I think that the entertainment society provides for its members to avail themselves of is a reflection of where the folk soul is at that point in history. There is, I guess, a sort of "chicken or the egg" argument as to whether the media reflects or helps shape the collective unconscious, but you can probably guess where I stand on that. A society whose entertainment is extremely violent is not necessarily unhealthy, but may be at a crisis point or, more likely, on a decadent path. Witness the transformation of the violent and cathartic (but spiritually-driven) tragedies of the Greeks to the empty blood-and-thunder of the Roman stage (whose tragedies actually were more often read privately rather than performed). The incredible balancing act of Shakespeare and Marlowe (huge body counts vs. sophisticated plot, verse, and characterization) at the height of the Elizabethan age gave way to gory revenge fests as England slid into Civil War and near anarchy. Both Rome and Elizabethan/Jacobean England offered even more bloody choices than violent drama...you could watch live gladiatorial combat and bear-baiting...if simulated carnage wasn't enough. We in this century have never gone so far as to give license to actual killing before an live audience's eyes (please don't make a naive argument about war on CNN--it's even less present for the viewer than movie violence)...and, make no mistake, the realistic bloodshed of today's cinema fools no one into believing they're seeing actual slaughter...unless they are already living in a delusional world...like the Littleton kids.
So...here's the deal...disturbed by movie violence? Eliminate the desire to see it. Good luck. It's not a self-perpetuating thing; it's driven by deep-seated needs in the collective unconscious...by what it is to be human.
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