I’ve been taking Arabic classes recently to improve my spoken and reading skills. I grew up speaking the Syrian Homs dialect, but since leaving home thirteen years ago, I haven’t been able to speak to anyone as much in Arabic. So the classes are a way I am reclaiming one of my mother tongues and my culture.

During a class recently, my Syrian teacher and I were discussing films. She loves Agatha Christie. And we were talking about the genres we enjoy when we both learned that we used to love horror, and now…we don’t. It’s not that we don’t like a good scare; it’s more the violence and gore that we can’t take in anymore. It’s something I’ve thought about occasionally the last few years, when I have realized that the movies I used to gravitate to: the Saw franchise, slashers, and the like are the ones I can’t stand to see or hear now. Midsommar, which is arguably a good movie, was difficult for me to watch, and I stepped out of the theatre right before the ‘mallet scene.’

Even “softer” movies with a touch of gore do not appeal to me. I still love a good scare, though, and a horror I watched that I think is so engaging is Oddity. It’s less focused on slashing, and more focused on the psychological horror, and though there is violence, is it not as central as in other films.

As I was considering this since my class and conversation, I happened to come across a Threads post that asked a similar question: do you no longer consumer horror? One of the comments got my attention: @alilamos wrote:

“Those movies are all about collective participation and consent. Our brain & body process fake horror the same way as real horror. You rationally know it’s fake, but your brain processes it the same emotionally. So you sitting in a theater being entertained by torture and violence is actually very similar to being one of them enjoying it in real life. It makes us all see violence as entertainment like they want us to.”

It got me thinking that maybe the poster is on to something. The media we consume becomes part of us. Often, I find myself thinking something only to realize that maybe, I simply imbibed it from the internet without even knowing it. How often have you thought of something only to recognize, days later, that you got your “idea” from something else? How often do you choose something and “don’t know why it came to mind,” only to realize afterwards, oh, right, this number I “randomly chose” is ‘actually my grandfather’s birthday and I was thinking of his death anniversary four days ago.’

Our brains are good at patterns and good at consolidating information. They’re also really good at picking up information from our environments, and kneading it into the neural connections that already exist. Of course, memory consolidation requires conscious discernment, but our environments do shape our minds in ways we don’t always notice.

This is not to say that art should be created to coddle or comfort. Of course not. And this is not to say we should not reach for the art that makes us uncomfortable, that pushes our understanding of the world. It’s more that we should reach for consideration, for story, rather than spectacle.

It is to say, however, that we should be aware, and we should actively choose what we consume. Making a spectacle of violence, becoming desensitized to it, does have an effect on us, whether we realize it. We’ve seen it in the ‘video game x violence research’ literature, and though the research is mixed, meta-analyses have found that consuming violence in video games does have a positive correlation with real-world aggression and lowered empathy. Prosocial games have the opposite effect.

I wrote recently about moving into cognitive conservation, about being more aware of what I consume and focusing more on depth and thought. I think the same goes for the media we consume, using it to sculpt our minds and bodies into what we want society to be, rather than letting spectacle and desensitization shape us. We should be left uncomfortable by our art, if and when we so choose, but not be left desensitized towards our collective humanity by it.

Art can wound, expose, accuse, and compel us. But there is a difference between being compelled deliberately, and compelled by default. I want to see more consequence, more substance, in the art and media I consume, and less gratuitous carnage. Some stories, by nature, have carnage, and that is the story that is being told; it may be historical, it may be symbolic, but it is necessary to the telling of that particular story. But to simply have just to have it is another thing altogether. Our minds are molded by what it is fed, and because of that, it is a rare and wondrous thing. To provide it with nourishment is a different form of cognitive conservation than I wrote about last week; it is a conservation of empathy, of society, of self.

Reclaiming Arabic has reminded me that the mind is porous and is easily shaped. What we stay engaged in becomes our fluency, the language we speak best and most naturally. If a tongue can be lost through neglect or severance, and recovered through reversal of that, so, too, can society move towards something better and healthier, starting with the stories being told, and how they are being told, and for whom.

The question isn’t whether art is meant to unsettle us; I think it should. The question, instead, is whether we are choosing what unsettles us, and why, and how. I want to be disturbed into thoughtfulness and awareness, rather than dulled into apathy. I want my Self to be shaped deliberately rather than by status quo, or by those who already hold the reins of narrative and art.

By: Rania Hanna