Death on the Small Screen: The Psychology of Viewing Violent Television by Jonathan F. Bassett
By Daniel Liechty | January 26, 2023
It is said that we are in the Golden Age of television series dramas. I am not much of a judge of such things, but I have undoubtedly been drawn in to more than one of these series on Hulu, Netflix, Roku and other streaming services. I probably can thank COVID for that. Like many others, I have seen my hours of accumulated television watching rise considerably since the shutdown. But it would be disingenuous for me to put all the blame on the effects of a virus. The fact is, for a number of these series I have viewed over the past few years, the impact has been very close to reading a really good novel. That is, much as I once planned much of my days around making sure I had time to get to that next chapter, I have found myself doing the same to get to that next TV episode. And (somewhat to my dismay and embarrassment) this has particularly been the case with series in which heavy violence and suspense play a large role. Why do such story lines have such a grip on me? What is the attraction? Which of my mental and emotional strings are being pulled here? I found many of those questions answered in Jonathan F. Bassett’s new book.
The first part of the book reviews general studies on the impact that violence on TV has for viewers. The most visible controversy, of course, is whether viewing lots of violence on TV leads to violent behaviors on the part of the viewing audience. While looking at these studies and interpreting them evenly and fairly, Bassett makes clear that this is not really the focus of his book. His focus is on the question of what makes viewing violent television attractive to us in the first place. While he does suggest some interesting findings in this general research, he feels strongly that there is a need for a more unifying psychological theory which is missing in most of these studies, and this Bassett finds in Terror Management Theory.
The book proceeds to a chapter outlining what Terror Management Theory is, how TMT studies are formulated and pursued, and what sorts of interpretations of human motivational psychology we find in TMT. While much of this material will be familiar to readers of the EBF Newsletter, I do want to say that Bassett does a fine job of summarizing, and if you should ever find yourself in need of a persuasive TMT synopsis, you could do a lot worse than consulting this book.
Following on this summary of TMT, Bassett moves into the heart of the first part of the book, which is a direct application of TMT to the question of what attracts us to violence as entertainment, that is, what are the psychological and emotional benefits we gain from it. Here Bassett is building on perspectives on TMT applied to understanding and interpreting a variety of aesthetic products, including visual arts, literary fiction, music and so on. What is it about the human propensity toward death denial leads us to fascination with violence in the first place? Bassett presents some very important conclusions here, especially that we are enthralled not so much by violence itself as we are in violence employed to uphold our sense of justice in the world, in equalizing power imbalances, restoring social order, and in general supporting a background worldview we have of life on this planet as meaningful. Such ideas have appeared in part in various places, but Bassett brings these sources together and synthesizes them into a coherent perspective.
In the second part of the book, Bassett employs this foundation to provide chapter-length summaries and interpretations five of the most popular examples of recent series television in which violence plays a central and obvious role, all of which have had very large viewing audiences and have moved in one way or another into the social psyche of America (and increasingly we would have to say, the world, as American entertainment television is now broadcast internationally). These are Game of Thrones (HBO); The Punisher and Jessica Jones (both Netflix); Sons of Anarchy (FX); and Hannibal (NBC).
My assessment of Bassett’s book here is hampered by the fact that I have only watched one of these series, Sons of Anarchy, the saga of a California motorcycle club during a time of change in (generational) leadership. The show is unquestionably violent, to the point that (wimp that I am!) I would often find myself muting the sound or even turning away from the screen. Yet I found that even when I said to myself, OK, that’s it! and walking away from the show, soon I would find myself coming back to it, just to see how this or that conflict, moral dilemma or dramatic agon worked itself out! It being now more than two years since I watched the concluding episode, in which the lead character, arms outstretched like a sacrificial Christ, purposely crashes his bike into an oncoming semi so as to save the secrets of the club, I found myself nodding in agreement with Bassett’s points throughout this chapter.
As I look back on watching Sons of Anarchy (and we are talking here many hours of my life I will never get back again) I notice a number of things. I got into it in the first place because I was looking for simple escape from boredom. I was having eye troubles that made lengthy problematic (or am I just retroactively rationalizing here?) but quickly developed an unquestionable fascination with the story lines. One technique we see in this Golden Age of television is the very developed production technique of ending each episode in such a way that you are strongly pulled into the following episode. Story lines never really fully resolve, but only sort of fade away while the viewer is drawn into the next one. I also unquestionably found myself identifying with characters whose violence and moral turpitude I would have thought I would abhor. I remember that I was particularly engaged in situations in which characters with whom I identified were feeling the fear of coercion and being put in a moral vise grip by their sense of loyalty to others, especially the club, coming into direct conflict with self interest or loyalty to specific people. All of this aligns nicely with Bassett’s applications of TMT.
One last thing I noticed, which does not contradict Bassett’s view, but perhaps fills it out a little more; that is, while engaged in watching this series, while I do not think I was primed for violent behavior myself in my everyday life, I did find myself very often experiencing the feeling that the life I was actually living was very mundane, quotidian, rather boring, lacking in excitement and even somewhat routine to the point of meaninglessness. No wonder I couldn’t wait to get back to the next great episode of the Sons of Anarchy!
In summary, with this book Bassett has made a very valuable contribution to both media studies and to Becker/TMT literature. For any of us with Becker/TMT interests, this book is a ‘good read’ and one to keep handy on the shelf.
Daniel Liechty, Ph.D., is a longtime reader and interpreter of Ernest Becker’s writings. Liechty is Professor of Social Work and Distinguished Lecturer in Arts and Sciences at Illinois State University. He is especially interested in the implications of Becker’s work in religion and spirituality and its applications in psychotherapy. His Becker-related books include Theology in Postliberal Perspective (1990), Transference and Transcendence (1995), Thinking about Faith in a Post-Christian Time (2003), and The Ernest Becker Reader (2005). More recently he edited Facing Up to Mortality: Interfaith/Interreligious Explorations (2021), exploring Becker’s ideas as a catalyst for interfaith communication. Liechty served some 20 years as Vice President of The Ernest Becker Foundation.