Ditto.

How many people died at each Death Star explosion?

So everyone has to decide for their own children, I get that. But from a media research perspective (just so you know), the portrayals of violence in the new film are MUCH more responsible than the portrayals in the classic trilogy. For example, one of the key variables in the research literature is showing the pain of those on the receiving end of violence. Studies show when this pain is masked or trivialized, the disinhibitory effect of violence is muted. This is why most Looney Tunes cartoons have been removed from children’s television channels.

The violence in the new Star Wars film is intimate, earned, disturbing, and powerful. It is shown as producing real consequences for complex characters, who suffer pain, mourning, and loss and wind up displaying their collective and individual griefs about it.

Contrast that to Luke blowing up the first Death Star, having lost his best childhood friend in the battle and having a joyous and unexamined celebration as a result. Or Vader personally killing so many officers (no worries: life is cheap and there is always someone to step up in rank afterwards).

The victories in the new Star Wars came at great cost and the celebration of those moments was infused with the grief of those losses. The whole succeeds because of the sacrifices of the individuals, and those effects are both present in a much more responsible manner than in the classic trilogy.

I understand the author’s view: Americans tend to prefer sanitized and unexamined violent narratives in which good people are justified in violent acts because of their framing. The effects research consistently shows the results of these preferences: desensitizing towards the pain of others, a lack of critical engagement of the social effects of violence, the reinforcement of the savior complex that justifies “good guy” interventions that exceed law and the social contract.

As the parent of a boy, I absolutely prefer the nuanced and painful portrayals of the complex consequences of using blasters and lightsabers to enact social change in a society to the idea that this is just normal and death, pain and dismemberment are just a normal part of struggle, and the consequences of that should merely be dismissed or banished from view.

(Then there’s the whole discussion about what else is lost by not viewing this film: the prosocial gender norm statements, the deconstruction of evil as twisted urges to control the uncontrollable, the complex displays of love and acceptance in less than ideal circumstance … a lot of baby being thrown out with that bathwater).