A History of Violence
Writing early in the aftermath of the evil — not tragic, evil — events in Colorado, Roger Simon has laid out some challenging thoughts on Hollywood’s philosophical culpability in such horrific crimes of violence:
Given the horrifying death toll, rare as the likes of Holmes may be, we have to account for the similarly deranged and aberrant. We owe that to the dead of Colorado and elsewhere. Moreover, we should not encourage these events, wittingly or unwittingly. And by we I mean the people who make films (which includes me).
I am not calling for censorship here, nor for gun control laws, but for a modicum of self-censorship on the part of the filmmakers and the film and television industries. They should ask themselves to what end is the violence they are portraying and whether it need be so explicit. Can they make their points as effectively, perhaps more effectively, without the endless splatter and gore?
Allow me to take this argument in a slightly different direction. If you glance to the right of this column, you’ll see the three (so far) books in my “Devlin” series, about a top-secret and very lethal operative for the Central Security Service, as well as the great Irish-American gangster Owney Madden’s own personal memoir (channeled through me) of the most violent days of Prohibition, And All the Saints. To wrap up this orgy of literary ultra-violence, there’s As Time Goes By, my prequel/sequel to Casablanca, which finds Rick and Ilsa wrapped up in the assassination plot against the architect of the Final Solution, Reinhard Heydrich, the Hangman of Prague.
So you’re not going to find me arguing against violence per se. Violence, alas, is a part of life, and a history of civilization is also a history of violence – of force met with force, of great armies clashing on the plains, or two special ops waging a secret war in the back alleys of Berlin. To those who say that violence never solved anything, I say: ask Hitler. As Al Capone famously observed, in his neighborhood (Brooklyn), you got farther with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word.
Saving Private Ryan is violent. 300 is violent. Enemy at the Gates is violent. But they are about men at war.
Thanks much for the fine distinction.
Stirring war scenes, bang-bang shoot-em-ups, I like those.
Murder? No. Not entertaining at all, even the endless CSI Des Moines clones. Not watching.
Torture porn? I’m very, very libertarian, but desensitising, sick, sick Hostels and Saws should be BANNED. Absolutely no redeeming value, just reinforcement of the worst sort of thing.
Okay, maybe not banned (enforcement’s a thorn), but certainly not with megamillion financing and big screen rollouts. Relegate to the grade Z dollar bin along with the cheesy Che Guevara flicks.
(Maybe Hostel is where we get to when pedophiles run Hollywood?)
So not banning just the control of how much money independant people can spend? Wow xD
Look buddy horror itself has levels within it. Brian Keene’s Dark Hollow is pretty creepy. Ryian Hardings Genital Grinder is more over the top than Dark hollow and not for the same audience.
There are a large number of old, forgotten movies on YouTube whose copyrights apparently have run out, or noone seems particularly interested in enforcing. They tend towards WW2 movies and ’50s and ’60s films that kind of glorify non-PC subjects. They serve no liberal purpose, so they seem to have been discarded.
The constant thread in all these movies is that everyone eventually gets what’s coming to them. Indeed, Gen. Gordon even gets just what he was seeking in Khartoum: immortality. Justice is, in every case, served, even if the hero dies. After all, once one is a hero, what a letdown to become merely mortal once again.
It is as if a fresh breeze has cleansed my spirit. Somewhere, at some time, evil was recognized and serially defeated, movie after movie. Right and wrong were not relative terms, defined by armchair academics at Hahvud; they were as clear to all of us as the rising of the Sun.
Perhaps the Kennedy administration really was our Camelot, the tower on the hill, where all their venial and mortal sins condemned us to suffer in payment for letting the Schtupp-master-in-chief violate so many virgins while all looked away?
Extrapolate to today, where the constitution has become toilet paper for the whole adminisration, yet they only follow the lead of the previously most corrupt regime in history, the Clintons. When a nation can rehire an obvious serial rapist with nary a concern, what is left? Perhaps a transexual. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Why am I reminded frequently of the idiotic movie “Putney Swope”? It wasn’t really meant as a guide to success, you know.
Thank you, Michael. It must be exhausting work, this explaining reality to so many, long divorced from it.
“Somewhere, at some time, evil was recognized and serially defeated, movie after movie.”
So, so right.
The snowball just gets bigger the further it rolls down the hill.
We didn’t see horrors growing up. I don’t think we understand the consequences of what our grown young have seen.
Your grandparents and great-grandparents thought they were so hip, with it, and progressive when they threw me and my buddy the Catholic Legion of Decency out. Heh heh, now even the libertarian is allied with Tipper Gore in wishing for Big Government to barge in and “do something” about torture-porn and gore-fest screenings.
Now look again at what is being poured into the heads of your children, the ones who someday are going to be deciding on your retirement dole, rest home, or euthanasia date.
Good point, John J. I’ve long believed the lack of defined good and evil inherent in the relativism espoused by the far left will destroy our country if we let it.
If good and evil are what I believe they are, what limits are there on my behaviour?
There is a difference, as you say, between movies that use violence as part of a larger drama and movies that are a thin excuse to show nothing but violence. Movies that are fundamentally built around explosions and extended slow-motion sequences of automatic weapons massacres are common.
In a larger and historic film sense, the generality is nothing due but the extreme lengths to which it has been taken is. A gangster movie from the ’40s or ’50s might have a requisite amount of gun play but couldn’t really get away with that alone. Since the advent of conspicuous violence in film there has been more and more talk about violence or sex as part of “artistic license” as opposed to gratuitous. Take away the soft-core porn and extreme violence from a movie like Suckerpunch and what are you left with and when are lines really crossed?
I’d say the reason people are calling out video games is because, despite complex backstories, many of the games are in fact arranged around the thinnest of “plots” to simply murder scads of people.
The odd and unexpected argument coming out side-by-side with the issue of gun control is movie gun control, because of where the killings took place and the nature of the movie being shown.
I’m afraid liberals aren’t going to be able to have it both ways on this one. If the mere availability of guns is an issue, what about the genre that almost lovingly displays a bewildering variety of weapons as almost friends to a movie hero? Dirty Harry’s gun is almost a character itself. The second line of the wiki of the Dirty Harry film series says “Eastwood’s character also helped popularize the .44 Magnum.”
This is an old argument, most famously highlighted by the Hayes Office censors and Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent. In each case codes were imposed but mostly those industries police themselves nowadays. Many videogames were and still are created based on movies but a bounceback is in force where many movies have been based on videogames. The same is true in fantasy and science fiction where games and videos have been novelized, short on creativity, long on violence and stereotypes.
Liberals are caught in a Catch-22 here: you have men like SF writer John Scalzi and Josh Whedon smugly carping and carking about politically correct liberal values using the popularity of their most conspicuous artistic creations as a platform – Scalzi’s sometimes violent and markedly NOT philosophical novel about war in “Old Man’s War,” and Whedon in the wall to wall fight called The Avengers.
Liberal hypocrisy has been exposed which is no surprise since liberalism is composed from the ground up to be a giant hypocrisy. It seems the oddly violence-addicted yet at the same time nerdy politically correct peaceniks are going to start having to ask themselves their own hard questions before frowning at gun stores. One of the biggest things these morons could do is take a hard look at their own ignored history and read The Weapon Shop, by A.E. Van Vogt, a novella singularly lacking in violence. “The right to own weapons is the right to be free” Hah! Ironically, van Vogt’s novella is philosophical in nature and more brightly written than anything Scalzi or Whedon will ever produce since, without violence, they wouldn’t have a voice.
Very well-articulated, as was the author, in helping to make this delineation. I posted in another thread that everything that is created is not art. I agree with your definitions that showing violence for the sake of the story is a far cry from showing some story to showcase your violence, and of course, gratuitous sex.
By mentioning Whedon, whom I feel is a hack, though I loved Firefly, you reminded me of something. Have you ever seen Dollhouse? Is there not an episode were Eliza Dushku wasn’t brutally assaulted in one fashion or another, only at the last minute to suddenly go all Rocky and win the fight? I remember reading many reviews from other liberals who thought the whole thing was pretty tasteless.
I play a lot of video games, but I couldn’t agree more with you that many of these games are as you describe, thinly veiled stories giving the player an ever more graphically immersive way to murder remorselessly. Video game creators are worse than Hollywood production companies for the rabid defense of their products as “art”. Specifically using the all too worn out phrase about it being the parent’s job to protect their kids, all the while doing everything they can to cram the imagery into the child’s brains via any media possible.
But I don’t think it is movies that destroyed this young man’s empathy. He had learned to hate indiscriminately somewhere. To seek mass, murderous revenge against a range of innocent people he had no personal relationship to. Where was the instinct that saw them as fellow human beings? What happened to extinguish it? I have no sympathy whatsoever for this man and his inexcusable actions. They may turn out to be inexplicable but if there are patterns to many of these mass killings, we need to be aware of them now. Before this happens again.
This theatre wasn’t far from Columbine. As dreadful as that day was, it was supposed to be so much worse. Those 2 teenagers, again without a soul that felt empathy, tried to blow up the school. To cause mass murder at a high school on an unprecedented scale. They started shooting when the bombs failed.
Was he trying to act out the movie or just using a landmark event and a captive crowd of innocents to act out his revenge against society fantasy?
Why do some young men learn to hate so indiscriminately and acutely? The movies or violent video games fuel a means of demonstrating the hatred but that does not seem to be the fuel.
The guy is just plain evil. Why is that so hard to comprehend? Sociopath, homicidal maniac, or whatever, it is quite simple: he is evil. In previous generations they quickly exterminated like manifestations of evil before it could cause more pain and as an example to other potential evil-doers, but now we analyze it to death. We know what is “good;” why is it so difficult to comprehend its opposite?
I call BS on the “desensitized to violence” and the “inability to tell fantasy from reality” line. To me it’s just a way of avoiding admitting there is evil in the world. I understand that is not the thrust of this article, but the man is not insane – he’s evil. He may be acting out now in an effort to not face the electric chair and end up in a cushy mental institution, but the fact remains he is evil, not crazy.
Additionally, while I cannot even watch shows like House or CSI because of the levels of gore, I think a lot of action movies are turning away from senseless violence. While there’s still a number of popular and well received Quentin Tarantino movies, almost all of the superhero flicks and movies like Gran Torino and The Hunger Games are violent, but they show the dark side of that violence. Hell, The Dark Knight rises was about what a generally bad idea class warfare is.
I would also like to point out to people like Roger Simon that movies and video games are not the only sources of violence available today. Have you read the Bible? There is a part in the Old Testament where women are left to be raped to death. Jack the Ripper didn’t need to go see SAW or play COD before he decided to start garroting people.
So, if we’re going to start censoring, after we have movies, TV and video games under control, we’ll need to address books and the Internet. Won’t that be great?
Um, just where exactly are “women left to be raped to death”…? Are you referring to Judges 19:25? That was one woman, in the town of Gibeah. Hardly “women.”
That wasn’t written in the Bible to entertain/amuse the reader; it was a ‘record of truth,’ documenting a historical tragedy in an ancient city.
I’m assuming that you are not insinuating that if it were one woman that it’s okay, but your wording makes it sound that way. That said, the point of my post is that you can’t make blanket statements like violence in books, TV or movies is bad. Additionally, you can find examples of violence with little effort since it frequently crops up even in the Bible. Therefore, if you’re trying to eliminate violence so people won’t imitate it, you’ll have to get rid of books, movies, TV, newspapers, radio, the Internet ect.
Sound like ‘one woman’ is okay? How about YOUR wording being inaccurate, misleading, and false? If you want to justify violence and gore, then get the facts straight for your references, especially Bibical.
You are justifying violence for entertainment, not unlike gladiator stadium attendees of old, in my view. There actually have been many ‘copy-cat’ acts of violence over the last several decades, ignored or minimized, especially if the perp was a member of some sacred cow victim rights group.
Policing free speech because it (might) incite violence or exclusion only applies if coming from a conservative or Christian. Leftists shout about artistic license, book burning, unenlightened flat earthers suppressing freedom of expression/speech, retrogressive neanderthal spoil-sport busybodies telling people how to live. Liberals are the only ones who get to ‘push the envelope’ ‘Test the boundaries’ ‘Fly in the face of tradition’ ‘Burst through barriers.’ ‘Break the rules.’
Yep, this ‘let it all hang out’ attitude has been very beneficial to the culture…ya’ think? Teaching Kids to Kill,” discusses the risks arising from violent video games. Covers of DVD’s feature what is hideous and evil, and nowadays flipping through certain TV channels should only be done while wearing a hazmat suit with a fire hose in your other hand.
I take it the entire Bible chronicles one Saturday afternoon? From the time I was 14 until I left Chicago at 20 the incidence of young people murdering other young people was so rare as to outrage the entire population. Now, the total number of such murders is easily eclipsed by an average two week summer period. I am reasonably sure that did not come to pass by youngsters reading too much of the Bible.
During my teen years girls and women were to be treated with a modicum respect and a certain amount of protection. Now, they are objectified as, “Ho’s” and slapped around to soften them up. From where did that come? Once again, I am reasonably sure that did not come to pass by youngsters reading too much of the Bible.
During my teen years girls and women were to be treated with a modicum respect and a certain amount of protection.
I do not know during what years you were a teen but women are *still* treated with a “modicum (of) respect”. That has not changed. Possibly the way it is done is different today, but that has been an issue for women for a very long time. More people opened doors for us ‘back then’, but we were also treated as if we were very inept if not just mentally child-like. It may not have been so popular to refer to us as whores (“ho”) but grown women were regular referred to as “girl”, “little lady”, and “sweetheart” in a demeaning and dismissive way.
I will not go through all the history there is to prove my point. Just know that things were different back then, not “better”. At least I have real opportunities today that my mother & her mother never had.
The word “evil” is the eighth and eleventh word of this post.
My favorite remark on the way movie and TV violence does, or does not, affect the behavior of viewers was made by the late MPAA president, Jack Valenti. While testifying in front of the Senate during hearings on the level of violence in TV shows, he made the following statement;
Period. Dot.
What amazed me was that exactly no one on the panel thought to (or had the cojones’ to) ask the obvious question in return, namely;
Mr. Valenti, if that is true, then isn’t the entire advertising industry, and TV networks that sell commercial time within their programs, engaging in fraud?
Over two decades later, I am still waiting to hear that question asked, and an intelligible answer to it.
I’m just not holding my breath.
clear ether
eon
Nothing anyone sees in a movie or TV show can affect their behavior, unless they let it.
There, I fixed it for you.
Have you ever wondered why commercials are so banal or why violence on TV is so “transparently” fake?
The idea is to get you to expose you to something without you thinking critically about it. My first exposure to this was “Bambi”; I was talking about going deer hunting and one classmate actually, really did, start to object with the words, “But, Bambi…”
We actually think critically about very little, we mostly operate on auto pilot, and seldom even realize why we are doing or saying what we do or say. Some are more aware than others, but even the most aware do not score high on the “paying attention” scale.
If you research con games for a while, you will run across con artists who specialize in the highly educated: lawyers, doctors, etc. They are “easy”, with the right approach, because they are so confident that they know more than anyone else, so they pay less attention. If approached right.
Before you jump to conclusions and propose solutions, you first need to analyze the entire problem. You need to account for ALL the data.
That data includes spree killings (many similar to the Aurora CO incident) all over the world, dating back nearly a hundred years. What accounts for a spree kiiling in Russia in the 1920s? Or a spree killing in Germany in 1913? Or a spree killing in Japan (with a sword!) in 1938? Or a spree killing here in America in 1949? Back then, they didn’t have violent movies or video games you can blame.
Many different countries, many different cultures, time periods from a hundred years ago all the way to today. And yet occasionally, a citizen would just freak out and commit mass murder.
Criminologists have studied these cases, and there are commonalities. The common threads deal with the personality and mental state of the perpetrator, rather than with any cultural links between prewar Japan and America today.
One more point. We don’t yet know if this Holmes fellow is truly psychotic, or sociopathic, or just a bad evil guy. Let’s sit tight and let law enforcement figure that one out. (Since Holmes is exercising his right to remain silent, they can’t do a psychiatric interview.)
Blah, blah, blah. We always hear so very much of this after every mass killing. The killer in this instance, as the killers in every mass-murder incident, is obviously insane. There is no real way to defend against irrational insanity, especially when the killer is young and heavily armed.
I’m one of those people who believe that there is way too much violence in movies today. Disgusting, gratuitous, violence that doesn’t do anything to enhance the quality of the movie. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that the bulk of the violence today is there simply to cover for the fact that the plots in most movies are dumb, infantile, and so predictable that they use the violence as a prop to distract people from the fact that they have nothing really much to say.
Do I think all violence has to be erased from movies? Absolutely not. There has been violence in movies ever since movies have been made. In its day, the movie “Birth of a Nation” was probably as violent as it got. But it’s all a question of degree and common sense. There was tons of violence in movies from the 1930s to the early 1960s, and yet the violence wasn’t nearly as graphic as it is today. Most of it was implied or left to your imagination.
Even in famous gangster movies, like Public Enemy, The Roaring Twenties, White Heat, or Angels with Dirty Faces, where lots of people were gunned down, you never saw graphic violence with people’s heads bloan off or gory scenes with blood in them. But you very much got the idea that the gangsters were homicidal maniacs or unrepentent killers that needed to be caught and punished by the cops. And what’s so terrible about that? Why is a form of common-sense self-censorship so terrible? We had spectacular films coming out of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and there was so little real violence that parents can let kids today watch them without the fear of seeing too much violence, let alone hearing any foul language (which wasn’t used in those days at all).
The movies today are so brutal and so graphic, you really have to wonder what effect they have on mentally unbalanced people. But you really have to also wonder why we use that at all. What does it say about people today that they go to movies expecting to hear and see junk like that? It just shows you how little we expect from our movies today, and how little Hollywood is willing to give us.
Look at who goes to movies; mostly the young, poor, and stupid. I’ve been to a few in the last couple of years because I wanted to see what 3-D was like, but before that had only been to Saving Private Ryan in the last 20 years or so.
I’m not much on censorship even though I think most of the sex and violence is gratuituous and is there solely to appeal to purient interests, but I would like to see the ratings revised to not allow those under 17 in to R-rated movies at all, with or without parental permission, and for PG-13, the kid must be accompanied by a parent.
Unless you’ve been through it, you have no idea how much social pressure there is on kids to go to R movies and a lot of PG-13 movies really push the sexual envelope or are gratuitously violent. And unless you just like to be hated, you have no idea how much pressure there is on parents to let them go to R-rated movies. They advertise them on kid shows, they advertise them in prime time, other kids with less conscientious parents go and tell the kids about them, and before long your home is a living Hell over what movies they can go to.
I don’t know what to do about the gratuitous sex in movies because they can get far worse than they’d ever see at a movie on the internet. Ten years or more ago my stepsons and their friends had networks of boys that passed porn site passwords around and there was plenty that was very explicit that didn’t require a password. I know all the stuff about not letting them have a computer in their room and such; let me know how keeping kids off computers and away from porn is working out for you. Oh, and it isn’t just young boys watching porn either.
Once pandora’s box is opened, there’s no closing it.
We’ve only begun to see the impact of ubiquitous pornography on society.
And it isn’t the only way that technology is genuinely revolutionizing society. Birth control started a revolution that is also in its infancy.
Aside from the morality of those two things, and other high impact changes (wmd, pervasive visual communication, free food, many many others), there is a genuinely fightening aspect to it. Human beings are genetically and culturally wired to live in a radically different world than we live in today; and that world, by any standard, is changing more rapidly than humans are designed to cope with.
I’m beginning to wonder if culture can deal with the rapidity of the change, even though a lot of the changes are at least argueably beneficial.
It’s not decelerating either.
and it’s not predictable.
I recall the evil character in one of those Airport movies of the ’70s saying “It’s not the money, it’s the kicks.”
So it could be with Holmes, shooting up all those “sitting ducks” in that movie theater just for the thrill it surely brought to his demented mind. It very well may be no more complicated than that. JMO.
When I read Mr. Simon’s article I was reminded of The Wild, Wild West that was canceled in 1969 because it was “too violent”. That show is now on afternoon TV and is rated “G”. That suggests that Mr. Simon’s plea is BS.
However, one thing that has changed over the 80 odd years of visual entertainment is an increased focus on the anti-hero, or the glorification of the villain. Combine that with all of the efforts to chip away at millennial old societal norms, which in total comprise the micron thin veneer of civilization that overlays man’s basic nature, and you reveal the barbarian underneath.
It’s quite understandable that we’d want Holmes to be mentally ill because if he’s not… take a look at the fellow sitting beside you… yikes! I do wonder, though, where the tipping point to insanity is – if I commit premeditated murder and kill one person then I’m a criminal; if I kill two people then I’m a mean criminal; if I kill three people then I’m a monstrous criminal; if I kill twelve then I’m mentally ill. Where is the inflection point to insanity? I’d have to be mentally ill to kill twelve, otherwise we’d have a society where there’s no right or wrong, where there’s no accepted behavioral model, where I can do as I darn well please and you’ll just have to like it. If I’m not mentally ill then we’d be living in “Thug Nation”, we’d be living in a “Nation of Men, not Laws”, we’d be living in a nation where “man’s inhumanity to man” is on daily display. And the daily death toll in Chicago does not support any conclusion save that we’re a “prim and proper nation” with full respect for life, liberty and the rule of law… does it?
“ChrisS
When I read Mr. Simon’s article I was reminded of The Wild, Wild West that was canceled in 1969 because it was “too violent”. That show is now on afternoon TV and is rated “G”. That suggests that Mr. Simon’s plea is BS. ”
What a perfect definition of desensitization! I saw the “OMEN” on one Saturday afternoon, uncut and uncensored. When it came out it was an “R” rated movie, now it is children’s fair.
I bough Sam Peckinpah’s “Wild Bunch” the other day the most violent movie in it’s time. Now it wouldn’t even make the Saturday matinee. Still it had a story, heroes and villains. I found it quite refreshing, got a twofer with “Jeremiah Johnson” another good movie although violent.
Can they make their points as effectively, perhaps more effectively, without the endless splatter and gore?
Yes, as the “master of suspense”, Alfred Hitchcock proved.
And yet another article that does not address the atrocity; the barbaric, and savage nature of this incident. Until now, these terms were absent from this article and comments.
Is there another area of political correctness that I’m not aware of? Are these terms being eliminated from the discussion to show sensitivity? Is this an exclusive domain of the attack dog media?
Believe it or not, anger is a natural human emotion. It cannot be legislated or deemed evil enough to be throttled or controlled by government or the spiritual community.
And, if I remember correctly, it hasn’t even been considered a sin, YET. God knows the Democrat Party is trying to trump the Bible in whatever behavior and emotion it deems “forbidden” to FEEL.>/b>
WRITING has always been an accepted form of expression. What’s going on here?
These days, if you write “barbaric” or “savage”, some bright-faced young idjit, with the good will of a labrador retriever waiting for a tennis ball to fly and about the same amount of good sense will ask you why you don’t like brown people – that’s how deeply conditioned people are these days.
Atrocity, I think, may only be used in the context of condemning military actions.
I’m sort-of kidding, but not entirely.
That’s what’s going on, here.
what we have here folks is simply an act of domestic terrorism and it should be treated as such (should be a federal crime to mass kill and where bomb making involved) and dealt with as such – fantasy would be send this guy to gitmo. searching for solutions in the mine field of psychology is a losing proposition, much like trying to understand and change the mindset of the “foreign” terrorist. would we feel better if he was a muslim? or an officially declared mentally ill person? I think not. there are plenty of angry or psychotic or misunderstood, bullied, etc. etc. types out there who never commit atrocious acts.
the problem here is that despite supposed efforts to understand and find evil before such events, we see what one motivated mind can do, without fear, without empathy, without an ability of the populace to defend itself. flashback to the massacre at Ft. Hood, because our soldiers were not allowed to have their weapons on them at that scene, and the evil doctor knew it. this guy too went to a safe place for him to act out. he didn’t try this in an open carry or closed carry location.
suggestion to the good – expect evil at all locations, much as we do on airplanes now – last few episodes on airplanes have been dealt with by passengers, not “authorities”. enjoy the movie but prepare for worst case scenario. goes for any public venue. train your mind, your bodies and your loved ones. unfortunate this is the world we live in.
Nice comment; But, where are all these devices coming from with the “cap” keys broken?
The only difference between Holmes and a multitude of other Hollywood creators/authors/producers, is that most Hollywood architects of violence never act out their own fantasies. (As another commenter refers to Alfred Hitchcock, above; What if Hitchcock actually acted out his most endeared fantasy?)
If Holmes could have documented his scenario, expressed his psychosis in writing, he could have sold it to a screen writer, and started a new career.
Also, this was not a “tragedy”, this was a vicious murder, period. A tragedy is a hurricane ar an earthquake.
Oedipus Rex is a tragedy. A hurricane or other natural disaster is a natural disaster. The shooting up of a theater is massacre and horror – an atrocity, if you will.
As the professor says in “Educating Rita”, when a tree branch falls and kills a man, it’s sad, but it’s not a tragedy. There’s no lesson, there’s no catharsis gained, there’s no figurative healing of society from either a natural disaster or an atrocity.
It might be worse than any of us thinks, since there is now a second “person of interest”.
That puts it squarely within the “evil” category. To me, two people plotting to kill innocents is a definite step higher on the evil scale, because it means those evil thoughts have been thoroughly reflected upon, articulated to another human being, and validated.
I really hope they’re wrong on this, because it changes the entire situation.
If this idiot – Holmes – had done this in China he would already be dead. Somethings about communism are quite appealing, that being one of them.
If these massacres are so rare, how can you blame movie violence any more than guns? It’s the same argument. Obviously movie violence doesn’t have that effect on millions of people.
Holmes is just a whacko who wants to be more famous, more evil, than the Joker. He knew that he had the nerve and resources a long time ago. It wasn’t until he realized that the media would provide the necessary PR that he decided to act.
The saddest part of this story is that there are other whackos sitting in dark basements thinking to themselves, “Hey, I could be on TV 24/7 and be much more famous than that guy and I wouldn’t have to have a gun; I could kill more people with XXXXX.”
Thus, by exploiting Aurora, the media is just guaranteeing the next massacre. The risk decreases if the media covered Aurora like they do every weekend in Chicago, where about the same numbers are killed and wounded.
After Columbine they wanted to ban Goth and Heavy Metal music. 2 generations ago it was pot and comic books. Before that it was Demon Rum, and before that “you got trouble right here in River City, that’s a T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Pool. “
But that stuff didn’t get banned, did it? And Columbine happened. And this latest mass murder spree happened. And tomorrow, how many dead will it take for the next violence-porn re-enactor to make the national TV news?
Hayes Code is right. What argument are you making? You are suggesting that it was wrong to censor, but that never actually happened. We still see these acts of mass murder, so you are saying what? You never provided a premise that shows censoring failed. Are we so calloused and hardhearted in America to believe that the effort to keep young people from looking at and hearing explicit violent messages and images is an infringement on theirs and the devils who create that garbage right of free speech? I really doubt that protecting vile lyrics and images was in the spirit of what the Founders intended the Constitution to protect. Weren’t they trying to establish a strong government and nation? It is indeed time for America to Wake Up, but to their own sins and hardhearts. Forget Bilderberg.
Although the gory movies of the 1970s may have maintained an in-the-end moral storyline, the problem still dates back to the late 1960s and the decline in movie attendance ue to television and the breakdown in the production code. Beatty’s “Bonnie & Clyde” was the first movie from a major studio with truly graphic violence for the time that pushed the envelope of what Hollywood had shown up to that point, and a script point of view that had the audience rooting for the bad guys.
Once that taboo was down, it’s only been a matter of upping the ante over the past 45 years, both in the technological advances that have made shocking/grossing out/horrifying audiences easier, but in the scripts which have come up with new and more varied and sadistic ways of carrying those murders out, and the lack of a moral compass that is designed to at times either get the audience on the side of the killers, or allow they to get away with their murders unscathed.
Hollywood in general decries gun rights by linking it to gun violence, but runs away from and culpability of their own films encouraging violent acts because they don’t want to mass murder the cash cow they see those same violent films being. As long as they pay no penalty in the public’s eye for holding those two conflicting viewpoints (especially the public on the left side of the political spectrum), you’re not going to see self-censorship of their films — the violence will continue to be shown at whatever the current level of CGI technology that can be created, and the creators of the stories will continue to deny that their movies do anything to influence the outside world.
Oh, dear, I’m going to sound like I’m carping at you, but honestly, think things through.
“Bonnie and Clyde”, the movie, was graphically violent, no argument. However, Bonnie and Clyde were not exactly handing out flowers, themselves. What made them so needlessly violent? What made them murder their way across a couple states?
Terrible violence happened before ever there were movies. Or perhaps you think “The Illiad” (and his armor rang around him) is a story about unicorns and rainbows? The Illiad, come to think of it, is pretty damned gratuitous in its violence!
I’m not saying that movies aren’t gratuitously violent, lacking moral focus and in incredibly bad taste. I’m saying that – in the end – that’s not what triggered Holmes, or any other of these spree killers.
Since Columbine – which upset me dreadfully – I’ve reminded myself that the Boomtown Rats got it right – “You can see no reasons because there are no reasons.”
I think some of the posts above hit on the real problem. Popular culture in following the relativistic philosophy of our society creates antiheroes and morally ambivalent leading characters. So much of movies, literature and music such as the abysmal gangsta rap is decadent, amoral and nihilistic. Mix it with unstable soul dead losers like Holmes or Harris and Klebold and it makes a volatile mix. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” is prophetic.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This whole post seems like a rabbit trail. If we are going to argue that exposure to media (books, television, video games, etc.) violence causes violence, and that only in small medicated doses can it be distributed to the masses, might I suggest that we stop teaching history, since nothing out of the recesses of Hollywood can hold a candle to the real scope of brutality that humans are capable of.
I very much share your revulsion for the torture porn genre of the Saw and Hostel series. I cannot understand how anyone enjoys that stuff much less allows it to be broadcast on basic cable on Saturday evenings.
Since the killer seems to believe himself to be the star of his own movie, is this just attention whoring taken to an extreme?
However, in contradiction, Charlie Manson got his creative ‘spark’ from the Beatles. Charles Whitman was not influenced by any pop culture other than his abusive family, military training, a brain tumor and an amphetamine prescription.
The men who imagined, engineered and implemented the mass murders in Armenia, the Ukraine famine, the Russian pogroms and German death camps, they were not influenced by any pop culture.
It isn’t good logic to compare mass murder committed by young American males with rulers of leftist countries. And maybe you should research some more about the Beatles, in regards to your silent premise that they are innocent good guys. Look for a connection with Aleister Crowley.
You’re obviously ignorant of the Russo-European pop culture that formed Lenin and Stalin. And likely you know nothing of the Wandervögel, Freikorps, and other elements of pop culture in the German-speaking lands during the late 19th and early 20th century.
Study up then come back and try again.
What a snotty self-aggrandizing reply. So now a mass murderer and the founders of Soviet communism have pop culture to thank for their infamy. Thanks for the enlightenment.
You can talk about there being violence in the past all you want, but it misses something very important. Before a certain time in history people weren’t able to watch murders second-rate on the television. They weren’t able to listen to music throughout the day conspiring for their rebellion from all the shackles of growing up; or the exaltation of both mediums of hedonism and love of wealth.
A war movie, like Saving Private Ryan, might be appropriate, but anyone with a brain would instantly understand from seeing that movie that it does not GLORIFY the violence it shows. It should not be grouped in with other showings of violence to make a point about senseless “entertaining” violence. Pretty much everything else showing violence DOES glorify the violence, whether it is sci-fi, government “thriller” types, lone cops, superheros, mercenary, whatever. Any justification of even heroic violence must face the hard premise that violence is entertaining. Something that is enjoyable and even pleasing to see. And I’m not even saying that this can never be the case, but just please stop with comparing Saving Private Ryan with, say, the Bourne movies.
Today we have an adult population that still plays with their frickin toys. People who can’t grow up, who still are able to be transfixed on fantasy. And it is not just the superhero garbage. There are many (children – the next generation, and adults) obsessed with World of Warcraft, middle earth fantasy, explicit porn, Roman-esqe make-believe, vampires, monsters of all kinds, zombies, anime, and I’m sure not a few other major genres (even reality-based fantasy, like the Sopranos, etc).
Doesn’t it seem odd that in a time when there is so much technological potential, so much free and accessible knowledge, so much freedom and wealth that the people gravitate towards fantasy, violence, absurd and evil humor? In all of this I am unable to draw a direct line to the people who commit these evil acts of public mass murder to our fantasia enthralled culture. I would simply point out the warping of our culture.
And there are always the ones who like to point out how there has always been something that people were blaming on corrupting the youth: comic books, rock n roll, movies, etc. How far back are they able to trace the truth in that canard? To before television? Before radio? I don’t think so. So, they prove the point that it is inductively more true than not that these things do CORRUPT the youth. And the supposed adults from the previous generations are the ones who have reeled it in.
The Bible speaks of Israel at one point in regards to a coming punishment in this sense: that you will be ruled by woman and oppressed by your children. Perhaps, America is in the throws of this class of punishment. One could point to the so-called sexual revolution in the 60′s for the burgeoning of the punishment. It is a god-smacked ironicy that a human culture of Peace and Love, that is founded on emotion and desire (and not the God who’s son is Jesus Christ), would beget Voilence and Hate.
I also don’t mean to suggest that Hollywood and television or radio simply have this power over the culture, to control our minds and behavior in a respect, but that Hollywood is giving the culture what it craves. That is the function of such things. And to look at the country now one would be hardpressed to say we are not beyond repair. How hard would it be for people to start growing up? It would take a major war (Major), major economic downfall (again, Major), or widespread environmental destruction.
I think what happened is that after WWII America become wealthy and turned to other things than were necessary. It is not necessarily the wealth, but the turning away. That is what begets drug use, the love of violence, the ignorance in love and sex, love of material things, and the lack of love for God. And there is much more that can be said.
This is the media version of banning 16 oz. colas and thinking that’s going to affect obesity.
What happens after is the difference between movies and reality.
Star Wars is a good example, The Rebel forces defeat the Death Star orbiting the moon of Endor filled with animals and the cute l’il Ewoks.
The death Star’s protective force field goes down, the Star blown up, everyone celebrates.
In real life the Moon of Endor gets bombed by all the fragments of the Death Star falling out of orbit and burns the Ewok culture alive.
In Murder movies it’s the same, what would happen in real life after a spree by a Freddy Kruger? All those victims families who will suffer the loss of their loved ones and Freddy? If he is caught then what happens to him? Well, He cannot be caught because he isn’t real. John Holmes thought he was like Freddy and at the end the credits roll.
John Holmes is now past the movie parts and is slowly entering the reality phase which if justice prevails will smack him in the face about the same time the lethal injections start to take place. But what of the victims and their families their reality will last their lifetimes and always hurt.
The overall murder rate in the US was 5.1 per 100K in 1960, climbed to 10.2 in 1980, and declined to 4.8 in 2010. http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Mass murders are a tiny % of the overall numbers. One of these incidents seems to occur once a year or so.
Murder doesn’t make the top 10 leading causes of death in the US. Accidents and suicide both do.
The proper big-government “policy” for addressing these horrific one-off events is….nothing. Almost all of the perpetrators of these horrible incidents are off the scale of any measurement of normalcy. It’s useless to speculate that any policy-directed actions, voluntary or forced will have an impact on somebody who would do this sort of thing. They all seem to be too evil and cunning to be influenced by much anyway.
The proper topic to be discussing is the murder rate in liberal cities. That’s an area where government policy might be able to make a diffence. We might consider starting with a discussion of how a 70%+ out-of-wedlock birth rate deprives men of their historically most important reason for living. btw, the rate for white women is something like 40%, which is also enough to cripple and society. Of course, it does encourage women to vote for amoral politicians who claim to support their needs, doesn’t it?
I don’t think anyone here is asking for government intervention. I’m certainly not. That is the “dead cockroach” defense that every “artist” gives when someone objects to their so-called art. Oh, free speech, blah, blah, blah. Every since Larry Flint won his pornography defense, it seems that everyone thinks that any attempt, on any level to curtail the culture to a more civilized norm is an abridgment of free speech.
We are here just philosophical debating how much this wide spread accessibility to violence is possible desensitizing the populace and leading to something more disastrous down the road. Will we eventually become like the Romans where we think nothing of watching people put to death in an arena. Civilization has made us prosperous, and the rejection of civility, I believe, is going to lead us to a point were we are unable to repel the barbarians at the gate. We are not just giving in to our basest instincts, we are wallowing in them, and gnashing our teeth an anyone who suggests that maybe we should dial it back a bit.
The sad thing is, many of these films would be better if they were showcasing the story instead of showcasing the violence.
These things would happen less if we were not so PC about putting the mentally ill.
At one time if someone thought they were Napoleon Bonaparte they were but in the rubber room the same should be with people that think they are the Joker.
I’m surprised we haven’t heard about the mother having troubles getting him the help he needed or having problems getting him committed. By the way did he have a father??
Every time these people get committed it’s after the fact, in the 1950s it was much easier to get people committed before they destroyed family, friends and strangers.
Violence in movies isn’t driving culture, it’s reflecting it. People are frustrated with society. Institutions don’t work, corrupt kleptocrats seem to run everything, rules are for the Little Guy. The Feds arms Mexican drug gangs. The IRS audits political enemies. The local Police Departments shoot innocent people in no-knock drug raids in between running Revenue-Enhancement operations on the roadways, and property crime goes unsolved. Stock brokers steal their clients money, banker and judges both make Mardis Gras revelers look sober and responsible by comparison.
Official Society isn’t working anymore. The majority of Americans realize our institutions are dysfunctional, that the peaceful and civilized means of resolving problems are crapshoots that can’t be relied upon. Most people keep on going, finding the best ways they can to live their lives, but the frustration mounts. Guys like this, with poor cooping skills and probably a sociopathic disregard for other people to begin with, go off sooner.
But frankly, if we don’t fix the social institutions, there’s going to be more violence born out of frustration.
Check out Pat Dollard’s website! http://www.patdollard.com
He has actual screen shots of the OWS idiots claiming the Colorado shooter as an active member, and the reason why!
and real live violence more terrible.
takes place right before our eyes and under our noses
The author and his ilk can moralize all they want but this crap happens because of Math, 300 million folks exposed to all kinds of stimulus will by virtue of statistical odds produce unstable assholes who will do bad shit.
Now, we can create a massive police state that ,starting in primary school, watches over the behavior of “every single one of us” and controls our behavior with appropriate action.
Pick your poison, freedom with occasional bad acts, or caged animals begging for approval to walk to the park.
I consider myself to be very much a conservative, and I don’t understand that when something like this happens and we get into these talks of violence in society why we always have to hear of the false dichotomy between fabricated senseless violence and a police state. That is not the case. Censoring extreme violence and imagery that is meant to shock the eyes and upset the mind is NOT an infringement of freedom of speech in the spirit of the Constitution, and it would not lead to a police state. I don’t care what argument anyone can make, American service men do not die so some kid can watch a movie where a person’s face and mouth is surgically attached to another person’s anus (this occurs in a movie called Centipede, apparently, that I’ve heard people talk about). And if they are dying so some stupid kid can brag that he watched Centipede to his friends then we’ve already lost, and there is nothing to talk about. Nothing to say about anything good or bad, right or wrong, and we can all go down the drain in lock step.
Further, all this nonsense about how violence on television is comparable to stories from antiquity like the Illiad, or whatever story that has children being eaten by some witch is just that, nonsense. And you know it. Look at Sodom and Gamorah. There is a point that perversness will not be tolerated. But go ahead, keep throwing a blind eye at the degredation of your society and youth, and check your brains at the door. We don’t want the police state coming, whatever that is supposed to mean.
I think it’s sad that society always wants to find a certain explanation for these kind of tradgedies. Whether it’s guns, drugs, parenting, work environment, ect… I just think the pressure to perform in life gets overwhelming sometimes. And if you don’t have the right people around you, encouraging you, then you end up idolizing a false reality that plays out in Hollywood Movies and video games. This kid had a ton of potential and somewhere along the way, something went wrong, and he was never set the right direction. He created his own alternative universe as this “Joker”.
The problem isn’t that there is too much violence and sex on TV. The problem is the lack of positive energy and publicized role models is creating this very stressful environment for anyone growing these days. I don’t understand why so many people love Chris Brown and so many people despise Tim Tebow. The priorities of the Media to entertain are completely screwing up our citizens.
It seems likely this killer was going insane. Good age for the onset of schizophrenia. Maybe he heard voices.
Kurt Vonnegut had a good insight into this sort of situation. He wrote that insanity was simply a biochemical aberration in your brain, is all. You brain simply stops working properly. But, it requires bad thoughts to give your madness form and direction.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the people who put vile, destructive thoughts into a deranged mind.
BTW, I am glad this killer used a gun to engage in mass murder. You really can’t kill that many people with a gun. Imagine if he had chosen to use a more destructive weapon instead, like fertilizer or poison gas or fire. He could have killed hundreds.
Meanwhile, we will have our 90 dead per day from murder and 100 dead per day from drug overdose (mainly prescription, legal drugs), and nobody will be alarmed.
So it goes.
Interesting analysis. Long Kiss Goodnight is under-rated and one of my faves. My less-evolved self relishes the moment when the bad guys get it, up close and personal. My evolved self regrets the fact that I relish the bloodletting. I am, I fear, a hopeless case.
I disagree with the basic premise here. As proof, I need only point out that this kind of violence has been going on long before movies like “Hostel” were produced, or the creation of first person shooter video games were even a dream in someones mind.
The Texas Towers shooting, for instance, predates both.
No, I suggest something else has poisoned our society to the extent a coward like this murderer can methodically spend months planning something like this without some part of his mind rebelling against the very thought.
Whether or not we ban video games and horror flicks will not impact this reality in the very least.
“300″ is about men at war as much as “The Godfather” is about community organizing.
“300″ sucked big time and did a disservice to a truly inspiring battle that saved Western civilization. Too bad is was turned into a comic book (both the print and film version)instead of the outstanding history it deserved.
*Meanwhile, we will have our 90 dead per day from murder and 100 dead per day from drug overdose (mainly prescription, legal drugs), and nobody will be alarmed.*
“Nobody panics because its all part of the plan…”
HOLLYWOOD TRAINS THE NATION ON FIREARMS
HOLLYWOOD PRODUCTIONS NEED A SMALL REALITY FEEDBACK
The mechanics of drama: the hand reaches into the closet for the hidden fifth of booze and encounters the automatic hung up in its shoulder holser rig. Audience knows that shortly the boozer will use it to kill someone. Drama requires introduction of the props.
Ever look at comedy movies before WWII and see guns on the wall of wealthy folk’s second homes away from urban areas? Ever get a little bell going off about soon there will be a shooting?
In the audience watching movie violence, some are clueless and acquire knowledge of real life. Others see that sort of thing as a training film. Ubiquitous in movies are violations of the laws of physcs and the criminal and civil laws.
In production credits, just below the name of the person who gets coffee for the worker holding the scene-marking clap-sign at the beginning of each take, there should be a new credit: Violations
Law violations not mentioned in the play, such as felony breaking & entering, domestic violence, convioted felon with a firearm etc.
Violations of the laws of physics: exploding car, character firing pistol and hitting things (etc.). The only accurate shooting I remember from Hollywood is “Quigly Down Under.” Most of the shooting in war movies is science fiction, as is the bullet-dodging.
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