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.
... or maybe I just got married.
So seeing that in reverse I was like "Well because we have more family and less Rated R movies nowadays that are blockbusters". Even rated R movies are not the same as the top grossing one is 'Passion of the Christ'.
Not sure what is worse graphs with time in the wrong direction or that more family movies are being made now with killing in them.
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.
As of 2010, US murder rates are significantly higher than they were in 1960. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
Violent crime increased significantly in the 60s, 70s and 80s, peaking about 1990. Since then they've dropped somewhat, but we're still at somewhere around 1975 levels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code
Alternatively watch something like Howard Hughes's Hell's Angels (1930)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Face_(film)
Sex and violence are not some kind of radical new idea. The shape of the OP's graph is almost certainly caused by the censors of the mid-20th century.
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!
The facts don't bear this out, despite how often it's repeated. Real world violence is not proportional to violence in movies (or video games for that matter).
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 :)
So 9 for 10
Avatar (2009) - Yep
Titanic (1997) - Yep
The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep
Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep
Spider-Man (2002) - Yep
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - YepEdit: The year 2005 was overall the safest year in the past thirty years.
PS: You can get an idea based on the % of serial rapist victims that report at a later date, but that's extremely unreliable.
1969, let alone 1975, was considerably more violent than 1960.
Go to http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/Search/Crime/State/State... select all states and violent crime rates and the push "get table".
You'll see that the murder rate in 1960 was 5.1. By 1969, it had jumped to 7.3. By 75 it was 9.6. It peaked at 10.2 in 1980 with a lesser peak at 9.8 in 1991.
By 2005 the murder had dropped to 5.6. (FWIW, 2004 was 5.5) 2008 was 5.4, which is still above 1960's 5.1
PS: I work with these numbers all the time. Murder is for lack of a better term the least reactive crime type, compared to say assault it far less influence by things like age, education, and gender etc.
So, it looks like the top US grossers only 1 was made without showing someone being killed.
My point is that the rates were changing so much during the 60s and 70s that speaking of averages loses too much information. 1960 and 1969 were very different as far as violence in the US is concerned.
> 5.1 vs. 5.4 for such a rare and random event is not particularly meaningful.
It's frequent enough to be statistically significant. We're not talking about the difference between 1 and 2 incidents in a population of 1M, we're talking about 10k incidents in a population of 180M.
The advantage of talking about murder (which includes manslaughter) as opposed to rape and drunk driving is that reporting isn't a big problem - the only argument is over the circumstance of death.
As to being significant looking at different crime rates you tend to see similar trends but the "peak" year is often different. You can try to interpret it to mean something, but the reality is your looking at an imprecise estimate of an imprecise estimates of a highly random event it's really vary random after the first digit.
1991 Forcible rape 106,593
1992 Forcible rape 109,062
1991 Robbery 687,732
1992 Robbery 672,478
Your assertion would be more convincing if your anecdote was had variance in the second position. Instead, it has variance in the third position (1065 and 1090) and less than half a unit in the second position (6877 and 6725)
The murder/manslaughter numbers are varying by 4-6x as much. (5.1 to 5.3/5.4)
Downward trend: - 2.2%
1991 Robbery 687,732
1992 Robbery 672,478
Upward trend: + 2.3%
1991 Forcible rape 106,593
1992 Forcible rape 109,062
However, X + 2% vs Y - 2% does not necessarily mean anything. If you want to understand people you need to look beyond any single year to find cause and effect.
PS: A heatwave can significantly change a city's crime rate, but on it's own there is no meaningful long term effect. Average things out over months and years and you can start to see meaning emerge from chaos.
"What was the peak year for crime" assumes a definition of crime, a way to aggregate rape, murder, etc. While we can agree on one, that agreement isn't binding on others. That's why I didn't claim that there was a peak crime year.
That said, averaging the 60s doesn't make sense as there was too much change.
Demographics alone tell us that different kinds of crime will peak a different times.
> By second digit I was talking about % change,
Since I was talking about to 5.1 to 5.4, the 98/99 comparison isn't especially relevant.
> A heatwave can significantly change a city's crime rate, but on it's own there is no meaningful long term effect.
You're assuming that weather doesn't have trends or long term effects. I'd argue that the dust bowl did. Urban heat-islands cause persistent heatwaves. (Yes, that's artificial climate, but ....)