an inability to deal with emotions, especially anger, then it is likely that external influences will trigger aggressive behaviors. On the other hand, if a person's psychological development includes a strong sense of morality and respect for others and their properties (Kohlberg, 1976; Gilligan, 1982; Piaget, 1932; Rest, 1979), it is expected that aggressive behavior will be less prominent.

If one accepts the psychoanalytic explanation about aggression that it results from unneutralized aggressive impulses in a person with an immature ego configuration (Freud, 1920, 1955; Parens, 1984), it is likely that any level of frustration in individuals with such psychological characteristics will lead to an expression of aggressive behavior. Ultimately, what we are referring to here is a deficient personality structure, including an undeveloped superego structure, which in turn tends to affect the extent to which the individual's behavior will be dictated by moral codes of conduct. According to most psychological theories, it is in the context of the child's relationship with important others that anger modulation is learned and as the child progresses in his/her cognitive development, language and other more advanced means of expression come into play. It is also in this context that the development of morality takes place which Freud and other major psychoanalytic thinkers amply describe in their writings (Freud, 1920/1955; Winnicott, 1965).

The child learns what is or is not appropriate in his/her early years of development when he/she is most vulnerable to influence. It is during the formative years when a complex web of guidelines/moral principles which permeate and influence all aspects of existence are encoded in personality. Once encoded, they function as guidance for behavior, and it is our belief that the extent to which the media's violent content influences an individual is determined by his/her moral development. Since this issue is the essential point of this paper, we will discuss it further in the following section.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ARGUMENT: A CASE IN POINT IN THE FILM "THE BAD LIEUTENANT"

A creative fictional work, the film The Bad Lieutenant, is used to illustrate the potential of the media for facilitating insight into violence and in turn opening up directions for its prevention. The film will be described first, followed by an analysis of the insights that can be derived from its depiction of violence. An interpretation of the violence will be made in terms of the main character from the personal psychodynamics of violence will proceed to an understanding of the development and expression of violence in society.

The Bad Lieutenant is a film directed by Abel Ferrara, cowritten by Abel Ferrara and Zoe Lund, and starring Harvey Keitel. The protagonist, who is nameless in the movie, is a New York City police lieutenant who is married, has children, lives in ueens with his family, and other female relatives, and is a nominal Catholic. He engages in most forms of evil, corrupt behavior that come readily to mind, as well as some that do not.

His major passions dominate the thematic content of the story. He is extremely competitive in both duplicitous and foolhardy ways. This is illustrated by a running account of a Mets-Dodgers seven game championship series in which the Dodgers have a three game advantage, but ultimately lose four games and the series. He gets some of his fellow policemen to bet on the Mets while he is secretly betting on the Dodgers. He cheats his comrades, and at the same time lacks the money to pay the gamblers with whom he is placing the bets; they ultimately kill him for trying to cheat them as well. He is preoccupied with his ill-fated gambling, and ignores his work, (which involves murder investigation) to place bets. This illustrates his disdain for people and events, a lack of personal integrity, his own grandiosity, and leads to his inevitable demise.

His passions are addictive, risky, and engaged in violently. His sensual, libidinal gratification includes drinking alcohol to excess, drug abuse, stealing, and spending a lot of time with drugged prostitutes. He uses his position as a police officer to intimidate and manipulate everyone. He is vulgar, profane, and dangerous, falsely believing in his own immortality. Although warned that treating his gambling debts as though they were not obligations for payment could have dire results, he is defiant. He states that no one can kill him because he is "blessed." Cursed appears more to be the case.

The only times he does not appear at the very least angry, and often in a rage, is when he is drunk, drugged, or performing some sexual act. The latter frequently has a sadistic component; one prostitute describes him and herself as "vampires." His third passion becomes apparent in the pivotal scene in the film, the rape of a nun, graphically depicted, along with the pillage and destruction of the church in which she is raped. The Lieutenant is involved in the police investigation and attempts to apprehend the rapists, in the process, his voyeuristic tendencies are displayed, but more striking is his passion for the hunt as he becomes intent on catching the criminals.

The nun becomes his opponent in his role as the hunter, and weighs in heavily for a time as she refuses to say anything. However, he correctly surmises that she knew the identity of the rapists. His suspicion is confirmed when he listens just outside the confessional as she admits to the priest that she indeed knew her attackers. They appear to have been just boys, parishioners, actually past students of hers but even in the confessional when the priest asks her to name them, she refuses. Ultimately the Lieutenant finds her in the church where it happened and tries to get her to tell him their identities, but she continues to refuse. Instead she tells him that she has forgiven them as though that settled the entire matter. He confronts her with the possibility that they could repeat their actions and harm others if she is not forthcoming, but she appears disconnected from him and his logic. Instead, she tells him to pray, and she leaves him.

He crumples to the floor, begins to moan and wail and hallucinates a figure of Christ at the back of the church. He crawls towards the figure, angrily beseeching its help, but when he reaches its feet and looks up, the figure is a black woman who is returning a stolen chalice to the church. She has taken it from the rapists so he is now able to identify the boys and render ineffective the power of the nun's silence.

He captures and terrorizes the rapists, but at the same time he drives them to the New York Port Authority bus terminal, gives them some money he has acquired by his betting which he might have used to try to rescue himself, and sends them away on a bus. Although some attempt at escape still seems possible for him, he does not seem in a hurry as he leaves. He gets in his car, and rather quickly, shots are fired from one of the passing cars. He is murdered.

In a satirical movie entitled Hot Shots Part Deux, a body count appears on the screen during violent scenes, and this body count includes comparisons to other movies notable for their rampant violence. The Bad Lieutenant would not rank among them because it is not close to being the most violent movie available. However, it is being used as our example because it makes violence believable as commonplace, and therefore, personally meaningful to the viewer. It assaults the sensibilities of viewers with its mixture of fact and fiction that combine to evoke a gritty reality in which one man, the Lieutenant, sprays his anger around rather indiscriminately, including at himself, and is eventually destroyed by the wrath of others. The film raises the specter of an unending cycle of everyday violence that has little respect for law, order, society, religion, or personal ethics. As such, it has a chilling fascination. Although it is fiction with excesses, personalized views, and distortions, its unreality is just real enough that the viewer suspects life can be like this. There is the lure of the unbridled power of violence as the final solution to one's problems, the loathing and disregard for one's self and others, and the triumph of personal anarchy that masks the goodness of humanity. Finally, there is the recognition of the eternal struggle between love and hate, described by Melanie Klein (1957) as the central conflict in human experience, which demands attention if love is to win out so that the world might actually become a more peaceful place.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE FILM: THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THE MAIN CHARACTER

The lieutenant is introduced to the audience at a point where he has already become "bad." As a result, it is necessary to hypothesize the developmental progression of his violent behavior.

The model we are using to recreate the Lieutenant's progression to violence considers violence as part of an instinctual aggressive drive which can be used constructively and destructively, thus making conflict inevitable in varying degrees (Freud, 1920/1955: Parens, 1984). In the division of aggression into acceptable and unacceptable, both types can be equally violent. Thus the Lieutenant can cloak his aggressive inclinations in the mantle of acceptability. Of course, he is supposed to remain within the confines of good aggression, but just giving him license to be aggressive turns out to be risky and illustrates the need to be very concerned with the use of force.

A likely developmental situation for the Lieutenant is that he was subject to excessive frustration in his interactions with caregivers when he was a child. He probably had a low threshold of reactivity, so that he quickly became irritable, moved rapidly to rage and customarily displayed considerable aggression that developed into a violent pattern that was repressively socialized by his choice of an occupation, namely, becoming a police officer. His relationships with others may well have originated with a bond to a frustrating maternal object under the dominance of internalization of bad self and object relationships. There is both an identification with the frustrating mother as well as with the relationship with her. Thus, the Lieutenant becomes a destructive, omnipotent person and projects his mistreated self onto others who become his victims. In the process, he is both victim and attacker, and ultimately, is destroyed. The excessive aggression tends to interfere with the integration of the good and bad aspects of both self and others. The result is a relative fixation at a level of split objects where integration takes place only on a superficial level, and violence dominates. Of course, this is only one probable psychodynamic evaluation. Other possibilities include excessive gratification resulting in narcissistic grandiosity with violence as a derivative, or constitutional and situational outcomes, such as physical illness, interfering with appropriate caretaking. However, given the many instances of the Lieutenant's apparent anger, deprivation by primary caretakers coupled with constitutional vulnerability to aggression seems most plausible.

The Lieutenant makes it clear that he has a driving need for an omnipotent image. Early in the movie, he angrily explains to his sons that he is the one who decides what will or will not happen in the household. This is his response to a challenge to this authority by a woman. His reasoning is, as he states, "I'm the boss," indicating identification with the aggressor as well as widespread displacement.

He is willing, if not eager, to use violence to make the point of his encompassing authority, and at the same time the position of boss provides him with the feeling of power that for him automatically includes the use of violence. His role as a police officer illustrates this as well; he has all the symbols and tools of violence available to him. He uses them primarily to serve his interests of the moment. He is quick to pull and shoot his gun, and this phallic impulsiveness is repeatedly revealed in his sexual adventures and substance abuse. He is a person of excesses, as though a great hunger drives him; mere anger scarcely whets his appetite.

We also see the difficulty he has in separating aggression, (and violence in particular) into good and bad categories because he blurs the lines fusing good and bad into bad in his expression of violence, even when it may be thinly disguised as appropriate. He is, after all, a representative of the law, one of society's guardians against violence, who is expected to use restraint in his own behavior. Instead, he thinks nothing of cheating and robbing others, good as well as bad, of charging around traffic jams with a flashing light indicating his "star" status just because he is frustrated and impatient, and of shouting "police business" when he wants to make a personal drug transaction without being observed. He mocks the law, seemingly without remorse as though it were not something deserving respect, yet considers himself invulnerable from the revenge of criminals because he is the law, and he sanctifies his status with a delusional invincibility.

The viewer is quickly moved to wonder, what drives him? What made him like this? Thus, the line of inquiry that is being pursued in this paper becomes a public question, which is useful both in terms of increasing awareness about the need to understand violence as well as seeking knowledge to facilitate understanding. Of course, since the movie shows only glimpses of the man's life as it is coming to an end and provides little factual information about his development, it increases the need for the viewer to explore the developmental possibilities. He is such an ominous character that we need to try to prevent others, or ourselves, from becoming like him. In addition there is also such a sense of the man's pain that a troubled history seems certain.

Although considerable footage is spent on his preoccupation with winning money, the sums of money that he anticipates winning (and keeps losing) appear rather uninteresting to him. Economic deprivation may not have been a primary etiological agent, although it is often a contributor to the expression of violence. However, in this case he focuses on a need to win which becomes converted into his right to win. In one sense, it is incomprehensible to him that he will not win, and even when it should be clear to him that he has lost, he tries to blot it out refusing to believe that there will be negative consequences and that he has indeed lost. After all, he is invulnerable, or so he has stated, and those who dare disagree with him are met with a violent reaction from him.

He believes so firmly that violence demands violence (unless he is the violent one) that the silence of the nun puzzles him, and as it continues, it appears to torture him to the point that he is obsessed with destroying it. She becomes an adversary in her partial identification with the aggressors because she is defying the law by refusing to cooperate. At the same time, the confused comments she does make to him, including the erotic statement with miraculous overtones that she "will turn bitter semen into fertile sperm" along with saving the souls of the rapists, and her initial silence, suggest she is severely traumatized. As a result, rather than being particularly motivated to thwart the law or the Lieutenant, she defends her integrity by what she knows best, her religion. In so doing, she gains temporary omnipotence herself, as a martyred Christ-like person who has the winning position the Lieutenant usually reserves for himself. He might have felt he had been winning up to that point because he has invaded her in so many ways she does not know about, including a visual rape of her after the fact, yet she beats him for the moment. She leaves him to howl fiercely on the floor of the church to hallucinate Christ, who he begs with fury to help him. At the same, time he excuses himself, saying he tried to be good, but was too weak. Confronted with Christ he appears to have some degree of repentance, some stirrings of conscience, some possibility of an appropriate superego.

All this quickly dissolves, however, once he realizes that the figure is a real person, not Christ, and that this person will lead him to the thieving, raping boys. He will then win out over the nun and the boys, and probably the world. Of course, it is a desire to see justice carried out, or even a desire to seek vengeance for someone who will not seek it herself, but instead a show of his power. Once he has the boys, he toys with them, alternating between physical and verbal abuse as he feeds them some of his drugs. Driving along in a fury with the rapists he seems bent on destroying them. Even when he parks his car defiantly in front of the bus terminal, it still appears as if he will harm them. Suddenly, he releases them and sends them away on a bus. Perhaps this is an attempt at ultimate, other-worldly redemption as part of a reconstituting superego, but he retains his power over them and over the nun's silence. However, he has at the same time followed the nun's thinking in letting them go.

Thus, his power appears to be ebbing, and when he returns to his car he appears to be taking just a bit too much time to leave. Perhaps he is continuing to defy the odds, or perhaps he is waiting for the car that comes carrying the deadly bullets. He becomes another statistic of the city's violence as the curious begin to gather around the illegally parked car with the dead driver. The movie fades to black, the credits roll, the soundtrack is "Forever My Darling."

The Lieutenant made violence as acceptable to himself as eating. He was sustained by it as much as he sustained it in a developmental progression that starts with an incorporative identification of the libidinally satisfying aspects of being fed which are equated with the ingestion of the feeders. Apparently, he never got enough, as the boundaries melt away and he devours (metaphorically as well as literally) drugs, alcohol, and the procedures of Catholic communion all appearing as symbols of the need to satiate an ever-consuming hunger, thereby maintaining his infantile grandiosity and omnipotence. He probably began life with the magical notion that he was all powerful. He refuses to accept any reality that denies this. He displays oral annihilatory rage, anal-sadistic rage, and phallic exhibitionistic rage, as though all the fears of the past, lack of narcissistic supplies, external controls, and castration anxieties are forever his companions. Psychic structures, other than the id, appear weak and primitive, with an apparent strong investment in the death instinct. Intriguingly, although he is a violent man and death surrounds him, he never kills anybody, though he is killed. In the closing moments of the film, his complexity is more apparent, and it hints at the positive side of ambivalence and the hope that no one either wants to be or is bad, all of the time.

In all, although it is clear that the multiplicity of factors discussed earlier may impact on the extent to which violent expression is present in the characters of the film it is their personal psychologies which ultimately determine the extent to which violence becomes part of their behavioral repertoire.

CONCLUSION

In this paper we offered a comprehensive perspective on the role the media can play in the expression of violence. It is our premise that, although violence in the media can have a deleterious impact on behavior, the nature of this impact can only be understood in the context of multiple dimensions, but especially, one's personal psychology. But to the extent to which the media can influence behavior and facilitate the expression of violence in certain individuals, it is important that carefully designed interventions be implemented. This is particularly the case since the media can also have clear educational influences in teaching a prosocial message and the complexity of human motivation as shown in our analysis of the film "The Bad Lieutenant". Given that television is likely to stay and will have an increasing influence on our lives and the lives of our children, it is necessary that we get actively involved as parents, educators, and citizens.

As parents, we need to monitor what our children watch on television and watch with them. We need to engage them in conversation about what they see and help them understand it and learn from it. Using television as a babysitter or a way of avoiding contact with our children may have greater detrimental results than we realize. It is our contention that the abdication of parental responsibilities and the erosion of the family are major contributors to the increasing number and the severity of the societal problems we face, including our subject, violent behavior.

As educators, we need to teach children how to understand what they watch on television. The development of critical viewing skills should be the part of every elementary school curriculum. Curricula for the development of critical viewing skills already exists and has been shown to be effective (e.g., Singer, Singer & Zuckerman, 1981). Teaching children how to watch television more productively is extremely important because the use of educational television and other media appears to be growing in all educational levels.

As citizens, we need to be concerned about the quality of life in our society. Our concerns about violence should not only include the need to monitor the kinds of programs our children watch but to advocate an understanding of the personal, family and societal issues which cause violence and determine what role television can play in reaching that understanding.

In short, we must all become involved in this educational task. Although the media is capable of inciting violence, it can also be a tremendous aid in preventing it. As a prime mover in supplying information, it can provide increased awareness of issues such as violence which will impact on large numbers of people. It is our hope that many will seek solutions to such problems by becoming more sophisticated users of what is available to them in the media. It is also our hope that people will become more psychologically aware: better interpersonal skolls that come with psychological understanding can only result in a more peaceful world.

The recognition and illustration that good and evil are always there to temp the ambivalence in humanity is what make the Bad Lieutenant so good!

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AUTHORS' NOTE

This manuscript was presented at the International Conference on Violence in the Media, Prospect for Change, sponsored by St. John's University, October 3-4, 1994, New York. The authors extend their appreciation to Philip Yanos, Lydia Adlerstein and Leslie Bogen for their invaluable contributions in the preparation of this manuscript.

Direct Reprint Requests to:                                          
Rafael Art Javier, Ph.D.                                             
St John's University                                                 
Center for Psychological Services                                    
and Clinical Studies                                                 
Grand Central and Utopia Parkways                                    
Jamaica, NY 11439

RAFAEL ART. JAVIER, PH.D., WILLIAM G. HERRON, PH.D. LOUIS PRIMAVERA, PH.D., St. John's University

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