Today we’re crossposting the review that closes our new issue—out from the paywall for our Substack readers (as well as Alex’s!). In tracing the history of cinematic violence from Thomas Edison to the Cybertruck bombing in Las Vegas earlier this year, “Explicit Content” captures and articulates one of the major concerns of the new issue: the way that algorithmic culture severs our apprehension of violent events from the narrative structures that once invested them with political and moral meaning.
If 2025 were a movie, it would begin at sunrise on New Year’s Day, in the porte cochère of Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. A gleaming Tesla Cybertruck glides up to the entrance. Seconds later, it explodes.
The movie could end there. Or not, whatever.
When I watched the CCTV footage of U.S. Army Special Forces soldier Matthew Alan Livelsberger, a married 37-year-old and father of a newborn, obliterate himself in a fireball, I had a wildly inappropriate thought: damn, that’s a nice shot. Early morning light. Long desert shadows. The explosion, a Bruckheimer-esque bloom of fire and debris, arcing in balletic symmetry. I felt like a shitbag for admiring this. Then I realized—the shot was the point. Livelsberger must have been picturing it. The shot was everything.
“Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,” he confirmed in his manifesto. And for a few hours, he had their attention. But what was he trying to say? Like so much modern terror, his act had the quality of slop—painfully unsubtle, yet maddeningly unclear.
No one except Livelsberger was killed or even seriously hurt, thankfully. If others had been harmed, he may have earned himself a few extra news cycles, or even a limited series on Hulu. These days, we like our tragedies serialized, and preferably featuring victims and killers who resemble bankable young actors.
In the not-so-distant past, cultural watchdogs spoke out against the unchecked glorification of violence. But those fingers have stopped wagging. Jerry Falwell is dead. Tipper Gore is napping in some Montecito cul-de-sac, and the gummy residue of her parental-advisory sticker is being wiped clean by the algorithm. The parents have left the chat.
In their absence, our appetites for violent media have changed, and the language of cinema has rewritten the way we process real-world violence. How we got here—how filmed violence slid from something with deep moral weight to something unquestioned and banal—is a strange story: one that doesn’t begin at sunrise in Las Vegas, but at the dawn of cinema itself.
In 1903, Thomas Edison produced Electrocuting an Elephant, a film just over a minute long that documents the execution of Topsy, a Coney Island circus elephant that trampled a jeering spectator. This grim spectacle was confined to Edison’s coin-operated kinetoscopes—arcade cabinets that predated movie theaters and allowed a single viewer, peering through a peephole, to catch a flickering glimpse of life and death.
Film historian Tom Gunning would later call these kinetoscopes the “cinema of attractions,” a form that prized sensation over story, pure kinetic display over cause-and-effect narrative. The kinetoscope offered its voyeurs an ephemeral jolt of something real, raw and primal: beefy strongmen flexing in loincloths, leggy dancers twirling their skirts and, of course, violence. Prizefighting reels such as The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897) were among the biggest draws. “These early films,” Gunning writes, “explicitly acknowledge their spectator, seeming to reach outwards and confront … as opposed to the cinema of the unacknowledged voyeur that later narrative cinema ushers in.”
Across the Atlantic, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) marked the beginning of cinema as a communal experience. Unlike the clunky, stationary kinetoscope cabinets, the Lumière brothers’ projectors were light, scalable and breathtakingly profitable. Equally important was their fluency with the classic Aristotelian narratives of literature and theater, stories presented in three acts, taking place in legible ethical universes where the forces of good mostly prevailed.
For the next sixty years, narrative cinema dominated, not just as entertainment but as a vessel for a spiritually and ethically coherent teleology. Like religion—or, increasingly, advertising—films used storytelling to shape behavior, teach lessons and model morality for the masses. A hero is tested, makes sacrifices and returns transformed. A fallen world is righted through his struggle. The narrative logic ladled a comforting secular moral order over the chaos of life, inviting paying viewers to empathize with, and even embody, the characters on screen.
To the extent that Edison’s pervy little picture box, with its morally and dramaturgically untethered spectacles, persisted, it was in a subdued form: restricted first by local censors, then by the Hays Code, a set of moral guidelines enforced by the film industry that forbade profanity, sex and nudity. Violence, however, was permitted, provided it was cleaned up and moralized. From the eighteenth-century frontier myths of Daniel Boone to the American Revolution and the Civil War, violence had always been central to America’s founding narrative and it remained the key ingredient of mid-century America’s most popular cinematic confection: the Western. Movies such as High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953) lionized lone gunslingers who cleaned up corruption and “tamed” native populations through purifying carnage.
In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America rating system replaced the Code, and with its adoption, restrictions on explicit, morally ambiguous spectacles eased. Consequently, Edison’s cinema of attractions flickered back to life in films such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). This cinema of “blood and holes” (as critic Pauline Kael named it) transcended the closed moral frameworks of the Code era to present audiences with ambiguous studies of human nature at its most savage—or perhaps its most honest.
Arriving at a time when American society was grappling with spiking crime rates and anti-war protests, these films prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to assemble the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence to determine whether on-screen brutality bled into real life, particularly among children. Various studies produced competing results, none of which stopped filmmakers from venturing further outside the newly porous moral boundaries of narrative into the savage wilds of sensation. Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) followed a documentary crew whose reckless pursuit of shock value led them to a grisly fate. Among the first so-called “found footage” films, Cannibal Holocaust was banned in more than fifty countries for its real animal killings (a callback to Edison’s elephant) and its gut-churning, hyperrealistic depictions of human sacrifice. When rumors spread that the murders were real, Deodato was arrested in Italy. Actors were forced to appear in court to prove they were still alive.
By the Eighties, violent media—newly available on home video and cable TV—were drawing fire from all political corners. On the right, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority crusaded against filth, while on the left, Ralph Nader’s watchdogs accused Hollywood of reckless sensationalism. Networks scrambled to appease both camps, dulling down anything that might provoke outrage.
But it was too late. The dam had cracked, and an endless barrage of carnage now splattered onto our screens—“nightmares of depravity,” as Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole called them, singling out Time Warner for “putting profit ahead of common decency.” He was echoed from the left—in the 1995 State of the Union address, no less. President Clinton urged Hollywood to “understand the damage that comes from the incessant, repetitive, mindless violence … that permeates our media all the time.”
Then, just as the outcry reached its shrillest note, something unexpected happened: from 1990 to 1997, U.S. violent crime dropped by 15.4 percent, even as the consumption of violent media exploded. Suddenly, it seemed that after all the hand-wringing, any supposed link between violent entertainment and real-world behavior was, at best, wildly overblown.
The cinema of blood and holes could now flourish unencumbered—it was all good harmless fun. But as on-screen violence became more stylized and abstracted, it began to lose its ethical charge. Films like The Matrix (1999) rendered mass shootings as sleek, slow-motion bullet ballets; The Boondock Saints (1999) offered up vigilante killings with frat-boy bravado. The line between depicting brutality and endorsing it had blurred—not because these films told us violence was good but because they stopped telling us anything meaningful about it at all. A deeper cultural shift was tremoring underfoot—one that would intensify our aesthetic fixations and dull our moral instincts, slipping the bounds of cinema and television in favor of computer screens.
On March 25, 1998, tucked deep in the police blotter of the Columbine Community Courier, below a report about a stolen leprechaun lawn ornament valued at $25, a brief item appeared: a high school student had made death threats on his website. The student, identified only by his screen name, “Reb,” had reportedly singled out a classmate. Investigators promised to look into it. They didn’t.
Eric Harris named his shotgun “Arlene” after a character in his favorite video game, Doom. He tells us this in the so-called Basement Tapes—a series of ranty late-night confessionals he filmed with his gleeful, toothpick-chewing co-host, Dylan Klebold, in the weeks before they killed fourteen people and themselves at Columbine High School.
Elsewhere on the tapes, the two teenage murderers-to-be talk movies; specifically, the movie that will inevitably be made about them. Harris offers some preemptive script notes, suggesting the film should have “a lot of foreshadowing and dramatic irony.” Klebold agrees: “Directors will be fighting over this story.” Will it be Spielberg? Tarantino?
There had been school shootings before Columbine, but none so expansively documented. The nightmare unfolded live: sweeping aerial shots of students escaping, then grainy security footage of the killers stalking the cafeteria. Cinematized on arrival, it served as a grim precursor to another spectacle of unnerving realness, The Blair Witch Project, released in theaters just months later.
In the frothy aftermath, pundits scolded the usual culprits—violent movies (Natural Born Killers), music (KMFDM) and video games (Doom). Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore tacked the discourse toward gun control, while Jerry Falwell jibed back to the removal of prayer from public schools. But almost no one mentioned Harris’s online presence. The internet was still an unfamiliar alien landscape, one that law enforcement and the commentariat had yet to recognize as a threat. Harris, however, sensed its potential. While video games offered escape, the internet offered immortality—a place to curate his own violent legend. In addition to making death threats, Harris used his website to post bomb-making instructions and murderous rants. “I can’t wait till I can kill you people,” he teased. Elsewhere, he reportedly uploaded a custom Doom level mirroring the floor plan of Columbine High, presumably so online admirers could “play along” after he was gone.
The Basement Tapes were withheld from the public for fear of inspiring copycats. Only a handful of victims’ families and journalists were allowed to view them before they were destroyed. As Harris and Klebold predicted, movies were made, not by Spielberg or Tarantino, but by arthouse directors like Gus Van Sant (Elephant, 2003) and Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, 2011). Mainstream audiences barely took notice. As it turned out, most people didn’t need a movie about Columbine because they had already seen it. The massacre was the movie, with Harris and Klebold playing themselves. And there would be sequels.
In October 2011, a user named “Smiggles” posted a recipe for oatmeal berry chipnut cookies on Shocked Beyond Belief, an online forum focused on school shootings. Between threads devoted to his favorite Columbine-inspired movies, he fixated on the fabled Basement Tapes, marveling at “the potential it allows for speculation.” Smiggles—real name Adam Lanza—would go on to post on the forum 296 times before killing his mother and then 26 others, most of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
In the thirteen years since Columbine, the internet had grown from the pixelated nerd dungeon Reb once roamed into a glossy, all-devouring cathedral of content. Video production and distribution, once the tightly controlled domain of studios and networks, had slipped into the sweaty palms of practically everyone on earth. And everyone, in turn, could broadcast any video to anyone anonymously—even children.
Tumblr, a microblogging platform known for fan art, soft grunge and tweeny self-obsession, became an unlikely breeding ground for murder fandoms around 2012, just as the true-crime craze hit its cultural peak. On “True Crime Tumblr,” populated mostly by teen girls, mass-murderer fan fiction, video montages and chibi-style anime abounded. Some reimagined Harris and Klebold as bullied outcasts (they weren’t), while others “shipped” serial killers in imagined gay pairings, warping real-life carnage of the past into the bubbly vaporwave fantasies of now.
“Let’s get this party started,” Brenton Tarrant said, grinning at the camera before strapping it to his helmet and stepping into Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, where the 28-year-old gym trainer murdered 51 worshippers while livestreaming on Facebook. For Tarrant, a gamer radicalized on far-right message boards, mass murder wasn’t the endgame. The video was. The massacre, captured like a Doom-style first-person shooter, was crafted for a global audience.
Alarmed parents and watchdogs rallied—but this time, they found themselves outgunned and outnumbered: nearly half of America’s teens were now armed with smartphones, and they reported being online “almost constantly,” swiping through a blur of video clips. Thomas Edison’s “cinema of attractions” had returned—only now, the kinetoscope was pocket-sized yet infinite, and capable not only of displaying video but capturing it. Fans of violent spectacle could now take part in producing it. And as with all forms of entertainment, those who pushed the boundaries the furthest were the ones who garnered the most attention. Concerns about fictional violence in movies, shows and video games suddenly seemed quaint in the face of real-life beheadings bleeding into timelines between dog bloopers and makeup tutorials.
We still watched violent movies. But whatever power violent cinema held to inspire imitators paled in comparison to the internet, and whatever sharp edges or meanings once attached to cinematic violence had been memed away—made self-aware, ironically detached and frequently deployed to blunt or otherwise mediate the impact of real-world violence. For those of us who’d grown up watching Fight Club (1999) and American Psycho (2000) for their scarring intensity and cheeky originality, it was alarming to watch them become banalized and co-opted as right-wing memes—memes that were then sprinkled through the 180-page manifesto of Buffalo supermarket shooter Payton Gendron, itself plagiarized largely from the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. A copy of a copy. The internet, with its instant gratifications, its bottomless pit of “authentic” horror and its open call for user-generated interpretation, made even the most extreme fiction feel fake and toothless. The movie now belonged to the audience.
A few years back, my sister moved to Durham, North Carolina. Just three minutes from her front door sat the former home of Michael Peterson, convicted wife-killer and reluctant star of the acclaimed docuseries The Staircase (2004). My wife and I had binged it and now here I was, standing next to the very pool where Peterson claimed to have last seen his wife before discovering her bloody and crumpled at the foot of the stairs. My cousin, who also lived nearby, had even been inside the house. She went to the estate sale that appears in HBO’s 2022 dramatization of The Staircase, the one with Colin Firth and Toni Collette, which—of course—we also gleefully binged.
Morbidly, I confess: the proximity gave me a little thrill. A pulse. Then, as with Livelsberger’s exploding Cybertruck, came the pang of self-loathing. Why was I so delighted to be close to this ghoulish tragedy? What was wrong with me? With us?
There’s nothing entirely new about this impulse. Aristotle defended public interest in depictions of tragedy as cathartic and emotionally purifying. Plato famously disagreed. In the Republic, Leontius walks past the executioner’s wall, unable to stop staring at the dead bodies, torn between disgust and desire. What’s changed isn’t the impulse but the scale, saturation and speed. You no longer have to seek out the corpses: the algorithm delivers them to you.
The golden age of narrative cinema, for all its fussiness and flaws, gave violence a moral context, a weight. Its depiction provoked outrage because it was doing something, either reinforcing or challenging the narratives by which we understood ourselves. At its best, that framework made space for empathy and transformation. The climactic shoot-out in Taxi Driver is disturbing not because it glamorizes violence, but because we’ve already been drawn deep into Travis Bickle’s lonely spiral, and feel implicated by intimate association. John Wick, on the other hand, has killed a total of 439 people across four films—and I couldn’t tell you the first thing about any one of them. (Or, frankly, about John Wick.)
In Empty Moments, the film scholar Leo Charney argues that “drift”—the inability to hold onto a stable present—is the defining feature of modernity. Violent spectacle jolts us into momentary contact with something that feels real, however horrifying it might be. Social media, like Edison’s cinema of attractions, doles out violence as a stimulant. By discarding context and moral frameworks, the violence is aestheticized and reduced to slop—slickly produced yet strangely hollow, gesturing at importance without actually achieving it. What matters most isn’t what the violence means or why it was perpetrated, only that it draws attention. Its shallowness invites viewers to project their own interpretations—or just enjoy the show.
The rise of AI will only blur reality further. When images can no longer be trusted, everything can be viewed with detached amusement. It’s not only that screen violence has become normalized, it’s that it has become meaningless. Like a Cybertruck exploding in Vegas, it signifies nothing.
In Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), two young men hold a family hostage and torment them with escalating cruelty, occasionally breaking the fourth wall to confront the audience. At one point, when one of the intruders is killed, the other grabs a remote control and rewinds the film, erasing the event. In the final moments of the movie, as the killers dump their last victim into a lake, they casually discuss seeing a film, then set about enacting a “sequel” at a neighbor’s house. In the last frame, one of them smiles at us, and it is strangely reassuring. Who do we really identify with, Haneke seems to ask—the families being terrorized or their winking, unreflective attackers?
Viewed today, Funny Games strikes me as prophetic. Like the killers, we can now rewind, remix and even create our own screen violence. If violent cinema once interrogated our darkest impulses, and violent spectacle indulged them, the violent slop that engulfs us now is too hollow to do either. It doesn’t disturb or thrill. It simply loops.
To read the rest of issue 35 (“What is violence for?”), click here.
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A kind of tangential thought:
I'm thinking about the "splatter" category of horror comedies, where the ridiculous, over-the-top death is the punchline.
It's funny precisely because, to use your turn of phrase, the moral context is very different: precisely because we're in an aesthetic world where it doesn't have weight, where it doesn't have consequences, where the meaninglessness is the joke.
I have to quibble with a number of things here.
First off, the "golden age" of cinema gave us plenty of action movies as nihilistic in the violence department as John Wick. Dirty Harry, Damnation Alley, Duel, the ascendency of the Bond franchise, the list goes on. Comparing a character-driven dramatic thriller (Taci Driver) to a pure action movie (John Wick) is false equlivalency, and doesn't make much of a point if unbiased and considered.
Similarly, it's difficult to call The Matrix a movie that glorifies violence more than, say, a Peckinpah film, when the whole movie is about Revolution (also part of the American story) and generational warfare. The sequels naturally dig deeper into this, but the original movie firmly showcased thhe difference between digital violence in the Matrix and real world violence. More to the point, the inspirations were international and extra-cultural, predominantly being influenced by Japanese anime and manga. There's too much of an attempt to make cinema an American cultural throughline without dealing with the international nature of storytelling that began with globalization and was then supercharged by the internet.
Real people will forever affect us more than fictional storytelling - they always have and they always will. The fact that we can now be exposed to people we shouldn't be, and join groups and mindsets that would have been hard to find in the past, this is the key to how the internet has changed us.
Back in 1970 Peter Boyle starred in a movie called JOE about a conservative father who disapproved of the hippies his daughter hung out with, so picked up a shotgum and blew them all away (daughter incouded.) It was intended as a satire on the conservative/liberal divide in the country at the time, but while the film was in post production - and without the public knowing it was coming or what it was about - a father did this exact thing in real life. And newspapers recieved lettters to the editor from other parents spouting nothing but SUPPORT for what this father had done, sharing his hate of hippies and liberals. It was reportted that not one person wrote in against him. The father was ultimately granted leniency by the judge on his case, even though he brough multiple weapons and extra ammunition with him to the killing. The judge also forbade any jury member to see the film JOE, and screened for those who had.
These events, these people., and their surprisingly widespread supporters have always been out there. We just haven't had to be aware of them pre-internet, and people couldn't connect to them as easily. Film is often subtle, nuanced, subtextual, and metatextual more than superficial. The Matrix in no way is about glorifying violence, though you can easily read it as such if only glossing the surface. Real life is people saying precisely what they think, and the rest of us grapsing for possible nuance because we don't want to believe it. Fictional narratives are reactions: it's us trying to express what we're thinking and/or feeling about the world in that moment. It's real life and real life alone that is us showcasing precisely what we are in that moment. I fear this essay in every way is getting those two things competely confused.