The Rockets’ Red Glare

Examining a birthright of violence

I’ve never been one for violence.

As a kid, my media intake was decidedly PG, but I still lost my shit over the sound of gunshots and trauma of mother murder in both Bambi and The Fox and the Hound, and then there was the heartbreak of Dumbo’s mother singing lullabies behind bars.

I abstained from horror/slasher movies in my teens, even though my friend Anna was obsessed with the genre and promised she’d break me in gently with the likes of Pet Sematary or Child’s Play. But I declined. I knew my overactive imagination had barely recovered from the years I spent believing a child-eating witch lived under my bed.

As an adult I desensitized myself enough to read Stephen King and watch The Ring in the theater, but I always paid for it with nightmares. My husband would be away for a week on a work trip and I’d sleep with a taser in my nightstand and a security system fully armed. Midnight trips to the bathroom were fraught with dark corners and things that went bump. It was hard to rest easy.

Once my daughter was born I lost any tolerance I had gained for depictions of violence — written, visual, hearsay, I wanted none of it. The transformation was instantaneous. The moment that baby came out of my body and I held her in my arms, looked into her tiny…