Percentage of top grossing US films by decade that depict killing

Then when I read the title correctly on HN, I remembered the graph going downward and thought it was weird that films were showing less killing. I clicked through and was surprised to see that the x-axis was descending chronological order.

So now that I finally get the graph, let me throw out a WAG: with the end of the military draft, the almost complete departure of workers from agriculture, and increasing safety in society, violence of any form and especially death is not a real part of most peoples' lives. It is therefore fair game for fantasy and storytelling because there is little negative emotional experience attached to it, but there is a high degree of novelty.

If it makes you feel better about the world, actual murders per capita is not significantly higher now than it was in the 1960's; I guess we've all figured out that life lessons don't come from blockbuster movies --- just fun explosions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

Alternatively watch something like Howard Hughes's Hell's Angels (1930)

It's shame that more conciliatory outcomes are not considered. And you wonder about youth violence, but if this is the message taught by every film what do you expect?

P.S. counter examples please!

So the 70s correspond to Vietnam. And the 40s correspond to WWII. Today, we also have wars. But we are somehow increasingly disconnected from the realities of what that means.

Anyway, it's a nice chart. But if you ever watch old movies right after WWII (in the 40s, early 50s), you can almost feel the trepidation around anything but those undervalued, safe moral environments. In some ways, it's a more mature audience / understanding -- it's more focused. But because a lot of the country has seen real horrors, it seems like now they crave some kind of careful normalcy (which doesn't have much violence). Perhaps the 70s also had that incentive. A lot of social change and some violence in the late 60s might've prompted it. Or, alternatively, people actually might've believed in non-violence for a while, and that might've stimulated other subjects.

I don't know. But obviously, according to the chart, it's a self-perpetuating phenomenon. So this can be explained by saying that US culture (perhaps increasingly in the form of high grossing films), left to its own status quo momentum, gradually disconnects us from the realities of violence.

There, I drew my own conclusion. Provided the data is true.

Is that a boilerplate footer for every blog post? Because I didn't really see the connection between gore in movies and the book :)