How much violence is too much?

It was the darkest movie I'd ever seen. A relentless killer stalked a young woman in Los Angeles. No matter what she did, she wasn't safe. He was fully armed, he was unstoppable and he'd find her. He was the Terminator, in a movie filmed in 1984.

My friends and I thought the film was good, but extremely violent — and we called it "violent" back then, not "full of action sequences" as the euphemism is today.

People have long been shooting at each other in American cinema. Before the war movies of the 1970s and '80s, there were the cowboy movies of the 1960s, and before them the war movies of the 1940s and '50s. People shot at King Kong when he climbed the Empire State Building in 1933. But there was a reason for the violence, and it had consequences (Kong dies, and the police regret having had to kill him).

Concern about violence in several films, including Bonnie and Clyde (1967), in which the two outlaws are shot numerous times at close range, led to the ratings system America uses today. The aim was to protect children, but in our profit-driven world, it led to the marketing of more "serious" (meaning violent) films to adults and, especially, to teenagers.

When you turn on the TV this evening, count how many weapons you see. See how hard it is to find a movie in which no one holds a gun, fires a gun, makes something explode, or gets into a fistfight. What depraved souls sit around writing these movie scripts that have so little to do with real life — at least real life outside of Somalia or Chechnya?

Not only the scripts are unreal; the special effects are, too. Movie explosions no longer cause burns or shrapnel wounds. Movie fights almost never lead to contusions, brain damage or weeks spent in the hospital. Black eyes rarely take a week to heal. People die and we don't care. We've been desensitized to violence because we accept it as something unreal.

It's Arnold Schwarzenegger who's made me aware of this. Because I'm fascinated by the idea that robots will take over someday, I've watched each of the three Terminator movies (and the excellent TV series) several times. The funny thing is: the more I watched them, the less I noticed the violence and the more I noticed the dialogue — which, thanks to Schwarzenegger's excellent timing, is sometimes blunt, sometimes thoughtful and very often funny. The violence stopped being a central theme and became part of the backdrop or movie score.

The same thing happened with Fight Club, an extremely violent film that, as I discovered, is not actually about violence at all. What finally did it for me was South Park, whose purpose seems to be to demonstrate that profanity, violence and perversion are out of control in American popular culture. We know that the character Kenny dies a gruesome death in most episodes, and we know that we'll laugh when we see it.

Film critic Roger Ebert laments that the latest Terminator movie, which comes to Germany next week, consists almost entirely of "action scenes". "It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it," he writes. Terminator Salvation is the fourth film in the series. Director McG is already making episodes five and six.

Let's hope that by episode six, humanity can be saved using brains, not brawn. Otherwise, if we live by the gun, we may die by it.