The walking wounder: far from being redemptive, violence--whether in crimes or in war--comes back to haunt us all, including the perpetrators.

MANY COMPLAIN THAT TV AND MOVIE VIOLENCE has become commonplace and coarse, but what I worry about is that too much of it has no cost or consequence. If we are going to watch people beating, torturing, and killing other human beings, it should be disturbing and frightening. We ought to flinch. And realistic violence should wreak havoc in the lives of those it touches.

But heroes in most action shows are unscathed by the violence they employ, and audiences care little about the longterm effects of this mayhem on victims and families. Television and movie cops abuse suspects without repercussion, litter the highways with crashed and burning cars without civilian casualties, and throw down in countless shoot-outs without suffering trauma, nightmares, or depression. And when the shooting and bombing is done, no audience lingers to watch victims and their families grapple with their shattered lives.

A few recent films track violence's devastating wake. In Todd Field's In the Bedroom (Miramax) we watch a 30-year marriage shipwrecked by the murder of a couple's son. Christopher Nolan's Memento (Columbia Tristar) shows us a grieving husband traumatized and corrupted by the violence that took his wife. And Nolan's noir thriller Insomnia (Warner Brothers) gives us a policeman hounded and haunted by the consequences of his own violence.

Violence casts a long shadow in Brad Anderson's psychological thriller The Machinist (Filmax), for which Christian Bale dropped 60 pounds to play a factory worker being eaten alive by an undigested piece of his past. It has been a year since Trevor Resnik (Bale) had a good night's sleep or a solid meal, and the depressed and increasingly paranoid machinist cannot figure out why he is slowly turning into a walking cadaver, or why people no one else sees harass him and leave him mysteriously threatening notes.

But Resnik, who has suppressed the memory of a violent act he committed, will continue to be haunted by a phantom pain that has him night-crawling cafes and chatting up people who aren't there anymore until he acknowledges his guilt and faces the consequences of his violence. Then, at long last, his unconscious will stop carving the mark of Cain in his flesh and allow him a good night's rest.

YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT TO LOOK AT HIM, BUT cafe owner and small-town dad Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) also has A History of Violence (New Line Cinema) in David Cronenberg's tale about a killer who tries to escape his past by creating his own witness protection program. For two decades Tom--or Joey, as his buddies from the old neighborhood like to call him--manages to hide out among the quiet townsfolk of a sleepy Indiana burg, only to be unmasked when he commits a violent act of heroism that evokes cheers from his neighbors and catches the attention of old friends interested in settling accounts.

In Cronenberg's film Tom's heroic act uncovers a killer who finds he cannot forget or outrun his past and unleashes forces and consequences set in motion long ago by Joey's own violence--forces that endanger, traumatize, and corrupt Tom's wife and children, and could well destroy his family.

But A History of Violence also unmasks the audience cheering Tom on as he slaughters a platoon of movie villains. Each time our hero/villain swings into action we are less certain of his motives and less confident in the redemptive power of violence, a core American myth. Even if Joey kills all the bad guys, what will that do to his family and children, and how will he and they ever find a peaceful life again? Perhaps violence is not the solution to life's most intractable problems. Perhaps it is one of life's most intractable problems.

THESE TALES OF MEN TRYING TO SUPPRESS THE memory of their violence and return to normal life seem particularly poignant in the wake of reports about the rising incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

In October the Wall Street Journal reported that a highly-decorated Army Ranger captain honored by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address has quietly resigned from the army after being diagnosed with severe symptoms of PTSD. Studies in The New England Journal of Medicine and elsewhere suggest that 17 percent of the 360,000 troops brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan may suffer from this condition, and the Veterans Administration has already diagnosed nearly 10,000 veterans as having PTSD.

Experts believe soldiers underreport mental and emotional wounds for fear of being considered cowards or malingerers and suggest that the incidence of PTSD could rise in the months and years ahead. Most agree the military and Veterans Administration are not equipped to support all these wounded soldiers.

IN THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien warned about war stories that hide the obscenity of violence, that make violence seem heroic and attractive to the young men and women sucked into its maw. In other works he tracked the lingering effects of war on returning veterans. But the wounded soldiers who return from war are just the tip of the iceberg. Ninety percent of the casualties of modern warfare are civilians, and the effects of war linger for generations. Land mines left behind from previous wars continue to kill more people across the planet than any other weapon of mass destruction, and the infrastructure destroyed by bombs and sanctions took a million lives in Iraq in the decade after the first Gulf War.

Our violent entertainments need to tell the whole story, to track the long and tortured history of violence, the way it bends back on its perpetrators, the unfolding carnage it leaves in its spreading wake. The problem with violent stories is not that they are too gory, but that they are not gruesome enough.

PATRICK McCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.