As usual the question:  Do movies depicting violent and destructive content effect the public viewers?  We can always say, it depends on who is watching and the reason they are watching any movie of their choosing.  People watch movies to entertain themselves, feel something, or learn something, or discover a new story about life.  Most folks love to sit and allow their brains to fizz, at least of those who love to sit and watch other people do things that are often unimaginable.  On the other side of this are the folks who love to put stories together and bring art to the public for purposes of entertainment, impressions, change, or making people feel in order for them to become conscious.

Humans have the busiest of brains.  Throughout our lives we are constantly thinking, hearing, seeing, touching, feeling and doing.  When our eyes are open we spend time creating a living stream of visual and audio images.  Where on earth does all that information travel?  It certainly does not stop at the seeing of it.  It certainly does not die.  It must just keep flowing through our systems and our bio-physical processes...but where does it go.  How can the human brain handle so much constant information?  The fact that we humans can do this, in general, all of us, is genius.  It is a quality of life to be deeply respected.  I hold this ability in deep reverence.  Aha!  It is worth fighting for.  Oops, did I write that?  We all  have something to fight for, do we not?

We humans produce our own angst, our own violence, our own desires and needs, and when we become aware of them, we stand up and fight or defend this internal matrix of beliefs.  It is a land of lawlessness within our own brains where we can create our own realities and make things happen according to our own fantasies.  We call them stories.  We find them so fascinating that we make movies out of our thoughts because we want to communicate these flights of fantasy with other individuals.  In some cases the more humans who tag along with us create an army of followers. They scramble and piss on ants in order for the privilege.  They create conflicts, and competition and they fight for the right.  Again, they produce these conflicts inside their own brains.  It is the crush of tension and unresolved conflicts.  It can become violent and destructive.  Conflict is the angst of all great movies.  Conflict is an everpresent driving force of human motivation, although we claim to love peace and harmony more.  And if that is true, why then do we spend more time, energy, and money creating violence, destruction and conflict?  War is a driving force of all civilizations.  It is conflict.  The aftermath is controlled by private opinions and beliefs of opponents, still filled with a desire to win, even though the major historical event is complete, at least in some audio and visual ways.  But it lives on and on and on.  Conflict and competition are never ending stories.

Conflict and competition are the fodder of all good movies.  Without these elements people would be bored silly in a theatre.  Humans are so in need of these elementals that we see a rise in the popularity of 3-D movies.  Why is this?  We can already see a film and hear the drama.  Now we are so needy, it has to jump off the screen and into our laps in order for us to find one hour or two hours of artifical stimulation.  The flat screen our story is seen and known.  The 3-D impression makes us feel more of the action.  We are either extraordinaryily inventive or culturally numb.

Resident Evil portrays our need to wander through different environmental landscapes that are fabrications of the Umbrella Corporation.  They have a major goal in mind, providing Alice with a complex set of scenes that she must escape in order to survive.  We are entertained by observing fantasy within fantasy.  We learn we are given tools to save ourselves, but that we must figure out how to use the tools, and then apply the tools, and ultimately fight our way to escape.  The movie tells us that with extraordinary feats of ingenuity and physical exertion, we will escape.  In the meantime we are lead through visual and audio pathways that introduce us to violence and destruction and the use of our superior powers of dominance and control.  We sit breathless, our minds and emotions engaged in a subliminal battleground,  sucking us into the actions on the screen, until we feel it is happening to us.  It becomes a some level of consciousness, more than a movie.  All movies do this, if they truely engage our attention.  That is a strong impetuous to spend the hard earned money in our pockets in the first place.  We want to go somewhere else in a psuedo time travel experience.

The question the experts are asking now,  like Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarentino, and  their panel of experts," is this stuff on screen making us do what we see?"   This issue is  being addressed due to the incident in the Colorado theatre where, during the new Batman Movie,  a man entered the theatre and shot many in the audience.  So, the question became...did the movie and its contents make the man do this?  The experts probably should ask the man.  However, there are many movies that have been created that could potentially have more detrimental content than this.  And we do not know that audience members are going around performing heinious duties and activities from what they have viewed or learned on screen.

Considering the volumnes of content and the volumes of information from all the movies produced over time...we would be in deep conflict  if we acted out or tryed to recreate what we see on screen in real time.  However humans might be filtering out what they see and hear, just like they do in their own slower moving lives.  By watching movies we have learned to filter out information that we can use in a rational sense or information that we will never want to use.

All of the Hostel Series and the Saw Series are painful to watch.  Yet they will leave a viewer with a common positive thought: Think your way through situations, there is a way to the next open door,  and you might win if you persevere, but somethings will be destroyed and some of your companions will die.  This same basic formula exists in all movies.  In 30 First Dates,  Sandler was faced with the same dilemma over and over again.  In this movie it was his emotions that were in conflict, not his body, nor the property.

The lessons to be learned from all movies is this timeless passing of occassions, whereby within our own lives we have to filter information, think our way through situations, open door that are closed, look for escape routes for peaceful negotiations, and resolve or terminate the conflict.  That is it.  It does not matter is you are in Step Up 4,  Mission Impossible, War Horse, The Terminator,  Red Light, The Expendables 2, Thor, The Immortals, The Bachlorette, Lawless, The Black Swan...and on and on with endess titles....The Thin Red Line, or Milk, or ChinaTown, I Am Legend, The Hunger Games.  All provide a steady stream of visual activity and a stream of sound, light and movement and all of that stimulates the cerebral cortex etc. and hopefully raises our levels of consciousness in some way or gives us some much needed modern day stimulus...or alters our perceptions of our own life so that we can function better in our own ADL's.

Watching buildings crumble and fall, like in BattleField or in 2012, or in Transformers shows us and warns us of what could, might, or has happened somewhere and in some way to someone.  The social conflict movies such as the Fast and Furious Series show what the potential is for social conflict in slow moving towns where boredom repeatedly times the day.  These  stories we can find in LA, in Detroit, in Modesto, or Fresno...but they are about people.  Social conflict movies are primarily staged to speed up social conflict stories and create a fast moving happening about social possibilities based on stories of legendary activity surrounding certain populations.  The other former titles demonstrate structures in transition.  Structures that we recognize, like city buildings and transportation, and our own earth...structures that are static and stationary that we humans imagine are permanent.  These movie stories show our ideas of permanence blasted out of our tiny human perceptions of reality.  We comfort ourselves with the knowing or the feeling that our lives, our homes, our gardens will always be here for us.  These movies show us differently.  It is more than emotional shock we feel when we watch the impossible become possible on the screen, like in 2012, where the waters wash over us and the earth opens up and swallows whole cities. This is frightening to contemplate.  And these movies show us events we are unable to grasp in our daily lives.  It will break us out of our egocentric complacency.

More than what we see on screen is what is behind the movies themselves.  It is the people, the writers, the producers, the directors, the scene makers, the film editors, the photographers, the assistants,  the costumers, the make-up artists, the musicians, the graphic designers, and of others and of others, who think about these things and want to communicate messages to the population and get them to wake up.  They also earn a whole lot of money in the process.

To accuse that violence and destruction in movie content is all there is to movieland is erronerous.  Dolph Lundgren's movies all have the use of weapons.  They all have stories.  One has to consider the content of the whole, as opposed to picking on one piece of informationl.  The movies that he has performed in are about "having to struggle to fight or win...and in the end....he wins!"  That is what people do, we just do not as a norm use weapons to win.  The question is, "would the audience exist to watch Dolph walk up to someone and make a peaceful request, and the opponent say, "sure," and that is the end of that scene and on to the next.  I kinda see an empty theatre with that trick.  Movies are about action and action is about motion and movement.

Personally I would love to make a movie.  My movie would be of People Walking.  The content would be just that.  People everywhere walking away, in shorts, in pants, in dresses....every gait and every design of movement, alone, and in groups, in crowds...catching the movement of the human body as it exits a scene...as it shops a store, as it enters a park, as it hurries upstairs, or walks down a fashion runway....I might extend it to include arms swinging, or hand movements, or facial expressions of a thousand different smiles...there are many bits of information about people that movie producers are not using, that are missing from our social documentations, from our life stories....ever since  Oaklahoma, and The Music Man, it has been the end of musicals, which are my favorite type of movie...and Gone With The Wind...we have all top winners of note being movies of violent content and structural destruction....it is possible that these aggressive world views have effected us, and maybe not.

We have been watching.  We have been streaming it through our heads.  It does go somewhere.