Tuesday 26 April 2011

What is the effect of this violent scene on the audience?

This scene from Robocop shows an extreme explicit nature of fights. Usually the audience see a tiff amongst the hero and villain of a movie, however in this scene; the villain graphically shoots the hero’s hand off, followed by shots of blood from his arm. After this the villain laughs with his friends, suggesting that the shooting was humorous. This can lead to the audiences to make their own readings of the scene. They could either sympathise with the Hero and feel hatred towards the villain, or the audiences could laugh too. If the latter is the case, we could assume that violence has become desensitised, which can affect the viewers as they may feel that it is acceptable to horrifically kill someone. If that is the case, this may then go on to lead to the copycat theory, where the audiences may aspire to have power like the villain and go out and fight people. This has been a theory that people have studied in order to find a correlation between violent games and knife/gun crime.

Scenes like these can also make audiences view a ‘false’ world according to the cultivation theory. People may become so used to watching these sorts of scenes that they feel that events like that do take place in reality. This, then may lead to a realm of hyper reality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOkZIay0J00

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