The other night I watched Stephen Spielberg's "Schindler's List." In Spielberg's film, shot almost entirely in black and white, death is, by Quentin Tarantino standards, boring. Someone is shot, and he or she falls to the ground, like a sack of potatoes. The camera doesn't linger on the person's face. It's horrifying, but it's horrifying in a way that works largely because of the glorification of violence in films like "Sin City." It's as if Spielberg's point is that we disguise murder in style, and that it is only without style and without fantasy that murder is truly horrifying. In a sense, we use style to avoid the horror of killing, confusing real death and cinematic death to ignore the real consequences of violence.

I liked "Sin City." A lot. And I loved "The Matrix." Yet, these films epitomize the suspension of disbelief that accompanies violent movies, the same suspension that Spielberg tries to eliminate with his colorless picture and simple, horrible murder. In contrast, "Sin City"'s artistic, comic book design makes it easy to see that no one is really dying, that characters are imaginary. And, in "The Matrix," the delineation between the real world and the computer world implies that all of the nameless guards or civilians, killed by agents or humans, are lesser people that we can ignore. They aren't real, even in the movie world. Both movies make it easy to write off violence as imaginary, because no one legitimate is injured.

We pretend to be able to distinguish between real and fake, of course, and these films (unlike "Schindler's List") make it easy for us, giving us plot-oriented ways of doing so. And, certainly, if someone exclaimed "I'm watching 'The Pianist' tonight because the violence is so cool!" we would be horrified, perhaps proving that there's some value in our ability to distinguish. But in our ostracizing of those incapable of distinguishing, shouldn't we at least take some responsibility? Is it entirely someone's fault if, after being exposed to "fake violence" and "real violence" in a medium that is inherently "fake," he or she ultimately has trouble distinguishing?

The military understands this duality of real violence and imaginary, "fun" mayhem. A recent article in The Los Angeles Times tells of army recruiters bringing complex video games like "America's Army" (the example in the article) to American high schools in order to recruit soldiers to fight in Iraq (Felch, Jason. The Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2005). The kids play the games like they're just games, much as we at Amherst play Doom or Max Payne-but in this case they aren't just games. They aren't games, paradoxically, because of the illusion behind them: it is the military's goal that they be seen as games, so that the reality of the war in Iraq and actual death doesn't deter recruitment. As one recruiter in the article said, "It's a lot more difficult to find the best candidates because you're recruiting at a time of war." With artificial violence you can blur the line between the real possibility of death and just another really exciting video game. And thus, the army uses the confusion of real and fake violence to recruit young people to fight and die in Iraq.

But we're used to this debate, right, or a debate like this? We hear it all the time coming out of the Christian right, indicting Marilyn Manson for causing Columbine. Of course, that debate is centered around violence in our schools, not the war in Iraq, yet it asks the same question: Does fantastical violence manifest itself in real violence? Does the line between reality and fantasy, when blurred in film, ever take violence off the screen and into "our streets." I won't try to maintain that cinematic violence caused Columbine, or the recent school shootings in Red Lake High School, because that would be a gross oversimplification. Yet, what of the very concept of going out in a blaze of glory? As Clive Owen's character in "Sin City" proclaims, "It's time to prove to your friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying, sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people." If instead he had said, "Killing is a last resort. Instead, I'm going to get the hell out of town or file a complaint with the police department," in the world of "Sin City" he would have been, at best, naïve, and at worst, a "sissy." Violence is not a last resort in movies, because violence as a last resort isn't entertaining. Or because real violence, removed from stylistic Hollywood, isn't fun to watch.

Still, to be fair to cinema, this confusion of entertainment and real violence is as prevalant in our news media as it is in our movies. "The Daily Show" says it best, every time Jon Stewert makes fun of the dearth of coverage on anything positive in Iraq and the incredible number of front page articles on bigger and bigger explosions. We're obsessed with more and more terrible events, as if their size itself is somehow fascinating, entertaining. CNN noted in its coverage of Red Lake that "The death toll made it the nation's worst school shooting since April 1999"-the month of the Columbine shootings. This comment is a fact, I suppose, and yet, at the same time, it implies almost that this school shooting, killing 10 (including the perpetrator) was worse than those between it and Columbine. That the significance of the terror was directly proportional to the number killed or the extent of the devastation-the sensationalism of the crime. The same attitude has surrounded the limited coverage of the genocide in Darfur, which is ironic because this reduction of death to numbers and entertainment is part of the reason that countries can, subconsciously, rationalize not intervening in places like Darfur. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times cites the number of victims at 300,000 with 10,000 more each week, as if the size of the number is in itself what makes it significant. And can anyone deny our culture's obsession with "the number killed"? We all watched after the December tsunami to see how high the death toll would rise. We were moved by some unconscious fascination, voyeuristic or otherwise, with the size and degree of the violence. It is the gory details, to stretch the analogy, that Spielberg refuses to let you see, but that we desire to see the most. And in making violence, real or fake, a form of sensationalist entertainment, we blur the line between what we do and don't accept, confusing what is and isn't real.

I suppose then, that it is everyone's choice whether to see American violent cinema, news coverage and video games for what they are, the glorification and voyeurism of violence, and for what they are producing, the blurred delineation between real and fake violence. Or it is for us to go back to our computers, play our games, enjoy our movies and ultimately ignore the fact that, as Michael Moore pointed out in "Bowling for Columbine," our culture itself presents a contradiction. Can we both hate "real violence" and glorify fantasy? Can we promote peaceful resolutions and inundate children with death counts and fake blood that seem to imply, however unintentionally, that violence is exciting and interesting and societally important? "Schindler's List" is an accusation not just against the world for allowing the Holocaust or the Germans for perpetrating it. It is an affirmation of the complete and utter ordinariness, and thus horror, of violence. Those kids that play video games and then kill members of the insurgency believe real death is like a video game. Maybe it's our culture's responsibility to finally reject this duality and affirm that it is not.

Rosen can be reached at jmrosen@amherst.edu