Leonard and Cushing duking it out in 1894, a locomotive lunging toward its audience in 1896, the kabuki-esque brawl captured by Shibata Tsunekichi in 1899, and a bandit confronting his spectators with his pistol point-blank in 1903 all confirm that the aggressive image has been hallmark of the cinema since its inception.  In recent years, aggression in film and media has reached a fever pitch, from Europe’s “new punk cinema” and the plethora of coded jabs embedded in high-concept music videos, to the increasingly lucrative spectacle of contact sports and the rapid spread of the Internet as a democratic platform for aggressive mass communication.  Developing coterminously with the increasing political polarization they help foster, such platforms provide a battleground for enduring culture wars, and emerging forms of rhetoric afforded by new media technologies have produced novel imbrications of affect and communication.  But far from simply functioning as a depository for aggression’s affective surplus or a means for its expression, media in turn generate, regulate, and perpetuate new modes of aggressive experience, new circuits for aggressive energy.  The impulse is everywhere, from the micro-aggressions that pervade our social media interactions to the macro-aggressions that saturate our media diet of summer blockbusters, hyper-violent RPGs, and a 24-hour news cycle that gyrates to the tantrums of a tweeter-in-chief.  No longer repressed in the collective unconscious, aggression explodes incessantly across the surfaces of our contemporary screens.