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We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Kill

The stories we tell about violence determine who we see as a real person.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle
14 min readMay 26, 2023
A guy seen up through a grave he’s evidently digging. Hi, Greg!
A guy, substantially older than I was when I buried the cat in this story. Photo by Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash

A few months ago, I realized that I couldn’t watch on-screen violence any more. This was an odd development. I write a newsletter about horror movies; I’ve scripted two horror comics. Violent imagery is part of how I make a living. I also have no objection to violence as subject matter — saying “I don’t like violent movies,” as some people do, sounds to me like saying “I don’t like paintings with red in them.” Conflict is a basic plot element, present in every story, and lots of stories, from lots of genres, resolve their conflicts violently. You can’t get away from violence, in art or in life; you can only take issue with how it’s done.

Yet somehow, I got re-sensitized. Scenes that wouldn’t normally have bothered me made me jumpy and nauseous. It was a brief phase, and it’s long since passed, but now, I think it happened because I had been watching too much bad violence — lazy violence, unearned violence, violence that expected the splatter to sell the story instead of the other way around. I’d been streaming a pretty mid Netflix show, Alice in Borderland, one more Squid Game/Battle Royale rip-off where people compete in children’s games that lead to gory death. Like all such entertainment since Battle Royale, Alice in

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Jude Ellison S. Doyle
Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Written by Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Author of “Trainwreck” (Melville House, ‘16) and “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” (Melville House, ‘19). Columns published far and wide across the Internet.

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