I watched the film ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ yesterday, which is a thriller and horror film. In this film, there are many brutal scenes: eating human flesh, killing by excoriating men’s skin and torso murder. I think this kind of films cause people to imitate the crimes.
For example, a few years ago, one middle-school student put his classmate to the edge of the knife. After the accident, he said he had been much affected by the Korean film “Friend.” In the film like ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, there are many cruel acts: the most brutal scene is killing ‘Dong Su’, one of four best friends, in the end of the movie. Also, according to a research, after ‘The Godfather’ showed in the 70s, many felonies such as murder, arson and rape drastically increased in America. It means a movie affects a lot of audience whether it is good or bad.
What I most worry about is that common children who are pure and innocent imitate the crimes in the films without any doubt. It is said that the most important thing in one’s life is childhood’s experience because the more people are young, the easier they are affected by environment around them. Of course, I know every movie is rated by many association related to the movie industry. So, it is impossible for children to enter the theater in order to watch the movie which is rated restricted. Nevertheless, if they want to watch the sensational movie, they can do it through the internet, secretly avoiding their parents.
However, because of these things, we also cannot remove every brutal scene in the movie. Brutal scenes which are brilliantly described offer the audience chance to think about violence of people: how vicious people are sometimes. For example, Buffalo Bill, brutal murderer in the movie ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ kills many women continually to satisfy his greed. Through his unusual behavior, reasonable people can think about the importance of childhood and human abominable cruelty, not imitating them.
In my opinion, in order to get out of the dilemma, we have to consider about children’s accessibility to the restricted. That is, adults must prevent children from access to restricted media such as porno. Also, at once, we have to establish efficient education system which helps children learn how to accept mass media.