Blame it on films?

Is our cinema responsible for the extreme aggression among young people?

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A still from Shootout at Lokhandwala.The recent shooting of 14-year-old Abhishek Tyagi by two of his schoolmates in Delhi is possibly the first instance of a school shooting in the country.
The cold-blooded manner in which the murder was planned and executed, and the unrepentant attitude of the boys that has been reported in the media, is almost as chilling as the shooting itself.
And more recently, a 16-year-old boy from a Mumbai school stabbed his classmate in the eye with a pen because the victim was bullying him. In fact, the attack was carried out in class in front of other students and a teacher.
These incidents raise questions about the effect school bullies have on their victims. But it also raises a larger issue — are youngsters becoming inured to violence with all the violent movies (for example, Shootout at Lokhandwala, Company, Hitman and Duniya) made in recent times? They most definitely are, says consultant psychologist Swarnalatha Iyer. “What do films try to say? Take the law into your own hands, because the law takes its own time. And if you objectively analyse films, the villain is always well-dressed, owns a fleet of cars and has a lot of beautiful women around him. That’s the image portrayed, which is something that might appeal to youngsters,” she says.

Moreover, society’s threshold for violence has increased over the years. “If you watch a film with your grandmother, she may cringe if she sees a lot of blood and gore, but we wouldn’t flinch. So although people might not outwardly commit a violent act, this indicates that aggression levels have increased in society,” adds Swarnalatha.
But Anil Nagrath, secretary of the Indian Motion Pictures Producers Association, disagrees, saying that films actually send out positive messages. “The message in films is that crime doesn’t pay. The criminal either gets a sentence, or gets his just desserts in some way,” he says. And Anil adds that you can’t blame it all on TV. “Less than 10 per cent of what actually happens in our society is portrayed in cinema. You see all sorts of things on the news — rape, murder, a woman being stripped naked. None of these is explicitly shown in cinema because our films are heavily censored,” he says.
In fact, censorship of violent films is something that often debated by the censorship board, says A Chandrashekhar, CFBC regional head. “We definitely feel that people are imbibing an element of violence and are becoming increasingly more intolerant. We are trying to grapple with the situation by restricting minors from watching these films by giving them ‘A’ certificates. But the other hurdle is enforcement, which is not such a problem in the cities, but is in rural areas,” he explains.

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