Time to Curtail Violence in Film
The Greek dramatists, interestingly, kept their violence offstage. Oedipus appeared with his eyes already out. We did not see him yanking them from his face, yet we knew and know the terrifying act that occurred and its import. Shakespeare too was not graphic in modern terms, even in King Lear.
Only in the modern era of the cinema, however, have we had the potential to be explicit in these matters, but great films have exercised restraint in their portrayal of violence. Hitchcock’s Psycho and Fritz Lang’s M (about a serial killer), scary as they may be, are considerably less explicit than Natural Born Killers and considerably better artistically as well, yet it is Natural Born Killers that is said to have inspired copycat crimes. Screen violence always has the potential to glamorize mass murder. After all, it’s on the screen — where so many want to be. It is indeed time to exercise restraint.
But none of this is simple. We are in the realm of the diciest of judgment calls. And some of what I am writing is colored by the events of early this morning. Still, I wouldn’t want to be an executive at Warner Brothers today. Or one of the filmmakers of the latest Dark Knight. If I were, I would have a lot of sleepless nights ahead.
Well, Roger, if you think movies and TV are gratuitously violent, you oughta’ see the video games. It says about all you need to know about how feral much of our society has become that people were bringing their small children to a midnight showing on a work night. We’ve become a nation of degenerates so it shouldn’t be surprising when somebody busts a few caps on a crowd.
Sure looks that way. Kids nowadays rapidly progress from FPS against monsters to war games against people. Not much of a leap of imagination required to go from the games, or the movies, to shooting up a theater. Asking for restraint is like asking the news media (any media, including PJ) to be objective. It’s too little and too late.
I’d like to hear what you thought of Act of Valor. =0[.]o=
Best move of the year,the drug culture looses big time! God Bless Our Troops!
You know, that occurred to me as well. WHAT were young kids doing at a midnight movie? WHY? If you can’t afford a babysitter, then sit at home and wait for the DVD. Where were the priorities of these parents?
As for the shooter, he should be hung. In public. With cameras.
IMO, we actually have too little broadcast violence – at least too little of the right sort.
I am not following the logic here. If the shooting had taken place in a restaurant, would that mean the steaks were too bloody? American cinema is a revolting cesspool, but that has been the case for decades.
And violent crime rates have been dropping for a generation now.
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_01.html
So there’s stronger evidence supporting the idea that violent entertainment decreases actual interpersonal violence than that it causes it.
Sometimes a psychopath is just a psychopath.
The only vote we have here, is with our dollar.
Use them wisely – and vote no today!
Exactly, Hobbit. That has been my philosophy for at least 15 years or so – it has been that long since I have paid to see a new movie – either in the theater or home video. I basically have three problems with the Hollywood complex. 1) I do not agree with politics of 90% of Hollywierd, and I especially don’t like it when they use their films to subliminally sway their viewers. 2) I don’t like how Hollywierdos try to “mainstream” deviant subculture through their films – Easy Rider, anything Cheech and Chong, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, etc., etc. 3) Finally, I am appalled at the amount of violence shown in American movies. Violence has always been a part of the American way of life (actually, of HUMAN life, period!), but over the years the degree of this violence has grown outrageously, and is now totally unrealistic. It is just thrown in for the “shock and awe” effect, and the bar is raised with each new film.
When I want entertainment, I view old movies and TV shows from my childhood days (or even prior to that) on the internet, or from my own collection. If someone was killed, you saw a shot or two, maybe blood on the ground or a bloody shirt. But, until Sam Peckinpah came around, you never saw blood squirting out everywhere – and quite frankly, there is no need for it. Maybe at 48 years of age I’m an old fuddy-duddy, but I really don’t care.
If you don’t like what Hollywood is putting out, stopping buying tickets to see their movies – it’s that simple!
If creative people have to curb the imagery with which they tell their tales, simply because some disturbed individual might act out on it, then the madmen get to define the limits of creativity. We could debate the merits/demerits of sex/violence/what have you in film, TV, and other formats, but this is exactly the sort of argument the nanny-mob would seize upon to control, direct, or stultify creative media.
Not a moment’s more reflection than upon that which would most effectively convey what the artist has to say. Anything else is surrender to madmen, and those who would exploit their madness. =’[.]‘=
Hear, hear.
I took this as more of an appeal for the “creative types” to actually be creative rather then lazy. To create, without explicit gore, the horror felt, leaving the splattering of realistic paint and plastic to those unable to paint a picture in the mind. These stylized gore shows showcase the skill of the special effects artist but reveal the writer and director to be unimaginative in telling the story.
Long ago, when I saw the first Friday the 13th movie on it debut, the gore was startling and somewhat interesting, but what terrorized me was not some zombie killer, but the knowledge there were people out there like that. Like the mother, revealed in the end. Not monsters, just crazy people who look just like everyone else, whom you’d accept a ride with on your way to camp, until….
Freddie, Micheal, Jason, give me a break, those were suppose to be gory comedies, right?
It will be interesting to see if, yet again, the same voices that cheered on censoring Bugs Bunny cartoons and ‘joe the camel’ will cry that such rules don’t apply to their friends in Hollywood.If there are and should be, no limits on violence in movies, then why is there a blanket ban on tobacco advertising, or a cartoon mallet? Any chance we’ll see the beautiful people of Hollywood rally for ‘joe the camel’?
You nailed it Blue Hen. Heads exploding-wow cool. Character holding a cigarette-RUN! RUN! Get that off the screen. Oh the children!
Retired Army Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who wrote “On Killing,” makes a pretty compelling case for limiting the amount of violence children are exposed to in this book from 1999:
Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence
Maybe we could have a new movie rating (D for dystopian). Sci Fi would be hit hard but wouldn’t it be nice if that induced less cynicism and more optimism in movies?
So, what does everyone think, will this help or hurt the film’s box office?
Hardly apropos to the point being made, but I couldn’t help thinking of Maggie Smith’s wonderful dowager in Downton Abbey talking about how much she hated Greek drama because everything interesting happened off-stage. Or maybe it is apropos to the point being made.
“If creative people have to curb the imagery with which they tell their tales….”
Dude, there’s nothing creative about graphic violence. In fact graphic violence is the opposite of creativity. It’s in the movies for one reason – to sell lots of high-priced tickets to nearly brain-dead people with low cortical activity. This director Tarantoad, or whatever his name is, may be an exception – in his case you get the feeling that he is chiefly gratifying his own creepy little psychopathologies. Happily for his finances, many obviously share them.
We have a solution at hand for the violent insane: Personal weapons in the hand of honest, trained citizens.
When such a person attacks, he is often stopped by either the last bullet in his gun, or the first bullet in the gun of someone else. Proper training would reduce the death toll by a factor of 10 in particular instances, and drive the most violent to select different targets.
There were violent insane people long before the invention of the movie. They will be created by mutation or accident after the movie is supplanted.
I don’t care for the Batman movies. It just isn’t good theatre. I feel sorry for the authors for whom only the squalid is strong.
I disagree entirely. If it wasn’t Batman, he would have shown up at some other movie at some other point. I dislike gratuitous violence, which is why I don’t go to see horror flicks. That said, I don’t see how not making them will make a difference one way or the other. Taking away examples of violence will not prevent it from occurring.
Well, that is your opinion. You back it up with no empirical evidence. On the other hand, we have the evidence of the violent murder of 14 or more movie-goers. I say, the movie-makers who glorify violence by splattering it all over the screen are culpable. No one seems to have noticed that the Columbine massacre occurred not too long after the release of Matrix. The Columbine perpetrators were attired in Matrix-like garb.
Unstable people do not need much of a catalyst to ignite their inner demons. Film-makers do know this. But they do not care. They are obsessed by their own inner demons to “make a mark,” to go where “lesser” filmmakers dare not go.
Movie-makers have an obligation to the public. If they choose to glorify violence and assault our senses with demonically-evil images, then they should hide under a rock when their creative efforts bear the fruit of the evil they depict.
I agree with you! Also there is too much movie son influence and not enough Father son influence. Divorce courts bear a substantial responsibility!
I agree with “me”. The best you can say is that the Batman movie served as a focus and inspired the particulars, but that these movies caused a good person to become evil is an hypothesis that goes far beyond anything I can subscribe to. I’d say that we had someone who wanted to do something spectacularly evil and thought the Batman movie would provide him with an ironic setting that pleased him, but I cannot credit the idea that the movie made him want to do evil in the first place. Had it not been the Batman theatre it might have been a nightclub and a few gallons of gasoline.
Roger, have you disproved that the Batman shooter wouldn’t have done it had the movie not been made, or were violent movies in general not made? I agree with much that you have to say but in this case your reasoning is no better than the reasoning that led to some hysterical laying of blame on Sarah Palin for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords because ads sponsored by Sarah had bulls eye targets placed on them. The connection is not quite as ridiculous as in the Sarah Palin case, but the reasoning is just as bad.
The Colorado shooter will be described as “insane”. I prefer “evil” as it lays responsibility where it lies, rather than upon the producers of a crappy movie.
What about the self-censorship of the film going public? I wouldn’t pay to see this kind of film; but maybe those who do have a rawer edge that gets mediated by scenes of violence. Modern society is deeply resentful, because it’s unbound from any highly sacralised order, everyone competing with everyone on every level. Artists have to do something with that resentment to mediate it. You can’t stage it like a classical drama, now when everyone identifies with Oedipus instead of seeing him as a sign of exceptional danger. Unfortunately it is impossible to know whether violent film does more to satiate or spur violent desires, because it does both simultaneously.. All we can know is that we can teach ourselves to reject it when the depiction doesn’t serve the higher ethical and esthetic imperatives to which we might still aspire.
You are absolutely correct, but not one in a thousand will understand your reference to the original purpose of Greek tragedy.
It’s no surprise that this article judges the shooter as “criminally insane” before the details of the case are in.
History tells us that vicious mass-murdering creeps are generally glory-hounds who do it for the notoriety.
Might as well curtail fame.
Good luck with that.
Time to admit the obvious – censorship of popular culture to remove from it gratuitous sex and violence is a prime tool in bringing to an end these massacres. We are intensively propagandizing a resort to senseless violence (as well as degrading sex) and so what we are getting is senseless violence (and degrading sex). Until the adults grow a fricking spine and start insisting upon public decency, this will not change. You’re on the right track, Mr. Simon, but you need to think it all the way through.
While I see where you’re coming from, I think curtailing the resulting shark frenzy of media covereage would quickly drop these incidents to a lower rate.
If anything, the culture on TV helps you identify the morons amongst us. If they wear Ed hardy and have to watch the Jersey Shore, or talk incessently about celebrity gossip as though it is in anyway important to anything at all, you can pretty much write that person off.
It would be asking too much for the MSM to give little notice to such events – they are, alas, genuinely newsworthy. Better to give them no such massacres to report about.
I can agree that the end result we all want is that these don’t occur, but the notoriety and carnival atmosphere of breathless coverage appeals to certain outlying personalities. Hence, copycatting and worries of such.
Roger, that is probably the dumbest and most knee-jerk thing you have ever written.
Crazy is as crazy does, and the attempt to tie insanity to the arts is like blaming the moon for madness: proximity is not causation.
Ask yourself this – why do toothpaste companies keep advertising toothpaste? We all know that toothpaste exists. Almost all of us use it every day. Each brand is pretty much like another. Why advertise? Even if you never advertise it, at all, vast quantities of it will be sold and if you’re making it, you’re going to sell quite a lot of it. So, why advertise?
Because if you relentlessly advertise a product IT WILL INDUCE SOME PEOPLE TO BUY IT. Simple as that. It can be as simple as while you’re going down the toothpaste aisle you just reach for the one you’ve seen advertised the most in recent days. Advertisement is done because it works – not because it makes everyone do what the advertisement directs but because it makes some people do it, some of the time.
What popular culture works out to is a relentless advertisement in favor of, among other pathologies, gratuitous violence. Not everyone will be swayed by it. Heck, hardly anyone will – but some will; and those are the people who get guns and go massacre random people. To be sure, there were probably a host of influences which brought this killer to that theater – but we’re worse than fools, we’re actually accomplices to murder, if we don’t stand up like adult men and women and say, “enough”. Its not worth it so that a few talentless actors, directors and writers can make an easy buck that our popular culture shall be a cesspit out of which will crawl murderers.
Not sure what toothpaste has to do with whether a crazy person kills someone else. That was the gist of the original article – that a crazy person is influenced easily. That is still debatable, toothpaste brands notwithstanding.
I’m asking you to consider why toothpaste is advertised. The biggest problem we have today is a failure to think things all the way through. Advertisement works no matter what it is you’re advertising. The use of endlessly repetitive appeals to a lowest-common-denominator strongly influences people – some much more than others it goes without saying…but our problem is that tiny (but, I believe, growing) subset of people who are primed to act out on the impulses implanted in to them.
The proof is this: we used to not have this sort of thing. Prior to the glorification of gratuitous violence in our culture such acts as this theater massacre DID NOT HAPPEN. Its not that they happened less often: they didn’t happen, at all. What is different between the times when it didn’t happen and today? Once you ponder that, the answer becomes clear – and it must result in a willingness to specifically curb the filth of our popular culture.
Toothpaste is advertised because if you don’t advertise it, people will forget you exist and buy the competitor’s product.
Mind control does not exist. Violent films do not get made in order to “induce” violence; violent movies are in demand, and so they get made.
Why is violence in demand? Ask those who demand it. Do not impute soft-headedness (i.e. controllability) to others simply because their choices are not the same as yours.
Mr Noonan, your post here has socialist undercurrents. Who, exactly, is supposed to “curb the filth of our popular culture”? The authorities? The government? You? I submit that the individual is a better choice. However, the failing that’s within our society is endemic in that parents, teachers and other authority figures have grown lax in their desire to curb the appetites of people who want to see garbage, as you put it.
Parents have relinquished responsibility to the schools and the schools really don’t feel like being baby-sitters so they pretty much let the kids do as they please.
Back when I was a kid, the rating system for movies was all the rage and us kids tried to figure out ways to sneak in to see an “R” rated flick…only to find out that there was a lot of fuss about nothing much.
However, back to the matter. Parents, if they don’t let their kids go see such piffle in the studios, the studios would have to alter their approach..however, since such piffle draws crowds, it must be what the people want. But I submit that controls over the product be administered by the individual. Not some as yet unknown quantity to “curb the filth”. That would just make it go underground.
P Jay,
All of us have to take a stand here – and if the entertainment industry won’t police itself, compel them to be policed. We need to stop being afraid to insist upon decency. Its no good saying “well, a good parent will keep their kids away from it” – parents are overwhelmed and can’t be everywhere at once (and it is another – equally important – part of the equation that our economy is not built so that at least one parent can remain a full-time parent). The purveyors of filth put it out there relentlessly and carefully engineer in youthful, inexperienced minds that it is “cool” to go along with this garbage (you really think that rap music became big because of a popular demand for that un-musical, un-artistic garbage? That people were sitting around thinking, “hey, you know what I’m in a spiritual need of? A song which has lyrics like, ‘Yo, reputation for bustin’, p***y open its nothin’, Big fat n***a all that huffin’ and puffin’”?).
Think it over – think about what has happened.
Well, since the shooter allegedly was trying to imitate the villain, and since the movie is trying to “sell” people taking a stand against violent criminals, explicitly without killing them, then theoretically more movies like would incite more people to stand up against shooters like this and stop them.
I’m not seeing how that is a problem, but I guess if you object to people defending themselves and others against crime it would be objectionable.
Thank you!
Your point is one I have made for *years*. If all the ads were made simply to advertise, all we would see & hear is the name of the product & a small description. But because people *can* be easily influenced & and persuaded, simple concepts (such as sex, desire, power & violence) are interwoven with imagery of products & therefore we have the advertising industry.
Culture is influence. Everyone can be influenced in one way or another, for good *or* for bad. How many have been encouraged or influenced by great war stories, great tales of space travel, a good love story? How about a fashion show? A music video? IMO, there just is no logical way to deny the fact that some portion of the population (possible a portion with certain forms of mental illnesses) can be encouraged or influenced so much that they end up going in a very negative direction.
Sure, that man may have ended up doing harm to others anyway, namely himself. But there is no denying there was some form of influence and encouragement, if not just perceived, there.
We’re not all as impervious as many would like to believe.
Agreed. Mr. Simon needs a cooling off period. Violence in the creative arts today should not be restrained, even by self control, if the restraint impairs the expression and meaning of the art. I suspect many people go to violent movies as a form of escape and catharsis. Removing that outlet may result in unexpected consequences. After all, many people are tired of seeing their freedoms removed, “calmly… coolly… entirely without incident.” Giving people an outlet for their frustrations where the bad guys are obvious and the good guys actually stand up and fight instead of milling around or running for the exit may have more benefits than some people are willing to admit. It is, after all, sometimes nice to see good guys smart enough not be tricked into surrendering their right of self defense.
I’m with #11 and #48 Miriam. To think this is due to films is to think far too much of yourself as a filmmaker. Sorry, but this isn’t about you.
If you want to consider the role media play here, consider how media and hollywood celebritize the mass murderer. By promoting him, making him a star, asking what his “philosophy” was, etc. we make this action more desirable, not less.
Mass murderers should get no attention other than a visual object lesson of being strung up and their eyes eaten by crows. Show them what happens to them if they do this.
And another mass murderers should know: they are no rooms of victims around. Concealed and open carry would have stopped this tragedy before 60 people were shot. Maybe not all would have been saved, but far more than this.
But to jump to “the film made him do this”, we know nothing yet. One report said he’d withdrawn from grad school–does that mean flunked out/didn’t pass quals? Another report said his Joker get up and actions massed a 1986 comic book, not a film version at all. Let’s wait and see what’s true before deciding who or what to blame other than the shooter.
The point was not that “the film made him do it” but that the films that he had seen were significant factors.
“Influence” is the key word, here. He was obviously *influenced* by such things.
I’ve always been somewhat bemused by this argument, that no one, or very few people, would do something like this unless they saw it on film first. It’s as if people in the movie business think that nothing ever happened until they inspired it by making a movie about it. Sorry Roger, no offense, but the Huns didn’t sack Rome because they watched a movie. There weren’t any flicks to go to before the OK Corral, and the Indians who killed Custer hadn’t ever seen a movie either. I know that certain perpetrators, when questioned about why they do these things after the fact, try to shift blame from themselves to movies, games, or whatever, but really, what’s going on is certain people having a dislike for this sort of entertainment, so they go on a fishing expedition looking for evidence that their conclusions are valid.
It’s related to the story that NFL Football on TV causes domestic violence. It doesn’t, that’s been proven conclusively; so everyone acts like it does, the NFL (last I looked) has to run PSAs arguing that their fans shouldn’t beat up their wives, and they get the bad rap anyway, because snotty intellectuals who don’t like football have “proven” a connection that doesn’t exist.
As far as I’m concerned, the chief problem here is that someone in the audience should have been armed, and shot or stabbed the guy while he was doing this. I’ve read several interviews where people saw that he was reloading, and used the opportunity to run. I hope if I’m ever in such a situation I use the opportunity to attack the guy…
The Huns sacked Rome for a rational purpose – they wanted to steal all the stuff the Romans had. The gunfight at the OK Corral happened for a rational purpose – criminals wanted to be immune from arrest, law enforcement wanted to arrest the criminals. The Indians massacred the 7th Calvary because they were fighting for their way of life. There is a vast difference between run-of-the-mill crime and these sorts of massacres. After the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre we could easily see what it was about – sure it was cruel, but one set of criminals wanted to off another set in order that they may make more money. Simple, easy to understand – and once you’ve locked up the perpetrators, the whole problem is over with as far as they are concerned. After this massacre, what are we to make of it? What was the actual motive? The answer is there isn’t any – only someone entirely divorced from morality could do what this killer did and he didn’t get his divorce all of a sudden. He didn’t wake up yesterday morning and say, “think I’ll go massacre me some people”. This built up, year by year, as influence after influence came in to his life – to finally explode in this manner.
Go to the ultimate source – go to where people get most of their impressions of life these days: popular culture. Cut out the filth and you’ll be half way to ensuring this doesn’t happen again. The other half is more general reforms to strengthen the family and ensure that those who are doing the right thing get the greater reward in life.
You have a rather irrational concept of “rational”. Perhaps that is why your basic premise iis that of the Left: individuals are malleable shmoos, dependent upon society to “make” them.
Speak for yourself, buster.
Well, congratulations on being a person who is impervious to the inputs of others. I’m astounded to be in the presence of a person who is sui generis – entirely an island and only taking in to consideration what he has carefully weighed in the balance and determined it to be true and beautiful. Pardon the rest of us weaklings, though, for not being up to your standards of personal excellence. The rest of humanity is not quite that perfect and thus – even with faith in God and a strong desire to do the right thing – can be swayed to sin. I speak for them – you are excused.
Sure, because that’s all the alternatives we have — complete isolation, or to be a mindless shmoo controlled by others who accordingly shoulder the sponsibility for my actions.
Someone else made that happen.
wait a minute, where have I heard that before?
Be neither isolated nor controlled – be deeply involved and in control. Its really nothing more than a matter of insisting that the public square be kept in a manner that the least among us can be free to develope themselves along bright, useful paths. That some decadent people will still find ways of getting their daily filth I have no doubt – but because such people are there and will be successful in their pursuit of personal destruction it does not follow that we have to allow such crudities to be readily available to all and sundry, and merely so that some money-grubbers can get rich (while piously hiding behind an appeal to the First Amendment).
It is a matter of understanding our inter-connectedness: that none of us stand alone and that we’re all in this together.
So we must curtail entertainment because of the worst out there?
Is that anything like women having the social responsibility to only appear in public in burka’s, and not walk around like meat on display, because there are rapists out there?
No thanks; I find your recommendation for sharia in entertainment to be aesthetically unsatisfying.
Were I to be satirical, I might must about we must also be cautious about putting certain political views in film, as well as on blogs, and how we must not “censor” ourselves, but merely “exercise restraint”, much as certainl political groups are even now calling not for an actual ban, but merely for something to “help” us “exercise restraint” in gun ownership. Certainly that could never be turned to an actual legislated ban on gun ownership, or an actual legislated ban on political blogging, much as there was never an actual legislated ban on certain sexual, or semi-sexual, or quasi-sexual, images in films, or people choosing to “exercise restrain” in employment in filmmaking. If something like that were to actually happening, then I wonder how those who made the initial calls for such would feel. I expect they might have quite a few sleepless nights after such things happened.
frank miller is evil. he deserves to reap what he has sown.
What the heck does Frank Miller have to do with this? He wrote The Dark Knight Returns back in 1986. This movie is barely based on that. Also, Miller’s work made it obvious that he (or Batman) was opposed to gratuitous violence–he was order in a world where most people were either violent or unwilling to do anything about it.
Nah. This guy was too well supplied. He was cultivated and encouraged.
Too much planning for a ‘madman’- unless he was obsessive. Still…
I was going to suggest we bloody ‘em up to appeal to foreign audiences.
I am often repelled, even at mainstreaming CSI Des Moines and the like.
Good gosh, they show it going in. Sick. Unwatchable. Not entertainment.
In the eighties, an old friend thought the slasher movies would breed a lot of psych cases. I scoffed.
Then, that night, I watched two and three year-old kids rigid with terror while their parents watched one of those slasher movies on VHS.
“It’s just a movie” the mom and dad laughed, while I took the girls to play in another room.
THEY don’t know that! They are two and three, for gosh’ sakes!
I scoffed no more.
I tend to agree with you and Roger.
Movies are a representation of our culture which defines our civilization.
While we know these awful acts occur and have always occured we do not want by their pervasiveness (and over the top) representations in movies to define our culture to a greater degree than they should and ever have.
Movies and all our cultural institutions should be accessible to children to properly introduce them to our civilization and carry it on. It is a responsibility that goes with our freedom, actually, it might make our freedom possible in the first place. Yes, maybe we shouldn’t over emphasize the one in millions who goes wrong, but ensure the millions go right.
And for those who say here guns don’t kill people, people kill people(true), but then consider carefully and choose wisely how we educate people and we’ll have fewer problems with guns
I mean, how would you like then to see guns represented on the screen? In some mindless, bloodbath by a sadistic killer typical of today’s movies? Does that make your case? Or as they are in Shane wherein Alan Shane describes to Brandon deWilde the awesome power and responsibility of the gun and how when properly used (as he does) actually protect the weak and innocent?
If you have not seen Shane and the classics I recommend that you make it a regular family activity to do so.
Let me see, three hundred and fifty million people – one psychotic kills 13 and now I’ve got to listen to the endless wisdom of the all-knowing from both sides of the aisle about how the rest of us need to take responsibility. It gets old. How come everyone that grows up forgets being a kid who rolls their eyes at the absurdity of adults….and then becomes that absurd adult. People will always be violent…guns or no guns. When 13 people get killed by a nut-job in a country of three hundred and fifty million, it is a tragedy – and let’s leave it at that. We can teach our kids about disturbed people….we can mourn the deaths, but for the love of God, save me the lectures on how I’ve got to restrict my freedoms because there’s a remote chance I might influence a parasite. We can all live in bubbles but someone will still find a way to sneak out of his bubble, enter someone else’s bubble and slit their throats…no matter how much of our lives are set aside in an effort to burp the fragile ones of the herd.
Holly’s got a point.
for a group of people supposedly obsessed with”freedom” you are so willing to renounce it when YOU get scared.
sorry, I meant THEIR
An exchange between Spock and Dr McCoy, Star Trek, “The Immunity Syndrome”
Mr. Spock: I’ve noticed that about your people, Doctor. You find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million. You speak about the objective hardness of the Vulcan heart, yet how little room there seems to be in yours.
Dr. McCoy: Suffer the death of thy neighbour, eh, Spock? Now, you wouldn’t wish that on us, would you?
Mr. Spock: It might have rendered your history a bit less bloody.
——————————
A couple of good points there. Hardness of the heart is not to be confused with lack of compassion. Many of us feel the pain and sting of the atrocious act but also, life is for the living and life must go on. Seeking justice will undoubtedly be a painful ordeal as it will be relived in the courtroom and quite possibly by some talking head like Jerry Rivers who provide us plebs with a “walk-through” of it.
Although it must not be ignored, it cannot be prevented. The “would’a, could’a, should’a” crowd can go pound sand. Spock’s remark, “It might’ve rendered your history a bit less bloody” ignores the nature of humans and especially those who resort to violent means to an end, for both good and bad. WWII…millions of men, engaged in violence to curb the violence foisted upon a world by evil people. Once the war was won, the violence ceased. Had the war not happened, the violence by tyrants, Tojo, Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin would’ve continued. *Note: It did continue under Stalin.
As long as there is more than one human being on the face of the earth, peace, in its empirical form is impossible. Disagreements will occur perpetually. Depending on the severity of the issue, they can escalate to violence.
However, the event in the movie theater has mysterious origins. Mysterious in that one person chose to murder. Like Barney Fife used to say about Ernest T Bass, “He’s a nut” is as easy an answer as can be found for now. Personally, I doubt there was any way of assessing any tendencies to do this type of thing, even if the guy had been evaluated by “professionals”. Nor do I care.
It is as unfortunate a thing as can be imagined. I certainly wish it never did happen but wishing won’t make it go away. So study is required to learn what’s wrong with this person. It may not help society in any great way or it may at that. Analyzing the Timothy McVeigh’s, the Unibomber, other people who seem “mis-wired” might provide more knowledge into the complexity of the human mind.
Suffering the death of thy neighbor is something one wouldn’t wish on anyone but we in America seem very good at it with all the rememberance TV shows, highway memorials, etc. It also smacks of our lack of ability to move on, which is unhealthy. Queen Victoria mourning the death of Prince Albert unhealthy.
Mourne, yes. Try to understand, certainly. Move on, definitely. Sure, easy for me to say…But I too have lost loved ones and it smarts to this day but I do not occupy a great deal of time to their memory. Occasionally I have sentimental moments where I take pause, where something reminds me of my Grandmother or my uncle, or a good friend. But it should not run my life, nor should it hover over the conscience of the nation. It’s just like “white-guilt”. Yes, bad things happened. Bad people did them. Even good people did them. Learn from it. Learn how to avoid it. Don’t behave like that.
Speaking of imposing the sharia on entertainment and general commentary . . .
When will bloggers and blogger sites decide to “exercise restraint” in things like “Islamophobic” commentary?
We know how much violence that causes, it would be nice to see PJMedia take the lead in eliminating any such articles and commentary from their website.
After all, politics is critically more important than entertainment, and anything that could incite political violence must be subject to significantly more restraint than is shown in mere entertainment.
While considering such a change, allow me to suggest some light entertainment:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s14e02-the-tale-of-scrotie-mcboogerballs
“When will bloggers and blogger sites decide to “exercise restraint” in things like “Islamophobic” commentary?
We know how much violence that causes…”
There’s been, what, one guy who could fall into that category?
Well, Simon, my first thought is movies don’t kill people, people kill people. I’m using “people” in its broadest most inclusive sense.
Sometimes insane is insane and the best we can do as a society is try to spot them and help them before they go to far. Dumbing down society to satisfy the insane is not practical as the insane will find hidden messages in jelly beans if given no other choice.
I’ve recently been revisiting some flicks based on historical events all of which occurred before the advent of either film or video gaming. Several recounted the incredible evils of the French Revolution and two others (Quo Vadis), the atrocities committed as “entertainment” against innocent Christians.
The realities: lopping off the heads of the rich ruling class for their crime of being the rich ruling class-and this included children; lions tearing apart men, women, and children as the crowd cheered approvingly; human beings lit on fire and used as torches in Nero’s garden while he and his entourage danced and played among them.
Though I decry the filth and violence churned out by Hollywood and others, I don’t see how, if you have any historical perspective whatsoever, you could pretend it is anything other than the ongoing expression of evil that has emanated from various human beings throughout history.
The greater question might be, what caused us to ascend to the level of civility where past atrocities, once accepted as normal, became unthinkable, and why, today, we have an atrocity accepted as normal which was considered a heinous evil just a mere few decades ago. I speak, of course, of the daily torture and murder of little baby boys and girls. (I try to avoid euphemisms as much as possible as I find them dishonest.)
“you could pretend it is anything other than ” – and by “it” I am referring to the theater shooting.
Several middle eastern nations still practice some of the things you mentioned which date back to Roman times. To me, that’s proof enough that they have yet to become “civilized”.
As noted elsewhere on this thread many videogames do feature a lot of violence, and a lot of it is very realistically rendered. And boy are they popular! The “Grand Theft Auto” series of games (a favorite target of wannabe censors) can usually be counted on to sell more than 20 million copies of each installment.
A big, violent blockbuster movie will often sell about 8 million tickets in its opening weekend. Purely for the sake of argument let’s assume those 8 million are some of the same people playing the violent videogames. And heck, let’s figure the 20 million are also the main consumers of comic books, rock music, porn and whatever else you don’t like.
Now let’s assume a weak but still real causative link between violent entertainment and real violence. Let’s say 1% of the people exposed to such entertainment want to emulate it. That would mean 200,000 explosively violent people walking around. Now let’s say that only a quarter of those people had the ability to actually act on their impulses. You know what that would leave us with? It would leave us with 137 horrific killings daily. Not two or three every decade… 137 EACH AND EVERY DAY. It would mean more than a quarter of a million people murdered every year, which is almost 17 times the actual homicide rate.
Here’s the bottom line: there are two types of people who are guaranteed to come out of the woodwork every time there’s a crime like this. The first type is people who don’t like guns, period, and want to use the tragedy as an excuse to curtail other people’s right to have them. The second type is people who don’t like some aspect of popular culture and want an excuse to forcibly change peoples’ tastes. Both types are wrong, foolish, and untethered from reality.
There is a correlative link. There is no causative link. This is because of the fact that you cannot force a mind.
I think the more important thing is a thing’s fame, the scope of its popular appeal. There are a lot of films more violent than Batman. But the Batman myth and the public popularity of the film make it a magnet for crazies.
“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”
—————–
I agree 100%, and will further assert that self-censorship is the only path to take. Another Hayes Code won’t do it. Character can be taught, but not legislated, and character (coming from within) is the solution.
The problem is, the films’ creators and the public like this stuff too much. They slobber for it.
They were titillated by The Wild Bunch.
Now it owns their very souls.
I’m afraid that we’re all bouncing this off our pre-conceptions. This occurred on Opening Night, not a week into the movie’s run. How likely is it that the movie inspired the violence?
It’s all very much an opportunity for us to jump on our soapboxes.
I think it was the “The Dark Knight,” the last movie, that inspired him; he called himself the Joker and died his hair red. This next movie made an obvious target for his particular madness. He achieved his goal; 90% of the world knows his name. I myself will never mention it, not that it will do any good, but it’s the least I can do.
“How likely is it that the movie inspired the violence?”
1. My comment didn’t depend upon that, has no bearing upon it, and I don’t care. I was speaking to a deeper, more fundamental, level than just one film.
(This movie probably had little or nothing to do with it. This massacre took planning on Holmes’ part, and the film might have still been in the editing stage when he began preparing. Even if the hair-dye story is true, it’s possible it was merely an ego side-trip.)
2. My comment can be broadened beyond violence to include relativities of all sorts. Glance at Frank Natoli’s Comment #40. “Do X, expect Y” as he puts it is deader than a doornail in today’s entertainment industry. Matter of fact, the industry does not like it one bit. It cramps their style.
Why not wait until more is known sbout this guy before weighing in on what’s behind this heinous crime?
Exactly, Bobbie.
To those posters saying that film makers put in violence for box office…I used to work for the company that tests for the studios and I can tell you the NUMBER ONE negative for audiences is too much violence. The studio wants to take out the violence. Not put it in.
And I disagree with Roger completely. It’s impossible to know what a diseased person could be inspired by. It seems much more likely the US needs to make it easier to commit mentally ill people. That’s the issue. In the past, people were surrounded by family and friends to mitigate mental health issues. Movie censorship or self-censorship will do nothing.
The hell we do (Need to make it easier to commit people)! History is replete with societies that loves using that excuse as repression. A very ugly precedent that shouldn’t even be considered.
We have three choices and only three:
1) Confine dangerous insane people so that they cannot harm innocent people.
2) Accept these sorts of massacres as stuff that is inevitable.
3) Impose rules on everybody in society that treats them like irresponsible and potentially dangerous mental patients.
More gun control laws and calls of the sort Roger Simon has made to self censor media because of the effect it has on crazy people are aspects of choice #3. Ever since the 1970s when Thomas Szasz succeeded in securing the right of psychotics to not be involuntarily confined, we don’t lock up mentally ill people until after they have hurt or killed somebody and then we lock them up in prison rather than mental hospitals.
Want to take the violence OUT?!? If you were associated with Hallmark Hall of Fame, or similar, then you’re right.
But on the other side, why did Braveheart, for example, have two (2) battle scenes?
…
It was obvious. They were showing off their special effects.
/And before you reply, consider that I know full well what Edward’s campaigns were like, how their weapons and tactics worked back then, and how Wallace died.
Your comment made me think of “The Passion Of The Christ”. As a Christian, it really struck a chord as to the incredible violence the Romans were capable of and endorsed. The crowd looking on while Christ was flogged was perhaps the most insulting toward human behavior as can be portrayed. They, the Jews, endorsed it because they were angry for Jesus being heralded as the Savior.
However, “The Passion” aside, it was a very realistic depiction of Roman brutality, common for the period and it enticed me to study Rome further. Interestingly, a society that brought about a more civilized breed of human while also happily exploring the worst that humans can be. A dichotomy that is hard to understand. But, when one steps outside of the United States and goes to, say, Zimbabwe or Nigeria or North Korea and sees the things that “the enemies” do to one another, one is transported back in time. We Americans find it appalling but national socialists do not. I have always wondered why that is.
The brain understands when it’s under the influence of story. If it didn’t we’d have psychotic episodes every time we watch cartoons. This op ed piece mistakes correlation for causality. We don’t commit crimes because we see them in the movies.
As for gratuitous violence in storytelling, there’s worse in Titus Andronicus than in anything Quentin Tarantino has produced. Let’s keep our heads (literally and figuratively) here.
The movies Hollywood makes is what drove me from the theaters, so if some nut wants to shoot me they will have to find me somewhere else.
When the incomprehensible — the horrific — happens — We feel so out of control … I think our first instinct is to try to place blame and thereby have the feeling that it could have been, or could be, prevented — meaning controlled.
Is there “blame” for this sort of tragedy?
Do you think that this terrible tragedy could have been prevented? By having no gratuitous violence in films? Can we fix everything?
I don’t know … I think that before you came to a conclusion like that — of cause and effect — and placing blame — you’d have to do a lot of digging around for information about it. Wasn’t there a big discussion of this topic in the mid-90′s and prior to that?
Do we self-censor to the lowest denominator? The rarest possibility?
I don’t know the answer to this question … but it’s a question.
Did mass killings like this not happen ever prior to violence portrayed in film?
If there’s a criminally insane mind — wanting to hurt and kill people — does it really need movies as inspiration? If it needs inspiration at all, couldn’t it get that from books or comics? Would it be helpful to banish all depictions of violence? It’s possible, I guess. I’d like it, because I don’t like explicit or gratuitous violence, in films, books or otherwise. But it’s not really about what one likes or not.
And the guns … if the insane couldn’t get their hands on guns (which they would always be able to get, even though a little more difficult) because the criminals will always have them) — they’d just make bombs, which would be worse.
It’s too bad no one was armed at the movie theatre. The killer might have been stopped.
It’s a little like man-made global warming. In one way, I can understand why some people believe in it so fiercely. The terrible devastation of those storms this summer. If we actually were the cause of climate change, we could do something about it, and then we’d have some control over something that is fearful. But … we don’t. That’s hard to accept. But …
Sometimes terrible things just happen.
I’m not for curtailing violence in films. Perhaps it would be a good idea to stop making characters like “The Joker” the protagonists in films. Another good idea would be to marginalize people like Frank Miller and Alan Moore who create these putrid, postmodern “Morality Tales” who make heroes out of people like the fictional Joker and the real-life shooters like the theater guy.
P.S. I know that “Batman” was ostensibly the protagonist of the 1989 and 2008 films.
Hi Roger,
I couldn’t agree more; I sense that many commentators here have missed the point of Roger’s argument. It’s about self-censorship in the name of cinematic art. It’s about making good films of lasting quality, and not schlock. Why the need for gratuitous violence in films? Examine the films of the last twenty years and you will note a trend. It’s disturbing and says much that America as a nation is uneasy and bothered by sexual nudity but not by grotesque and perverse violence.
Art, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Who are we to judge what art is for others? Are the works of Jackson Pollack art?
Should he have self-censored end emulated Vermeer?
No one is arguing about what is art – what needs to be done is to recognize that garbage is garbage and to not allow it to be intensively hammered in to peoples brains until some of them go insane.
So the needs of the crazies set the artistic agenda?
Not the millions of sane folks, but the crazies.
I glad that’s clear now.
Last I checked, garbage consumption was not mandatory; everyone in the theater was there voluntarily, not because they were “induced” to be there.
Free will (and individual moral responsibility) FTW.
How could the movie have turned him violent? It was the first showing, and he had to take days to prepare as well as wire his place with bombs. How can you blame the movie when it wasn’t seen?
There are standards in both art and beauty.
Indeed. I’d hang a vermeer in my house and use a jackson pollack as a tarp.
But they are both worth many tens of millions of dollars. Someone things Jackson Pollack is good art though I am baffled as to why.
Likewise, hollywood makes a ton of money on movies. Many, many people think they are worth watching. I like to think well of my fellow man. To say that can’t watch something, or hollywood shouldn’t provide something, that they clearly enjoy because of some nut-case is elitist and condescending.
Unless someone can show a broad causal link between movie violence and real world violence it is nothing more than elitism. Every study done, and there have been many, have failed to find such a link. It’s a call for action based on emotion. That has never sat well with me.
Cheers to Barbara (#20) and James Felix (#21) — precisely on point, both of them.
At a time of such tragedy, we need to call on pajamas media to curtail the pop up advertising.
Hmm, lets take that sentiment and re-word it a bit.
From Smith and Wesson to Colt to Glock, many of our best-known gunmakers have trafficked in extremly deadly, sometimes even with gratuitous magazines of huge capacity, weapons. It has long been their contention, and those of others, that violence in is not caused by guns.
As the mass murder in Colorado has shown, they were wrong. Yes, normal people are able to separate illusion from reality, but for the criminally insane like James Holmes, it is quite clear that easy access to guns can act as an inspiration for unspeakable acts.
Now doesn’t that make more sense? No it doesn’t.
For the record millions of gun owners did nothing wrong today and neither did
Glock, S & W, Remington and all the others.
I expect better than this hackery from PJM. Linking the violence in film to the location of the shooting is every bit as bad as linking the shooting to the tea party. You have no evidence at all that the shooting was linked to the film in any way. Perhaps it was a convnient location that stacked everything in the shooters favor? Including I note being a “gun-free zone”.
All the studies done show no link between violence in films andviolence in the real world. Your call mirrors the call of gun control advocates when no statistically relevant correlation can be made between stricter gun control and reduced crime.
To call for self censorship is equivilent to asking Glock to not sell to the public, or to make thier products more expensive, based on a hunch. At least “It’s for the children” was left out.
If whack jobs are going to be front and center in setting our agendas then we need to just give up and become serfs now. Whack-jobs will always be inspired to do things by stuff that the rest of us find mundane.
And I say that even as I find most of what hollywood makes today lamentable in its content.
Take a look at how violence was portrayed in movies and tv in the 50s and early 60s. It was deliberately fake and downplayed. Crimes committed for the fun of it were rare and shocking. If you read the book “In Cold Blood” or any of the information about Charlie Starkweather, you will definitely see how rare that type of crime was. Now we have companies that go out of their way to make violence very realistic and graphic. Folks involved in horrific crimes will say “it looked like a movie”. Now, you may say that this is a free speech issue, but let me ask you this: should we consider murder, rape and death entertainment? Because that is exactly what we are entertained by every night on our television and at the movies. I really question a society where we can watch someone being suffocated on tv and yet still be told that it’s just entertainment. I have seen too many shows where the realism is chilling. Normal people may be able to watch it and be unaffected, but there are too many people that live where the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred.
The best thing anyone can do is try to stop watching it for a bit – and then try to watch it, again. It is horrifying. It actually makes you skin creep after you’ve turned off the filth for a while and then go back to it. The effects of this garbage is progressive – the more you watch it the more desensitized you are and the worse it has to be to have an effect…and so it gets worse and worse because the sole purpose of it is to keep your eyes glued to it so that all the commercial advertising will also have its effect…to make certain, as it were, that you have a coke and a smile before you massacre people. I made an effort starting last year – when by the grace of God it really dawned on me what this filth was doing to me – and the result was remarkable. I really can’t watch most of television these days – and I shy away from seeing even those few movies I would like to see because I’m simply afraid that they’ll slip some filth in there and thus try to re-break down my resistance to it.
“Doing to you” — by your own consent, which you eventually withdrew. How did you do that? Why, you made a *choice*, didn’t you?
That’s great. I too have made the same choice; I hardly watch anything out of Hollywood these days. Fortunately, it was my choice to make.
It damn well better stay that way.
But that is to ignore your responsibility to others, especially to those who are ill-equipped to make the best choice (ie, children). Think of it like this – you are to do things which will make it highly unlikely that the next time you decide to watch a film in a theater that someone who didn’t make choices as well as you will show up and kill you and others.
“Responsibility to others”, a conveniently plastic phrase adaptable to so many purposes – some totalitarian, some not. Care to define that? what is its root? What are its limits?
The shooter was not a child, and the existence of children is not grounds to curtail adults’ right to be adults.
As for that horrificaly constructed last sentence: I am “to do things”? By whose command? You keep asserting causality between someone who “sets off” a crazy person, and his victims, as if the crazy person himself were just like the weather or something, just there, with no causal role… and yet somehow that’s a “fact” which supersedes individual moral sovereignty (as if there were any fact which could do that).
seerak,
A truly crazy person is drooling on himself as he thinks he’s the King of Spain or a turnip or some such. An fully insane person – someone who has no actual control over his actions – is usually not a threat because he cannot, due to his condition, plan and carry out an act. This murderer – like all before him – did have such control and consciously choose to act in a manner which would murder not just innocent people, but innocent people for no actual reason. It was a moral failure, at bottom: the murderer has been so de-moral-ized that in all his calculations it never entered in to his mind that he did not have the right to take the lives of others. To call this person crazy is to abdicate our moral responsibility – something got this person in to a position to do what he did AND THAT SOMETHING DID NOT EXIST 50 YEARS AGO. We know this because 50 years ago – when guns were also easily obtainable – this sort of thing didn’t happen.
My contention is that we must look at the event and ask where it came from – and the most remarkable thing about it is the fact that it only came about after decades of increasing glorification of violence in our popular culture. You can assert till your blue in the face that these two facts are not connected but if you do then I accuse you of a amazing lack of sense – I mean, come on! Its plain as a pikestaff. I’m not saying that “violent act number 10,567 viewed by Subject A caused him to kill”…but I am saying that all of those 10,567 acts of violence each played its aliquot role in changing this person – built like all of us with a sense of morality – in to a person who would lake that moral scruple which prohibits us from taking the lives of innocent people.
If Bruce Campbell thought this way, we’d all be chin-deep in Deadites.
Dear Roger,
I don’t know if Mr. Holmes is mentally ill or not – we will find out. However, the way we treat the mentally ill in our society is the 800 pound gorilla in the room that never seems to be discussed when Columbine-like events occur. It is far easier to point an accusing finger at depictions of violence in the media, widespread gun ownership, the Tea Party, or Sarah Palin, though, ultimately, far less rational or potentially effective.
The mentally ill are no longer hidden away in asylums; they live amongst us. The emptying of public mental hospitals in the 1970s occurred for some very good reasons: an improvement in drug treatments that reduced the need for institutionalization, concerns about the civil liberties of those being committed, and a desire to reduce costs borne by the public sector. Although liberals here in California often wag a finger at Governor Reagan for “emptying the mental hospitals,” you never hear them arguing that we should fill them back up again.
There is a cost to mainstreaming the crazies – conservative blogger Clayton Cramer recently published a very personal account of just this issue in a book that I am looking forward to reading. Crazy people do crazy things, particularly when they are off their medications – and many don’t like taking their meds. As long as we, as a society, choose not to focus resources on identifying and committing those with potentially dangerous mental illness, events like this will continue.
Strange as it may sound to you at this moment, I think the costs associated with systematically institutionalizing the mentally ill far outweigh the cost of occasional horrific events like the one that happened last night in Colorado. Other measures, I believe, are ineffective, at best, and culturally destructive, at worst. Ultimately, and in the face of media-generated hysteria, we must inure ourselves to horrific, but rare events like these.
Yours truly,
ThOR
“I think the costs associated with systematically institutionalizing the mentally ill far outweigh the cost of occasional horrific events”
How? As opponents of the death penalty like to say, you can’t free a dead person. You can free one that’s been institutionalized. These casualties cannot be freed. The nutjob that hacked off the head of a passenger on a bus in Canada, and who then ate body parts, is being freed. The passenger? Not so much. You can’t free the child of someone who should be in an institution either.They are stuck there, and with the boy/girlfriend/drug dealer/pimp that their ‘parent’ associates with. You think that institutions are bad? Check out any Child “Protective” Services agency.
Dear Blue Hen,
I am aware of the problems with CPS. I have heard horrifying stories about their failures to protect children, as well as equally horrifying stories about families torn apart for no good reason. I see why you are connecting this tragedy with CPS too. Too many of the perpetrators of horrific crimes like the one in Aurora are adolescents and young adults. How did these young men fall through the cracks of our social service system?
Thanks for replying to my comment.
Yours truly,
ThOR
Instead of curtailing violence in movies, why don’t we curtail crazy people?
Correlation != causation, and I’m surprised at the glibness that substitutes for rational thought.
Perhaps they are right; perhaps it really is movies, video games, television, comic books, little big books, dime store novels, and even Socrates that is corrupting our youth.
Nah, I don’t think so.
The glibness that substitutes for rational thought is best exemplified by the assertion that some how, some way, these people live in a vacuum and come to the point of massacring people without any outside input. Something sets these people off – it isn’t just stand-alone insanity. A truly insane person couldn’t do it as a truly insane person, mentally living outside the rational world, would not be able to successfully obtain weapons, learn how to use them and then get himself without incidence to the place of the massacre. A human brain capable of the very complex tasks of preparing for such an event went ahead and did it – clearly, then, a human brain which was removed from such considerations as the rights of others to live. Other considerations had supervened – and must have supervened while leaving intact a rational brain which would act.
How do you know it’s something external that sets them off?
That is a very sweeping conclusion you draw. I’d like to see the basis for you drawing that conclusion and how generally applicable it is to all the varied mental conditions that exist. These studies would also show what types of general triggers exist and that would help me to frame the context of your argument.
Or is it just your opinion?
Except for the truly insane it is always, at the end, a personal choice. Each individual is responsible for his actions but there is a reason for “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6). It is an understanding that while the sinner stands condemned in his sin, those who led him astray actually did the more evil deed. And what of those who stand aside and allow a tempter to lead others astray? Is there not any responsibility in that? Or is it a matter of “I’m ok; tough luck, sucker” to everyone else?
We are allowing people – just so they may make money – to lead plenty of people astray. To be sure, those who are lead astray, in the end, volunteer for it but why should we just blithely allow it to happen?
“Each individual is responsible for his actions but”
There are no “buts” about it. We are ultimately responsible for our own choices (including the determination of truth, falsehood, who to trust and who not), or we aren’t. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a paternalistic religious belief system that sees everyone as “children” underlying your desire to have free will and eat it too.
seerak,
Well, that is the merciless way to view the world. An atomized, entirely individualist worldview. But no man is an island – as we cannot effectively live and fully develope our talents in isolation, so we cannot excuse ourselves from our responsibilities to our brothers and sisters.
‘Le’olom odom mu-ad’
From Talmudic law – ‘Man is always responsible’
(Note ‘man’ in the singular – the individual, not the collective).
The example in the talmudic discussion is of a sleeping person who kicks a vessel that is at the foot of their bed and breaks it. They must repay the owner of the vessel for the loss, even though they were asleep at the time.
The glibness is yours. Free will is a fundamental fact of normal human beings, as are the facts of political liberty which follow.. Responsibility falls to the one choosing.
Even if you argue that the crazies are sufficiently “broken” such that they don’t really have the free will we have (glibly ignoring the wide variety of actual conditions and illnesses of the mind exist),, arguing that the choices of normal people should be curtailed — by standards you would like to supply, I’m sure — is a complete non sequitur, and immoral to boot.
Well hell, the Fort Hood shooter was a psychologist going on jihad. The Batman movie shooter was the “joker” and former PHD candidate in neuroscience at the University of Colorado. What is it with budding “scientists” and their propensity for violent role playing? I mean, these shooters certainly are not the unwashed poverty stricken and culturally deprived.
This attack wasn’t out of Batman, it was out of the end of Inglorious Basterds.
It’s not the violence. It’s minimally the moral ambiguity, and often the getting away with it. That’s the lesson of film today.
In living memory, otherwise known as when-I-was-a-kid, if you were responsible for murdering someone, the film would not end without your death. Whether Fred MacMurray in “Double Indemnity” coughed his life out in the San Quentin gas chamber, as the film originally intended, or taking a fatal bullet, as the released version portrayed, wasn’t as important as the fact the he paid the price. Everyone, young and old, left the theater having been reinforced with “do X, expect Y” to happen to you.
We have lost touch with causality, because cause-and-effect is anathema to the Left, which could pass a polygraph in the belief that everything in life is a random choice, and all that matters is who does the choosing.
My father, a WW2 combat infantryman, told me a story about two guys in France who got a “little carried away” with two U.S. Army nurses. They forcibly raped the two nurses. The Army promptly tracked them down, courtmartialed, convicted and hanged both of them. My father was one of the many who was brought to witness the consequences. It certainly taught him a cause-and-effect lesson. Do X, expect Y.
Roger wrings his hands over the violence. Frank wrings his hands over the endorsement of the violence, the admiration of the violence, the thrill of the violence, the getting away with it.
Right and wrong. Absolute right and wrong. That’s what’s absent. Care to bring it back?
So long as “absolute right and wrong” are understood by means of reason, rather than some arbitrary invented nonsense, I’m all for it.
If by “reason” you mean man’s tendency to never acknowledge any law, and “nonsense” you mean for example Judeo-Christian scripture, I think you are mistaken, because the latter has a much stronger basis of law, regardless of its purported Author, than the former.
“Reason” is arguably applied in the Reuters prohibition on the use of the word “terrorist”, their “reasoning” being that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”.
It is absolutely essential that a rule of law prevail in order for freedom and safety be reliable. In our present era where the judiciary no longer honors its oath to the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, insisting instead on a “reasoned” fealty to a “living” Constitution, we have become lawless, and both freedom and safety have taken a terrific beating in the process.
It is not sufficient for someone to “reason” what is right and wrong. What is necessary is that the right and wrong be clear, unambiguous, and effectively enforced.
YES!
Roger, “their point” is to outdo themselves every time. To be bigger, bloodier, louder, and more uncut. So, no, they can’t make their point without the endless splatter and gore; that IS the point.
Before we start throwing away our rights of free speech and legal access to firearms, can we perhaps actually look to the causes of this tragedy?
I can’t be the only one who noticed that another nihilistic, anti-American, terrorist act has been committed by someone who threw their life away in America’s screwed up higher education system. Considering he was a PhD student, I can’t imagine the daily, self destructive, pro Obama insanity that was pumped into his head.
I am simply amazed that this didn’t occur sooner.
One simple question: If films don’t teach, why do we make educational videos?
IMO, the power of truly great imaginative works resides in their ability to engage the reader’s/viewer’s own imagination through deftly wielded suggestion rather than in an overabundance of raw detail that leaves nothing but bludgeoned and ultimately blunted senses in its wake.
The idea was brilliantly expressed recently by lan Furst, during an interview about his latest novel, “Mission to Paris.” He was asked, “ A scene in your new book describes the Kristallnacht terror of 1938, but only in glimpses. Why?”
His response was: “I want the reader to experience it like most people experienced it at the time. Most people didn’t actually see it happening, but they could hear it, they could smell it; they knew something terrible was going on. Also, I’ve become averse to graphic depictions of violence. It was a much more brutal period than people really understand. Unimaginably bad things, unspeakable things happened. I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don’t want to be the person to stick that in your brain. (Confessions of a Master Spy Novelist, WSJ, 5-31-12)
Films do not reach. They communicate. Educational films are intended to teach via communication, and the audience is responsible for knowing the difference.
Individual moral responsibility has many enemies in this thread, sadly.
“Individual moral responsibility has many enemies in this thread, sadly.”
Not sure how you got to the above from what I wrote, but you can count me out of that sloppy and completely unsupported generalization and go grind your axe someplace else.
I’ve been exhorting fellow indie writers to be subtler and more tasteful about sex for some years now. The same advice applies to cinematic depictions of both sex and violence. It tends to be more effective literarily; I’d be very surprised if it weren’t more effective cinematically as well.
Agree. Case in point: the beautiful German film, Mostly Martha, contains an incredibly sensuous scene that uses nothing prurient but delivers like dynamite.
Well, in the past, writers had a tendency to be clever and appeal to the subliminal. But, noting that our American society is less populated with thinking adults than it used to be (Thank You, DOE), movie-makers have learned that the box-office draw is larger when they appeal to the “meat and potatoes” kind of flick. They spell everything out, leave nothing to imagination…because if they do that, 40% or more of their money-spending audience is gone. Though I’m a huge despiser of Cannes, they do tend to screen movies more in the realm of working the intellect. I despise it because it’s a gravity well for the social elite who probably don’t grasp much of what is shown, but go there for camera “face-time” (exposure).
Generally, the movies I have liked from the past include such greats as “Mr Roberts”, “Harvey” (or most any Jimmy Stewart flick), and other movies that provoke more thought, often AFTER the movie is over. Hollywood still makes them now and again but the real money-makers have action and movement and lots of escapism. The plot is less of a mystery than it is graphically pleasing and impressive.
In that vein, it’s why I have movies in my collection like “Das Boot” which has action as well as perspective on the characters involved. It helps a lot that it’s historically accurate.
On the other side, I also own a copy of “Airplane” for its hilarity and absurdity as well as the tag-lines.
Most movies these days tend to be re-hashes of old themes with the soul ripped out. Even the gratuitous sex is a substitute for what writers used to craft into a legitimate budding romance or heart-wrenching breakup. The pleasure-center of the brain is affected very differently while watching a “Terminator” flick than it is a “When Harry Met Sally” chick-flick which is why males tend to gravitate to the action pictures. (Yes…men and women are wired differently) But, some movies geared towards men, like Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” have a subtle quality that reaches men, even.
It’s not that Hollywood CAN’T do it…it’s that more and more they choose NOT to. Style over substance yet again.
A simple suggestion: Congressional Republicans should propose a five hundred million dollar grant, to be administered through the National Endowment for the Arts, to underwrite the production of a film in which young and attractive people serially murder major film studio executives in amusing ways – and not only get away with it but get rich.
I suspect Hollywood’s reaction to the proposal will tell us all we need to know about how sincerely they believe ‘violent films don’t promote violence’.
No,
they would go for it. The studio in the film would be involved in denying global-warming and would be using the films to promote a conservative agenda. They would also be trying to change the narrative of a presidential election by using their vast coporate power and ownership of a studio of supress opposing views.
The killers would be earth-loving gaia worshippers bent on ending the evil corporate excesses. They would use their new found wealth to open a collective farm dedicated to healing the hurts done to the world by said evil studio.
Sorry, Roger, but I’ve got to call Bullshit! on your line of argument, AKA emotional reaction. It’s uncomfortable to admit you have no control over nuts like this mass murderer. None. Not direct, not indirect.
All we can do is shift the odds in favor of the law-abiding adults. Outlaw gun-free zones, encourage open and concealed carry of firearms, and let the people cut short the rampages long before the cops could possibly arrive.
I ‘m curious to know, Roger, what you imagine that this act of pre-emptive surrender would pre-empt.
No, it’s time to end the 40 year experiment in de-institutionalization of schizophrenics and the idea that it’s just a mood disorder. It isn’t.
It’s not working people.
It appears that the shooter, a young man who abruptly quite a neuroscience program, was more likely to have been inspired by the Dark Knight graphic novel by Frank Miller than a movie.
Which act was it that insisted that comics couldn’t be so violent back in the 1950′s? How’d that work out?
I’ve got a better idea – promote concealed-carry, open-carry and less restrictive gun laws.
All due respect, but you’re way off on this one.
According to a report in the Daily Rash, after speaking to supporters about the tragedy in Colorado, President Obama made a surprise appearance on the Jerry Spring Show. http://www.thedailyrash.com/obama-appears-on-jerry-springer
Y’know, it’s funny. I’ve felt this way for about thirty years.
A bunch of years ago in San Francisco I drove into one of the Embarcadero Center garages enroute to a client’s office. I parked a couple spaces down from an ’80-something Cadillac with a flat tire. The owner of that car, it turns out, was a gentleman named Gianni Ferri, who just a bit later would be a couple blocks away in 101 California shooting up a bunch of lawyers he blamed for the failure of his business.
As I walked back from my meeting a little bit later, past all the police and the gawkers and the media, back to the garage and the Cadillac surrounded in yellow tape, the one image that sticks in my mind above all others was the ad for the then-current Clint Eastwood flick ‘In The Line Of Fire’, featuring Clint sighting down the barrel of (what else) a big handgun.
Mind you, I’m not anti-gun. Once upon a time familiarity and training in the use of firearms – through hunting, or at the insistence of Uncle Sam, if nothing else – was widespread at least in the male half of the population, and I consider that a good thing. My daughter will be shooting the old .22 as soon as I think she’s old enough to handle it safely.
What I am uncomfortable with is gun worship, the cult-of-the-gun. It bothers me a bit that the average supermarket magazine rack will have more gun magazines than car magazines these days.
Why don’t you teach your daughter to do custom bodywork? She could learn a valuable skill, and use a body file to protect herself.
Who are the ones truly Remembered by History, down through ages? The ones that truly come to mind and ring louder than anything else?
it’s not nice people, that’s for sure.
The toerag that did this wants to be remembered by society.
he got his wish
I don’t believe for one moment that Roger wouldn’t like to be one of the Dark Knight filmmakers or studio execs. When you can entertain thirty million people and make eight figures in the bargain, one lone nut isn’t going to keep you awake at night. As well he shouldn’t.
This guy could just as easily snapped because he brought home two or three broken eggs in his egg carton, and shot up a supermarket instead. In which case, I’m sure all the schoolmarms like Roger would be cringing and worrying about “double coupon Thursdays” or hormone-free milk, either of which makes as much sense as blaming movies and video games.
I think you are way wrong. Re-configuring society and freedom on the off chance something, somewhere if not published or seen will prevent any violent act is ludicrous. In the 1960′s Charles Whitman shot many people in Texas, and massacres by groups is nothing new,and predates film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_events_named_massacres
The younger ones, including my children in their 30′s have been hardened into thinking violence on the screen is nothing. They are wrong. I tried to stop them from viewing violence when they were young but as they grew older they turned toward watching the violence and garbage their friends were free to watch out of our house. I wouldn’t even let them watch some of the violent cartoons on TV as they depicted torture and brutality. They would say” It’s nothing”. When I taught grade school the children that had great difficulty reading would come in the morning after watching a show depicting violence and act it out on the play ground or in the class if I didn’t stop them. Kids do learn from watching violence and begin to think “It is nothing”. That goes for sex also, what they see on TV or film is pushing them into things they are not really ready to deal with. I think those in the comment section that seem to imply “It is nothing” are from the younger generation that have been hardened and not of the older generation that saw how things could be implied but not shown and that goodness was a virtue.
Sadomasochism has been sold as entertainment well before Rome was grand and the Coliseum had been built. Now we just make it readily available to the average citizen as a right to be so entertained, but remember we’re more ‘civilized’ than the ancient or third world.
PS The Huns didn’t sack Rome, Attila turn back before getting there. It was the Vandals who picked up that honor and forever had their name associated with gratuitous destruction.
It should be noted that “The Dark Knight Rises” is rated PG-13, as violent as it may be (I haven’t seen it yet). Meanwhile, I recently saw “Your Sister’s Sister,” where the only violence done was to a bicycle, and it was rated R, primarily because the characters were rather fond of the F-word.
It seems to me that nobody has to be crazy to be influenced by the depiction of cruelty and violence.
Although an argument could probably be mounted to the contrary based on the presence of lead in their pipes, it seems quite unlikely the entire populace screaming for blood and laughing uproariously as other human beings were ripped apart by animals or one another in the Roman Coliseum on any given day would quality as certifiably nuts. But the usefulness of repeated exposure to provoking stimuli as a proven method of successfully dealing with phobias and other unwanted behaviors can hardly be denied. And I submit that what we are doing is systematically desensitizing/raising the tolerance levels of our populace to gruesome, depraved, and bestial conduct in those who are repeatedly exposed to these sorts of materials.
Desensitizing –
that’s a very good point to give thought to. It’s very true. It does seem that each year, more and more gore and violence in film becomes … ordinary. The edge keeps getting pushed further.
Was it the 1960′s when the death scene in Bonnie & Clyde was so shocking — and would be almost a yawn now.
I just read Jenny McCartney’s article on Batman at the Telegraph.uk wherein she described the gorey violence in the opening scene. Not being a fan of recent Batman films … Wow! I had no idea it went that far.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/2461820/Our-attitude-to-violence-is-beyond-a-joke-as-new-Batman-film-The-Dark-Knight-shows.html
I don’t believe in censorship — nor would I ask that filmmakers self-censor while the public is clammoring for this type of work — but I think that perhaps the paying public ought to learn to reject it — by having much more discussion about it.
I don’t believe mass murders are caused by the watching violent films — but the extent to which this gore is portrayed has to be harmful in an overall way — as you say — by desensitizing.
I guess we should just ignore that violent crime has been decreasing for decades. regardless of the violence in movies and video games, and call for action to try to stop maniacs from acting maniacally. Good luck with that.
How many people in favor of self-censorship of movies and games woud be in favor of self-restriction on the number of firearms produced for, you know, the safety of society?
When people are murdered, some want to blame the gun; apparently, some want to blame video. We’ve already trashed the 4th Amendment due to fear of madmen, let’s not trash the 2nd or the 1st as well.
Well, since this was opening night – the guy couldn’t have seen the film. At most he saw a PG trailer alluding to violence. This assertion for self-editing is similar to covering up head to toe so as not to incite the hatred of some who think women shouldn’t be allowed to drive.
Oh, God!
Eliminate graphic violence in movies and that will reduce savage behavior by a few psychos?
What? Are you applying for the position as press secretary for Obama?
No; What’s really necessary is a medication for all citizens to take at bedtime to eliminate dreaming. And another to take when waking, that makes their thoughts peaceful and serene.
This will be established by executive order in the next two months, if it isn’t already specified in ObamaCare.
Very well said!
All Mr. Simon is calling for is the exercise of more taste and discretion among his fellow writers/filmmakers. Is that really such a horrible idea? The reason there’s so much violence is that it’s cheap, easy and profitable. It sells, like various combinations of salt and sweet in foods (see: Snickers and the Mars fortune). So Mr. Simon is asking if we couldn’t do with a little less of this. The answer is: Yes we could indeed do with less of it, and yes, it has a tendency to push marginal types over the edge. Would they do these things anyway? They might, but then no writer/filmmaker would need to feel the guilt.
Personal note: A friend of mine is a novelist who wrote a scene in which terrorists waited for a school bus in ambush, then machine-gunned the kids as they got off. Shock value? Off the charts. I didn’t say to him: You should be banned from writing stuff like that. I said: How would you feel if this gets made into a movie and then some terrorists actually do it? I think these are the questions Mr. Simon is raising, and I say: amen and bravo.
A little clue Phantom;
Now you should understand why the Democrat Party and their attack dog media believe they have exclusive rights to total INDESCRETION.
Holmes was inspired (?!) by a movie he hadn’t seen yet. What inspired Loughner, with his “grammar” obsession? The inherent violence of diagramming sentences?
Can we calm down?
The culture may be a mess, but how many random acts of violence have you witnessed today? How many people having sex against lamp posts? Generally speaking, the worst you encounter is a failure to say “Please” and “thank you” and “excuse me.” It’s a kind of unpleasant friction, and a revival of basic manners would make all our days a little easier. But it wouldn’t keep dreadful things like this shooting from happening.
Yes, Dianna;
A little common courtesy goes a long way.
But, by “common courtesy”, I do not mean “politically correct”. “Politically correct” is being forced on America by priests of voodoo.
Since 911, there’ve been enough take downs of would be hijackers by other airplane passengers to discourage hijacking attempts. “gun free zones” are invitations to wackos to mow down innocents who are unable to return fire. Do away with gun free zones and save lives.
Roger I want to hurt you because your hat tells me too in the name of the great Polarian Oompa Loompas.
You must now curtail your hat.
^^^The logic of a madman.
“but for the criminally insane like James Holmes, it is quite clear that ultra-violent films can act as an inspiration for unspeakable acts.”
Helter Skelter inspired Manson. Does this make Helter Skelter to blame?
Blaming a movie for what a crazy does is like blaming the spoon for making one fat.
Mr Simon. Serve as an example and censor yourself.
Your thesis is that simulated violence begets real violence, a concept that’s not too hard to check. Look at World War 2 veterans. How many of them shot up movie theaters after they got home? Salons? Church services? Markets? Just looking through google and I’m not really finding any, especially comparable to this. And certainly none with the the perpetrator yelling claiming to be Adolf.
So if real, visceral violence – which can only be more impactful and personality altering – didn’t cause any significant events then perhaps it’s the simulated nature.
I’m not familiar with too many cases of people breaking out in sudden chauffeur syndrome after repeated watching of Driving Miss Daisy. Perhaps people suddenly break out into choreographed song numbers from watching too many Disney films, but again I’m not finding that either. I might be missing something but I can’t really find any instance of somethings simulated nature leading to massive aberrant behavior in someone not already at risk.
In fact the only real change I can see that’s impactful is a decline in faith and fear of God, something Hollywood is definitely linked to. Had this kid been afraid of his fate at the hands of a supreme being he’d have not done this – just as WW2 veterans didn’t go on shooting rampages even though they had far greater exposure to violence. This corrosive, destructive culture – as part of a greater front combining with academia, labor, and the like – has removed many of the societal protections needed for large groups of people to interact.
Quite simply this isn’t about movie violence, or access to guns, or anything of the sort. This is about yet another person in our civilization who had no fear (societal or divine) of the repercussions of such a heinous act. This is another sad tale of one evil loser and his whole network of family and friends who would not stop him as, they’ll likely claim, what he did wasn’t any of their business.
To portray this otherwise is disgusting.
So I’m sorry Roger, but this is one of the worst columns you’ve ever written – especially considering (based on the timing) this makes you appear, essentially, to be trying to cash in on this. This column is ultimately vulgar, risable, and beneath your normal rhetorical skills.
Essentially a sad postscript on a tragic day.
Wrong, see posting below. It’s not “violence” per se, although regular exposure to any violence will tend to deaden the person. It’s regular exposure to culturally acceptable violence, especially that presented as entertainment, where the viewer’s barriers to accepting violence as normal can be steadily eroded over time.
It’s the same sort of thing as letting your kids listen to music. If I bring my kids up listening to classical music, it doesn’t stop them from listening to rock and roll or modern music, but they’re a lot more discriminating about what they listen to. If a kids grows up listening to rap, he’s much more likely to speak vulgarly, think of all women as sluts, and believe that being a gangster is acceptable behavior.
This post is an understandable and emotional reaction to tragedy. It’s also dead wrong.
Violence in films and games is a damn sight better than the the violence that would be likely to happen if the films and games weren’t there to provide a degree of catharsis. Given that the evidence is that in tribal societies in the order of 1 male in 4 dies violently enough to leave impact marks in their bones – and that’s without firearms – one person going on a rampage every few years is nothing (it’s tragic for the victims and their friends and families. It’s nothing compared to what used to be just how life worked: imagine a world where at least one person in eight died violently).
#55. MayberryLady, I respectfully submit that you are utterly wrong. It’s not just the Roman Coliseum. Genocide didn’t enter popular culture as a concept until the 20th century because up until then it was the normal way of handling defeated enemies in most of the world. The Romans weren’t the most stomach-churningly imaginative, and the lead pipes probably didn’t do more than reduce their imagination. Those who seek out gruesome material do so for a reason. Those who aren’t interested avoid it. At least in our world they can avoid it: something that was very rare before the 20th century, and pretty much impossible up until some 200 years or so ago.
Like it or not, brutalizing our fellow humans and enjoying it has been the norm for most of humanity, most of the time. We’re the ones living in the anomaly, and because we’ve been so sheltered, it’s shocking whenever the “natural” state reasserts itself.
That said, the only person who should be blamed for the tragedy is the gunman. He did not have to make any of the choices that led him to that theater. Any one choice could have taken him along a path that did not include mass murder.
Trying to blame violence in media is ultimately no different than blaming “society” or any other collective object.
Good point, but I think that there’s a fine line between “catharsis” and “pornographic violence.” Where exactly that is probably needs to be explored, but I rather imagine that it has something to do with A) whether or not it’s necessary to the plot, and B) whether or not the violent bad-guy gets away with it.
Don’t forget that the “bread and circuses” phase of the Roman Empire is generally considered to be its decline.
It’s very interesting to read how many comments take “we film-makers should watch the amount of gratuitous violence that we put into our movies” and get “we need to stop all movies” or some such. I thought that only liberals lost their sense of proportion and judgement in this way.
Today is just so terrible and sad that proportion and judgement kind of checked out. It’s really hard to keep your head. Charitably, we ought to cut everyone some slack.
yes and no
it is a tragedy, but so is the violence you see everyday in your local news. Why aren’t there tears for them, but tears for anything that ABC puts up? it’s kinda unfair.
I think it’s the uniqueness of the crime (haven’t heard of mass murder in a movie theater before) and the reminder of our vulnerability that’s got people talking.
Putting more “art” into movies, music or paintings is good idea. The Arts should elevate not tilliate. But the violent movies, music, or video games are not the problem.
We live in a dead culture. Family died when we stopped judging anyone. Its just do it or do your thing, or its nobody’s business. When the restraints were killed, we died. Now people medicate with drugs, alcohol, cigs, food, violence, and sex. Not into family building or family support or family happiness. Its me, me, me. I want what I want and nobody can stop me. We laugh at rape jokes of Sarah Palin’s daughter. Its “B’s” and Ho’s in music.
God has been relegated to Sunday (or Saturday) mornings. Tebow is derrided and mocked as strange. People are too busy checking their IPhones to talk to each other. Its really, really strange world Master Jack. We have all the material pleasures that the world can offer, yet we’re dead inside. Lonely, isolated, and lost. And not very happy.
Indeed. Makes one wish we could somehow start the whole thing all over again. (One day we will get to do just that).
I have sorta had it with stylized violence. I watched Sucker Punch with my wife and when it was over I was ‘that was pointless’. Anything by Tarantino; ditto. Batman at least has the morality tale. Even a positive revenge point (kill innocent people and someone might in turn hunt you down)… But making it look cool and easy has worn me down. In movies like Saving Private Ryan an attempt to show what it really is like was made… but yeah, I’ll just be voting with my dollars.
Before we jump to conclusions and blame media for the problem (and ask for restraint on the part of media), maybe we should first check if such rampage killing is more commonplace today than it used to be before video games existed. And if such serial killing is more commonplace in developed countries with lots of videogame players than in other countries.
So far, the answer appears to be no, they’re not.
Not only do such rampage killings go back a long way, but they also happen in countries all over the world, with diverse cultures, diverse levels of technology, and diverse levels of wealth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers
IOW, there have always been people worldwide who go insanely violent–because mental illness isn’t unique to any one country or time period.
For example, what is one to make of Martin Bryant, who took a rifle and killed 35 people in Australia in 1996? Evidently he wasn’t influenced by media. Rather, it appears that he was off his rocker since he was a young child–and being constantly bullied by other children exacerbated this.
Stories like this one and the Columbine murders suggest that what’s needed here is not media restraint, but early intervention to treat someone’s mental illness before it becomes a BIG problem.
Roger Simon = So spectacularly wrong he might be right?
Naw.
Violence has been a part of the human condition since the beginning. Real violence is glorified everyday in our media. War is celebrated and our nations most popular sport destroys men’s bodies and minds. Shall we ban the NFL amnd never again show a bomber flyover?
The disturbed man who perpetuated these murders would have found his outlet and expression through something somewhere. Blaming violence in the arts for his and others crimes is beyond intellectually dishonest.
For those of you who seem intent on denying that external impetus has any effect in behavior, I would suggest we owe an apology to those Nazi war crinimals we executed after World War 2. I”m mean, to accept your argument, we would come to the conclusion that all those Nazi hate rallys, all the propaganda speeches, all the anti-jewish rhetoric really didn’t influence anyone at all, because external stimuli has absolutely no effect on human behavior, right?
“Nazi hate rallys, all the propaganda speeches, all the anti-jewish rhetoric really didn’t influence anyone at all, because external stimuli has absolutely no effect on human behavior, right?”
This assumes that they would not have done so without them. External stim has some effect but as human beings we have choices.
It also seems like you mixed yourself up.
“For those of you who seem intent on denying that external impetus has any effect in behavior”
I am intent on denying that it occurs easily…
“Nazi hate rallys, all the propaganda speeches, all the anti-jewish rhetoric really didn’t influence anyone at all, because external stimuli has absolutely no effect on human behavior”
So in my denial I should…blame the external stuff…that I deny?
There will be another Obama arena Tucson/Columbine Memorial II for the victims, Obama 2012 t-shirts hanging on the back of each chair, awaiting their occupant. Obama will relate, “I just came back from the hospital where I visited with Selma, a critically injured girl in a coma, when suddenly she opened her eyes for the first time. (roaring applause and Obama pausing to prolong the effect) Yes, she opened her eyes for the first time! And then she said, with great effort, ‘Don’t let them sell guns Mr. President.’ Well, I’m here to say to little Selma, SELMA, I WON”T FAIL YOU! SELMA, WE WON’T FAIL YOU! WE WON’T FAIL YOU!”
Crowd chants….”WE WON’T FAIL YOU! WE WON’T FAIL YOU! WE WON’T FAIL YOU! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!”
Obama lifts chin to the heavens and beams.
Mr. Simon’s article is the precursor of the slippery slope: moral tut-tutting, followed up by the cry for government intervention, citing the fact that the self-censorship didn’t go far enough [it never does].
There are some absolutes in the world. Giving in as Mr. Simon suggests cracks that door open, for the moralists and do-gooders to impose unreasonable standards on our life, society and art.
Instead: make and market films that don’t celebrate certain themes. See if they succeed. Hollywood does nothing beyond barf up old movies in new packaging any more; their litmus test is, ironically, the almighty dollar.
Personally, despite this tragedy, I can’t wait to see the movie.
Yep to the above. I look forward to the movie too but later on after most others have already seen it.
12 people are killed so there should be no more movies with much violence. If this “logic” is even somewhat valid then there should be no more cars that go over 10 mph as more than 100 people per day are killed in America alone in vehicle crashes.
I’m all for curtailing violence in movies, but not for the reasons Mr. Simon states. The state of the art in movies is very good technically, but getting ever worse in the telling of stories; not uniformly, of course, but in a general way, in fits and starts. Any artist with any experience knows that self-restraint is absolutely necessary if there’s no external restraint. There’s a reason why so many of the movies considered by most great were created while there were strict rules in Hollywood; the externally imposed restraint required creativity to circumvent. With no restraint, we end up with literal piles of garbage being hailed as great art (in sculpture, and figurative piles of garbage in other media. Poetry is an excellent example of how it works; by forcing meaning to rhyme to a fixed meter, the meaning can grow more powerful. It’s the same reason we tell stories, including Jesus Christ. He could’ve summed up the Beatitudes with a Bill & Ted level ‘Be excellent to each other’ instead of using parables and other literary forms.
I don’t think that violence shown in movies or played in video games causes real world violence. It might increase the likelihood very slightly, but then there are so few outlets for violence in our society. Up to 1900 violence was easy to find, anywhere in the world, and violent persons had lots of ways to use their skills; even cops beat people up all the time. Now there are restraints everywhere, so violent people are forced to become more creative and have the means for greater destruction. I think it’s as much a cause for terrorism as any of the other purported reasons; violent people would’ve found any cause to perpetrate violence, and when it dovetails with religion how can one lose?
The idea that massacres of this type are a new thing is ridiculous. There were tons of massacres in the 1800s. There was the Rosewood massacre in the 20th. The Communists and Nazis butchered millions, not only as part of their impersonal political machines but also in horrifically personal ways. Chinese Communists ATE their middle class victims in a frenzy of class hatred. There is no way to prevent evil from taking hold of a person, and no way to ENSURE that this never happens again. All we can do is prepare and do our best.
The Batman movies have been quite good at demonstrating the conflicts that sometimes make it hard to be the good guy, but Batman/Bruce Wayne in the Nolan universe is an actual good guy. Rather than simply curbing or decreasing violence, I think all creative types should spend more time making the good guys good; not just the protagonist who is the least bad of a bunch of bad guys, but actually good, even heroic in the Victorian and maybe even the Greek sense. I’ve been trying to do this in my own writing, which may be a reason I only have one book on Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/792oqpd) and have such an amazing collection of rejection letters. It’s not popular at all except in comic book movies, and often not then either. Captain America is the only one I remember in recent days; everybody else has an overdose of the spice of human frailty.
Let the pendulum swing back the other way. Fine, we’ve had approximately 600 billion anti-heroes in movies and print; that’s a hundred apiece for the whole world. How about a few dozen heroes? If the bad guys weren’t so frequently glamorized, and played with such obvious relish by so many actors, perhaps they might not be so glamorous to those trying desperately to make things fall apart.
I haven’t commented once today, because I wanted to hear the entire story while the predictable talking heads made accusation. We can argue the cause, the historical frequency, whether it could have been stopped ad nauseum and probably never come to a consensus.
But one thing I am absolutely sure of that is on the rise in America. Living in fear and this idiot utopian idea we can eliminate risk.
I believe the biggest lasting damage of 9/11 was our overreaction, legalized molestation in airports being the most obvious. And we limited our freedom and liberty in the process. And once again, I am watching society IMO overreact to the work of a crazed individual – theater security beefed up, no costumes, searching women’s purses, more talk of gun control. And I believe when we succumb to this, we are directly feeding into the motive of the crime.
You may be right, Roger. Like many of your readers here, I have gotten numb to the gratuitous violence in many movies. I understand some of the video games are worse. I have no doubt kids are more amoral today than when I grew up 40 years ago.
But I think what we are witnessing is not the cause of violence, but a symptom. Our hearts have collectively grown cold and our parenting skills leaving much to be desired.
There’s nothing to grow numb to. It’s not real. My dog sees dogs fighting on tv and he knows it isn’t real. This guy wanted to be famous and now he is. Anyone has this same capability.
There’s no question where this is heading, guns and ammo will have to be limited in some fashion. Otherwise, we will all be at the mercy of this week’s Columbine anti-hero. A guy buying 1000s of rounds of ammo has to raise flags somewhere.
That’s your dog – it’s not your child. If you’re naive enough to believe what you see doesn’t affect how you think, then I can’t help you. Human sexuality says otherwise.
Let me tell you what overreaction is. High nitrogen fertilizer sales.
Can’t even hardly find it anymore – and the sale is limited. It’s been limited to the consumer because one nut blew up a building with ammonium nitrate seventeen years ago. So now I can’t buy so much as one bag of 46-0-0 to green my line without going through Agriculture where I live.
Stupid…real stupid.
Any attack on our rights be it the 1st amendment to the 14th amendment. We ca’t pick and chose which rights we defend and practice for our own personal gain. As parents it is our ( here’s the key word ) ” responsibility to teach our children and grandchildren right from wrong. Having violence in a film doesn’t create or inspire insanity. It is a medical ccondition. Why are we seeing more of it? Well there are probably alot of things that are leading to this increase. Population growth for one. Government telling parents they are responsible for raising their children the Government and schools are. Taking moral teachings and strong religious beliefs out of every day life. is a big factor. As kids we watch the Three Stooges hit each other with everything you can think of but we knew it was all pretend and done for comic reasons. We knew this because our parents taught us right from wrong and reality from fiction. Let’s start getting back to what made us the eny of the world. Our right to teach our children that every right comes with responsibilities.
If you are being serious here then you should be ashamed of what you have written. How dare you? Millions of people, HUNDREDS of millions of people around the world watch “violent” movies, play violent video games, read violent comic books and novels and they are as a rule peaceful individuals. One solitary person commits a violent act and you blame a form of entertainment. That is even more ridiculous than blaming the creation of serial killers on the consumption of milk. There is no scientific basis whatsoever linking violence in the form of movies or games with actual commission of violent acts, none. Jumping to such a conclusion is an indication that you have lost it and are out of touch with reality. I see how the generation gap takes effect now, even among people like you who should know better.
We used to keep crazy people locked up in this country. Perhaps it is time to start to think about maybe one day getting around to asking why we let so many of them out to walk the streets among us.
Roger: I’m not calling for censorship, I’m calling for self-censorship, see?
Me: I’m not calling for anyone to bitchslap Roger, I’m calling for Roger to bitchslap himself. See?
The people currently running the show in Hollywood are no better than porn merchants. Superior production values make their wares even more toxic.
I see something going on in places here. The merest suggestion of censorship of any kind, from any direction, drives some straight up the wall.
Even Simon’s suggestion of self-censorship — voluntary self-control, if I might call it — bring out a knee-jerk clamor of reasons why not.
preBoomer,
Why knee-jerk? Perhaps cannibalism is the miracle cure for world hunger too, especially since suggesting such a thing would get such a clamorish backlash of knee-jerks, it can’t be other than THE CURE!!! YOU HEAR THAT, NOBEL PRIZE COMMITTEE?!!
I gotta go with Mulder on this one.
On the issue of whether Holmes is insane or not, I can recount 2 cases which happened, some years ago, here in California.
In one instance, the accused was a doctoral candidate, I think in higher mathematics. He beat his dissertation supervisor to death because the man didn’t think his scholarship was good enough for the doctorate he was seeking. He never really disputed whether he killed the guy; instead, throughout the investigation, the trial, and his incarceration, right up until the day he walked out of prison, he insisted that he was morally in the right, because the victim in question wouldn’t give him a Doctorate, like he deserved. He knew others thought him wrong for doing this, but believed that they were deluded, and believed he saw things more clearly.
The other case involved a guy who if I remember right kidnapped a teenaged girl. I think she was 13 or 14. He cut her arms off (below the elbow, if memory serves correctly) and when he was arrested he claimed (seriously) self-defense. He otherwise appeared to be reasonably coherent and intelligent (not on the level of the math genius above, but smart enough to handle a normal job and be a rational human being). He maintained that stance of self-defense, acknowledged that the the jury didn’t believe him but insisted that they were deluded, and walked out of prison again insisting he had just been defending himself, had no choice other than to cut the girl’s arms off in order to defend himself.
Now obviously, both of these men have something wrong with them mentally. However, neither is insane in the legal sense (both know what society’s definition of right and wrong is, and both knowingly violated it), but both obviously had a screw loose that led to these horrific crimes. We don’t know what drove Holmes to do this yet, but my guess, when we get to the bottom of it, is that this is going to turn out to be a relatively rational, intelligent individual, who just chose to shoot a lot of people, out of some sort of nihilism. Someone pointed out in a review of the movie that the Joker, in the previous one, exhibited a sort of “Because I can” nihilism that was satisfying in a villain…maybe Holmes was imitating him.
You can no more put the genie of media violence back in the bottle than you can uninvent the wheel. We just have to learn to deal with it better…it looks like gun free zones are an idea whose time has come, and gone…
Not for the first time, Mr. Simon shows us that his conversion from liberalism to libertarianism/conservatism was not as complete as advertised.
I wrote 3 novels this Spring and though they have lots of violence I purposefully censored myself because I don’t find blood and limbs flying interesting and they coarsen the work towards little purpose.
Lovecraft scared the crap out of me when I was a teenager and he had no gore and the scariest movie I ever saw, The Haunting (1963), shows nothing; no ghosts, no blood.
I don’t think it’s a big deal to ask artists to self-censor. Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Bros. were very funny to me and they needed no cursing or other vulgarities to do so. Even Animal House, made by the generation that broke all the rules isn’t that vulgar really.
It seems to me that America got along just fine in the 40s and 50s with films and people somehow got through life without seeing a living heart plucked from a body.
In the ’30s the Hayes office censored films because they were getting a little dicey and 20 years later Fredric Wertham went after E.C. Comics among others when they got a little frisky. I wasn’t a monkey when I was 14. I read about this stuff and laughed at the idea I’d go mad if exposed to graphic violence.
The only real thing an artist can do is set examples, become famous, cool and emulated. Then there’s that thing called a dollar. Violence can trump decorum and make it look staid and conformist. That’s what the cult of cools buys you. There’s no easy set of answers.
Some people will always prefer nudity to suggestion and in a free culture they’ll get it.
Right you are, Mr. Simon. Because — despite the “What’s the big deal?” mantra of the Left — it really does matter what you put in other people’s minds.
I think it makes sense for filmmakers to consider how graphic their violence really needs to be, the context in which they’re presenting it, whether they’re glorifying it, whether they’re making the perps seem cool in some way, etc.
I don’t think it should be mandated, but that’s a strawman that a lot of commenters have put up, I think. Self-reflection and restraint were what you suggested, not external policing. Villains ARE cool in the movies these days. Violence IS casual. But at the same time, that can’t be the only factor in causing a crime like this. The guy’s mental state, the inability of anyone in the crowd to take him out, the egging on he allegedly received from people on the internet (we’re all very “lolz” about things online, never considering that someone could be serious), his access to the kind of weaponry that would make this possible, all of those things are factors. All those things should be looked at.
Personally, I think there’s little that one can do on an individual level to prevent certain people from becoming like this. The best thing I can think of is to be armed everywhere you go, and confident and skillful enough that you have a chance of evening the odds if something like this happens. Can’t control whether someone else becomes psycho, in the end… all you can do is maximize your chances of being able to keep yourself and others alive.
So, why is advertizing a multibillion portion of the economy if ‘exposure’ to its messages has no effect on behaviors?
It’s not quite the same thing. Advertising is clearly giving you a 100% message in favor of their product. We have had crime and punishment movies for over 80 years, where a good guy faces off against a bad guy.
We’re just in a situation where 1 guy can kill a lot of people at once, which obviously begs the question; should there be limits on how much ammo a guy can buy in a short time frame. Should assault rifles be banned, etc. I generally don’t like to go there, because the liberals will always try for more controls later.
I hate Bill O’Reilly but tonight he finally said something that I can agree with. He said that this shooting was not caused by the movie and it was not caused by any kind of lax gun control. It was caused by an insane man! Period! He is nuts just like the Tucson shooter was. Hollywood sucks big time and I would never defend them but use common sense. Stop blaming the people who brought their kids to a midnight movie and stop with the left/right crap. This man is insane and needs to be locked away forever. He could have brought a stick of dynamite and done much more damage. Or he could have brought a full propane tank in and set it off with a small explosive. He could have brought in a plastic bag full of gasoline and thrown it on the crowd. Do we outlaw gasoline and propane? Do we blame the petroleum industry for it if he had done that? Video games are a part of our lives and we need to counter their message with one of civility and human concern not censorship. Everyone is over reacting to this and it is sad to see intelligent people act so lemming like.
How about we curtail lawyers that pervert justice, bleeding heart liberals that don’t want to ever see a mass murderer executed, and we bring back quick and speedy trials for monsters that kill people, and then execute them, so that it is clear that if you deliberately murder someone you forfeit your life.
And we can stop with executions as being wrong because of being cruel and unusual. While executing murders may be somewhat cruel, and I could care less, it is not unusual.
Over thirty years ago, I wrote a letter to CBS that an episode of Barnaby Jones, that I happened to catch on n’th repeat, was gratuitously sick and twisted.
But look, some people are gonna blame the gun, some people are gonna blame The Joker, but look, maybe every ten or fifty million people we just get a defective, of course it’s several orders of magnitude worse than that, but most of the delusionals are less effective than Holmes and get locked up in prison or bedlam for much lesser crimes.
Means, motive, and opportunity. A hot-wired brain is their motive, it’s really hard to make the case that it’s Batman.
Monkey see , Monkey do I remember seeing the kid’s leave the parking lot of the theater after the first movie Fast and Furious…I agree about the violence
connection.
Gangster Squad is a new Hollywood movie depicting gangsters hiding behind
a movie screen and firing into a darkened full theater.Coming soon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y3aXOQG3d4
I haven’t seen any evidence that this murderer was insane. Sane people choose to kill, too.
Are terrorists insane?
Sanity is about motivation for the act, not necessarily the act itself.
John,
Acts are often sane, insane, or neither sane nor insane. Last time I read the DSM-IVR sanity was more or less defined by function. The distinction between conditions were identified mostly by symptoms.
Terrorists come in many varieties… though Islamic terrorism is an organized activity which frequently involves sane, insane and often coerced trigger pullers under duress who are forced to participate. Not counting the ones induced by the promise of rewards for their families.
… Not the same at all as a graduate student at a Colorado university who was performing well and then become “troubled” …
Surely you realize you’re pissing in the wind; the very studio execs, producers & directors you say should be ashamed are, even now, shooting memoes out to get a script in the works dramatizing the shooting. The beat goes on…
If violent movies were the cause, there would be carnage in the streets every day. I think we just had a guy here who wanted to be famous so he picked this particular venue.
They think they will be Famous , everyone will know your First,middle,and last
name , your image will be splashed in every media..but they end up being infamous.
Mankind managed massacres long before there were guns or movies.
I agree that too many movies are violent: But the problem is that they glorify violence, and spread the idea that violence is the way to solve problems.
But in the case of the Aurora massacre, the Major Hansan massacre, the Colombine massacre, The Unibomber, and the shooting of Ronald Reagan was that the person doing the shooting suffered from delusions, usually paranoid schizophrenia and his anger/delusions were focused on an object that often is inspired by a movie or a movement.
Before one bans guns for self defense, maybe we should loosen the laws so that family members can get help for their loved ones. The way things stand now is that even the most delusional person, if you can manage to get him to an Emergency room, will be given a shot of Haldol and sent home.
Your premise doesn’t hold water, Roger. No studies have found that violent video games or movies have anything to do with motivating psychopaths. How about that attack in Luby’s 20 years ago? Was the Food Network at fault there?
This was a hobgoblin–apparently acting alone–who picked a public venue that PROHIBITED THE CARRY OF PERSONAL SIDEARMS. He picked the site because he knew his targets would be unarmed. If you are looking for culpability, start with the theater chain that abrogated the patrons 2d Amendment rights.
Whether Roger’s point is succinct enough or not, I’ve started to agree with the overall point. Let’s start with “art”. Too much weight is given to “art”. This film is not art. It’s a carefully calculated media event. One guy didn’t sit down to his canvas or his keyboard and create something. It was carefully calculated by committee. I’ve heard the chicken the egg argument that Hollywood only makes what the public demands, and I’m at my wits end with it. Hollywood has been pushing boundaries since the 60s and with every new iteration comes a greater level of desensitization.
Nobody sat around in Middle America going. I’d really like to see a film like Midnight Cowboy, or Rosemary’s Baby. No, they were “shockers” at the time. Now they are viewed as tame. If Hollywood doesn’t continue to shock, they might not be able to pack those seats week, after week, after week. The cultural rot is in full effect. When I went to High School in the 80s we didn’t have metal detectors, and a campus that looked like a prison yard because kids were bringing guns to school to settle their problems. I’m not blaming this movie, but I think something can be said for the general state of our media. Our current crop of entertainment feeds our hedonism quite nicely. We are all too willing to wallow in it, and we are so quick to denounce anyone who would suggest that maybe we shouldn’t.
Can anyone argue that we are not a nation in decline? The takers outnumber the producers, our birthrate is stagnant. Families are in shambles. Can we really completely excuse our hyper-sexualized, hyper-violent entertainment choices as having nothing to do with it? I wonder.
What you are describing is the generalized societal decadence that permeates our daily lives. It’s going to take much more than being more circumspect about what types of movies we make or want to watch.
But when it comes to nutcases going ballistic in the midst of a crowd, I am not sure that taking this particular angle is entirely accurate. There have always been nutcases & there will always be nutcases out there even under the best of circumstances.
Why is there such a haste to jump to conclusions about this case before time is given to find out more about this obviously crazed individual? Really something that this sort of effort was not given in the case of the Fort Hood shooting. I can’t imagine why. *rolls her eyes*
Yea; Ever since “Piss Christ” was displayed, urination on religious articles and symbols has increased dramatically. Where’s the outrage and legislation to stop this insanity?
I just don’t think all the gore is necessary in movies. Not at all. There were plenty of dramatic movies made in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s that were excellent films and did NOT show excessive amounts of blood, or any blood at all. One movie that comes to mind was “Gone with the Wind.” Had that movie been made today, you undoubtedly would have seem much more graphic images of wounded Confederate soldiers and a lot more blood. Yet that movie got the same point across without having to be that graphic at all. If anything, during that famous scene when the camera pans back and you see all the wounded Confederate soldiers lying in a train yard, you don’t see any graphic images but you understood the horror that is being shown there. To me, it takes a lot more talent to show implied suffering rather than being overtly graphic and showing something as silly as “Pulp Fiction” or any of the other action movies today.
I just think directors today are going for the easy shock value of gratuitous violence. It appeals to to some of the baser instincts out there, but it certainly is NOT necessary. Classic blockbusters like Gone with the Wind proved that.
And all That gratuitous nudity in “Sex, Lies, and Video Tape”.
Metus improbos compescit non clementia
we no longer recognize the truth of this wisdom or the history that proves it over and over again
stop looking for false truths to stop the insanity of society
the results will be the “poor little him” syndrome of false psychiatry and the effort to take away your right to defend yourself via “gun control” as the answer – coming soon to a presidential campaign near you.
seems like he prepared himself with armor for someone having a gun to shoot him in that theater but no one had one and no one to attack him – training and instinct to flight nowadays – no instinct left to fight?
perhaps a moral to the story or another cautionary tale much like the dark knight series itself .
If this were a “zombie” movie, I wonder how many people would have had their face chewed off before they realized it wasn’t part of the movie.
With the crass, irresponsible, and blatantly psychotic ranting by the attack dog media, being echoed by high ranking members of our government, who expects any change in the status quo?
Good comments…
There are undercurrents though which miss the points:
1. Yeah, violent film, video, and graphic images, just like Big Lies and violent rhetoric incites violence. Get over it. The correlation is extremely high. It’s not just filmmakers who use it – it’s the same thing when someone tells you that you want to regulate their bedroom because… e.g. you don’t want to send money to an organization in NY that sends third world, armed troops to East Africa to rape little girls. (If I could just figure out how to connect my blood pressure to the grid… energy crisis solved.)
2. Regulating it … even self censorship such as Roger suggests is not just anathema: This is why the Catholic Church has rules (e.g.)… not so much that one little sin is so bad… it’s that slippery slope leading to an end game where the good guys are forced into checkmate or cheating.
First – most filmmakers do hold their powder. (Pay attn – it’s obvious) But if the filmmakers start colluding to resist “violence” the next thing you know, there will be censorship. And it will be Batman that gets censored, not some Ollie Stoner flick attacking every decent thing that’s not pinned down. We’ll have no Spiderman, no Superman, not even Bond’s anti-corporate films, and definitely nothing as violent (and harmless) as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. But we will have pedophile priests air conditioning with Uzi’s abortion doctors who are somehow miraculously saving lives… until the Uber Mensch sends in the ACLU lawyer with all the great lines to tell the bitter clinging cops how to stop this force of evil… and that will be different HOW?
Oh wait wasn’t that a John Carpenter flick? … or Resident Evil … or Avatar (the not harmless one) …
Roger of course you wouldn’t call for any sensible gun control but for self censorship Since when has business self regulated itself when big money is involved. Look at the banks and libor and the conservatives saying the same crap you are saying – self regulation. It doesn’t work in the long run.
Try writing about reducing magazine cartridges so that shooters can’t fire off so many bullets without having to reload. Does that impair a hunter – no. The only person that doesn’t like that is a sick twisted gun nut. How about we eliminate the ability to modify rifles that turn them into automatic rifles. How about we eliminate semi-automatic rifles. What’s their point? We have a whole class of gun nuts who think they need their guns to prepare for government excess. Are they that crazy that you would follow.
You want voter ID let’s have gun ID’s so we can tie what was purchased to a crime. Same with bullets. I don’t want to take guns away I just want some accountability. What a hypocrite with your self censorship claptrap
How would gun control have prevented this crime?
Answer – it would not. Taking guns away from people who do not use those guns to commit crimes merely disarms the potential victims without any improvement in safety.
Gun regulation is itself a Source of Violence. As the regulations become more convoluted fewer and fewer law-abiding citizens are willing to risk it all to arm themselves – correctly assessing that it is better to be a Victim of Crime than a Victim of Oppressive Government.
So… GET OF MY BEDROOM !! If I want to own a weapon it should be none of your business!
When Liberals Stop sticking their noses into their neighbor’s affairs, the world will be a better place. Liberals always regulate and shred-gulate other people’s lives without regard to the violence that ensues or the damage caused to the neighborhoods affected. And when they are told to GET OUT OF MY BEDROOM they diss the community on which they depend.
Mental…
Maybe we could of stopped him from getting a magazine in which he could fire off 100 rounds or even 30 rounds like the shooter did with Gabby Giffords.
I could give a rats arse about what goes on in your bedroom – that’s conservatives who care about that. I just want to make sure you can have your little guns but not assault weapons or even semi-automatic weapons.
I agree we cannot ever stop nuts who do these things. We can try to limit thee type of weapons they get a hold of
BostonLib,
“I could give a rats arse about what goes on in your bedroom”
—
Liar.
You most certainly do. That’s why all Liberals support oppressive government. Damaging other people’s lives is what keeps your erectile dysfunction at bay.
—
“conservatives who care about that”
When? Who? What are talking about? Oh, you mean when you’re raping little kids in a brothel in Haiti? Or murdering them in an abortion clinic?
I didn’t know Liberals sleep in Haitian brothels or abortion clinics … when did that start?
I know no conservative who cares who you blow – but you’re politics affects my family every day and every way. Blow yourself for all I care.
You just cannot handle the fact that your Fantasy Ideology is the most bloody, political-religion on Earth whose only rivals are its own step-brothers in communism, socialism, yada yada yada.
—
Just sayin…
next time I’m in Boston, I’ll buy you a clam chowder
Ah, the cognitive dissonance of the average Massachusetts liberal. I guess when all you libs were screaming at the top of your lungs about “King” George and all the rights he was taking from you, that you were just big, giant, liars, eh? I mean ObaMao has made no attempt to repeal any of those scary government excesses like the Patriot Act you all swore were the end of freedom as we know it when the guy in the White House had an (R) behind his name. As long as the guy has (D) behind his name, then anyone who would dare think the government is anything less than a paragon of altruism must be a certified nut case. Your inability to reason beyond the next headline is astounding.
I’ll try to explain something else to you, though I know it will not resonate, the second amendment was never intended to be about hunting. I blame the fuddies for that. They continue to try and reason with the disarmament crowd by using hunting as a “legitimate” reason to own guns. Poppycock. The second amendment exists to give citizens the means to protect themselves from their government; and from crazy nutcases, if they aren’t stymied by weak-kneed politically correct buffoons who put up “gun free zone” signs.
On a different note… only b/c yes we know why Roger brought this up…
1. Our prayers go out to the victims of the shooting in Aurora.
2. While this is beyond disgusting, my first thought was the UT Tower sniper, Charles Whitman… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman. i.e. this kid was showing signs of psychotic behavior long before he flipped his lid. note, psychotics are the cause of much of our communities problems … but most are not violent enough to murder and they can’t hold a candle to Liberals as the source of harm and violence. We will know more in the coming weeks, but if this new whacko is like Charles; there’s no way to pin the blame for his behavior on any one or any idea. The responsibility is his for not seeking psychiatric help. (if the hypothesis is correct… we don’t know as I’m writing this.)
3. I would not even blame Ollie Stoner or Jimmy Camerloon for the shooting. Albeit I hold these toilet wipes in complete contempt – this “type” of shooting is not foreseeable consequence of their films or their ideology. Their ideology incites violence, but not this.
I’m not going to lie. I really like gore and blood and violence and first-person shooter games but I certainly don’t want that IN REAL LIFE. My husband hates my love for violence and gore (it freaks him out lol).
And, do you we really have to curtail our whole society for a handful of nutjobs? Really?
Also, as others have mentioned…why take your child to a late night showing of a rather violent movie? But, isn’t that victim blaming?
/sigh off
so many comments, I’ll be surprised if anyone ever reads this, but here it goes.
In the 1980s, action were FAR more violent and gory, and nothing happened … why?
Videogames, movies, rock-and-roll, comic books, et all have been blamed for everything within the 50 years. By jumping on the bandwagon and talking about violence in movies, you’re just showing your age.
Crazy people are going to do crazy things, even without a movie. Besides, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull toned down the violence, and that movie sucked hard.
I’m not advocating violence for violence’s sake, but we’re becoming a nation of pussies.
I’m with you morgue (lol@the the moniker).
Where does it end?
What about the “DC Sniper”? He was just picking off random people all over the place.
We can’t change our society out of fear of a few whack-a-doodles. Look what happened after 911? Now little old ladies and children are getting frisked by TSA ‘agent’s. That turned out well. NOT.
Honestly… As sick and sad as this is…overreacting and spazzing out is the worst reaction.
A search for the terms “atrocity” and/or “barbarism” only comes up with 2 uses of the term “atrocity”, (in the same comment, and NOT pertaining to the recent event), and none for “barbarism” or “barbarity” in an article specifically addressing this action, with comments of record numbers and length.
So, Mr. Simon; You may be inspiring more discretion in public dialog and expression.
Congratulations.
Those reruns of “Perry Mason” and “Murder She Wrote”, should now show up more often.
(As if I needed another antidote for insomnia, already).
I don’t have a problem showing my age. As a child and growing up in the 50′s I remember how things were and I know how they are now.
No porn mags in plain sight at news stands – Now there for anyone to see
No explicit sex in movies or on TV, just a waving curtain or a door closing – now you see Bill Macy going down on a naked girl and then kissing her naked breasts = a movie that was aired on TV, uncut. I wasn’t expecting that scene and I was truly shocked that it was allowed to go uncut. I changed the channel.
No explicit scenes of blood and gore, always subtle or off camera – now gore gore gore
Teen pregnancy in high school was minimal – now it’s rampant
Bad guys always got punished because there was right and wrong – now getting away with stealing or murder is great.
I am grateful that I grew up during that time because it seems to me, in retrospect, that we, as a society had some concern then for our young and felt some responsibility for what we put out there for them to consume.
Tim Robbins made an appeal at a meeting with movie makers not long ago, which I saw, to clean up the violence and sex. As I recall he spoke about children and the need to care about them. I doubt it made a ripple.
Basically policing films would be a waste of time. The current Colorado killer was not influenced by movies. The most violent cities, which account for way more deaths than the Colorado Killer are not influenced by movies.
Look at the gang members in Chicago. Do you really think they fight and kill because of movies and video games. The people calling for less violence in the movies (and videos) are academics and elitists that look at kids in ‘normal’ homes. The average kid today is probably growing up in a rough part of town, under educated by our school system, and either a member of or intimidated by a gang. The average kid of today lives around violence. By the time they are 18 they are probably suffering from PTSD. You need to solve that problem before you even think about movies and video games. Good luck.
On 9/11/2001 I found myself stranded in Spokane. I waited for 5 days for a flight home and finally took a Greyhound ride through the sad American countryside.
During that time I watched airplanes crashing into buildings over and over. As I walked around town and took laps in the swimming pool a terrible sense of guilt came over me. Specifically, I remembered how I had enjoyed the stylized destruction in “Independence Day” and other movies without ever really understanding that I was watching depictions of the violent deaths of thousands of my fellow human beings. I still feel guilty for adding my small portion to the zeitgeist.
Roger is right. We are called upon to fight the good fight, but, all of us, creators and consumers alike, must take responsibility for our common cultural space.
There is, of course, only one correct answer to your question, Mr. Simon.
No.
The moment we start restricting ideas based upon how someone with a broken mind might interpret them is the moment we cease communicating.
Dealing with the occasional lunatic is unfortunately one of the prices of liberty.
WTF?
Why are you associating the violence in Movies with this incident? The fact that Cinemark Century theaters was a ‘gun-free zone’ under their own management policy may have been more of a factor than any film. It may have simply been a location which would provide a large unarmed crowd for the spree shooter/active shooter Holmes. And TDKR simply the film having mid-night openings when he wanted to do this.
His red hair and claim to be the Joker may have simply been laying the groundwork for an insanity plea. (Similar to the ‘Son of Sam’ killer writing documents indicating that satan was talking to him through a dog because he knew he would eventually be caught and wanted to plead insanity. ‘Mindhunter’ by FBI profiler John Douglas). Kind of weird that an avid Joker fan would use red dye instead of green, I saw about ~50 folks dressed as the Joker at Comic-Con and everyone used green dye in their hair and purple jackets).
This was an evil man planning an evil act, until we know more it’s impossible to understand his motives and what factors he considered in his planning.
One of my initial responses was to think that at least one person in that theater willing and able to stop Holmes with a concealed weapon could have curtailed this massacre.
But, Holmes was well organized and equipped himself with body armor. An armed citizen COULD have momentarily engaged a tactically advantaged Holmes in a fire fight, but with little real hope of stopping him.
Cinematic violence didn’t CAUSE Holmes’ rampage, but the pervasive nihilism of our popular culture almost certainly contributed to his decision making and self validation of this carefully planned horror.
Roger Simon is right. We all need to set our cliches aside and think of how we individually can improve our culture.
I absolutely disagree that one (or several) armed patrons could not have stopped the shooter. Return fire would distract the shooter, possibly hit his arms or hands, or even his face/eye area (which even if he was shielded would still cause a momentary diversion of attention, allowing others to rush him or shoot other vulnerable areas).
I used to teach community college, and on the first day of class I would walk the students through a drill for a shooter at the classroom door (verbal alert, throw objects to distract, mass rush of the shooter once s/he was distracted, also I carried mace for this purpose as well).
Pro-active is always better – don’t roll over in advance and say that self-defense is useless.
The body armor is a game changer. An armed citizen might have distracted him momentarily. Several might have stopped him, but with a probability of collateral casualties in the chaos.
That said, you are very wise to prepare your students for trouble.
Hope I’m not being redundant here – I didn’t have time to read all 210 (at last count) comments.
I don’t think the problem is violence per se. It’s the way filmmakers depict violence. They stylize it, dramatize it, glamourize it, romanticize, heroize it it until it looks and feels nothing like “real” violence. With the appropriate camera work and some exciting background music, one man shooting another to death looks “cool.” The actual death isn’t the point – it’s the POSE struck by the shooter that the audience reacts to, the snappy line he delivers (“Yippee Ki-Yay, Motherf***er). It’s the exciting, exotic, cathartic, and often acrobatic in which the bad guy dies. People lap it up. Crazy people emulate it.
Compare this nonsense with real videos of people getting killed. That Afghan woman getting executed by the Taliban. The Kennedy assasination. News readers who have committed suicide on the air. What about the films showing soldiers dying on Omaha Beach? Nothing exciting about that – they just fall down and don’t move anymore. Check out some crime scene and autopsy photos. Nothing glamourous there, even when they’re pictures of John Dillinger, the Black Dahlia, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Crane, Tupac, or Anna Nicole Smith. There’s nothing as small, tawdry, and pathetic as a dead celebrity.
It might help to educate people about death – real. Trouble is, death is the ultimate taboo, even in our supposedly rational age. Society surrounds it with an air of privacy and decorum; when we look at it directly, we’re accused of harboring a sick, indecent curiosity. But which is worse: knowing death as it is, or knowing only the false, “entertaining” version offered by Hollywood?
This whole idea is nothing but more spitting into the wind.
There’s an entire industry that’s dedicated to the depiction of graphic violence. The more graphic the better. And they are unionized.
Anyone who’s been involved in battle knows that mortal violence is usually a lot more subtle than what is portrayed in movies.
But, then again, the Jackie Chan movie “Nosebleed” was cancelled because it depicted a window washer that foiled a terrorist attack at the World Trade Center. I guess Jackie Chan knew that not showing window washers connected with terrorism would preclude that from ever happening. And, so far, it’s worked.
Anyone thinking the blood and gore industry will inhibit it’s ability to depict graphic violence, might as well wait for Obama to give every American a Chevy Volt.
Sadly, you are probably correct.
“They stylize it, dramatize it, glamourize it, romanticize, heroize it it until it looks and feels nothing like “real” violence.”
I agree.
And permit me to create a non-word to add to your excellent list. (It’s late in my day here. My mind is half-asleep already.)
They gratification-ize it.
They produce violence which has the sole purpose of enabling the audience to achieve “gratification.”
(No, I will not take this into an Anthony Weiner joke, but yes, that’s the general ballpark.)
The little boys who get off on this stuff are remaining little boys, no matter what their bodies’ chronological age. They are pitiful little things, travesties of “men”, with their hands thrust deep inside their pants — ur, no, thrust inside their egos.
Maybe the word we’re looking for is “catharsis.” Build up dramatic tension then release that tension in a blaze of gunfire. A crazy person, who experiences mental stress to a degree we “healthy” people probably can’t imagine, might take that the wrong way.
Movie violence doesn’t create real violence. Real violence creates movie violence. I’m working on my next blog post about heavy metal music, and I’ve realized that scary art helps us confront the real horrors and tragedies of our fallen world. Sure, a lot of it is poorly made or unrealistic; the bad entries of such movies, music, video games, etc depict the evil simply for the thrill of it. But the best examples make thoughtful people wonder “What would I do when faced with such evil?”. The world needs Batman, whether he’s real or not, because he takes the lead in a society practicing self-defense. Jim Holmes identifies with the Joker because he’s just as sick in the head as any inmate of Arkham Asylum. He sounds like a paranoid schizophrenic, and probably could have found any number of venues for his crime regardless of the context. I’m reminded of a great episode from Batman: The Animated Series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lze-xhhXDMI
So, if we get Hollywood to strictly stick to Disney material instead of ‘Entartete Kunst’ and other assorted filth — no doubt, people who self-publish on YouTube will stop posting WTF stuff, porn movies will will feature only fully clothed people and real plots without sex; and we will be able to close the lunatic asylums because finally, all our crazy people will stay sane due to lack of media temptation and bad examples to copy.
And if that all fails, maybe we should just go for the jugular and take people to court for ‘influencing’ others, the Brits lead the way with this stellar effort:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2176585/Perverted-psychic-brainwashed-women-stripping-naked-help-contact-dead-jailed-years.html
Right with you RWHC. I totally concur.
This is how we lose our freedoms bit by bit because of some dramatic, ugly event…
No bueno.
ON SECOND THOUGHT —
Been thinking about what you wrote … and find that after all — YOU ARE RIGHT, ROGER. Hollywood ought to give more thought to how they are affecting people with this ultra-violence.
Yes, they ought to give a lot more thought to self-censoring. They have gone too far, and the abnormal is seemingly becoming more and more normal. Using the extent of gore and violence as a standard, it has to keep escalating over time to remain “exciting” — like drugs.
Our public also is responsible — they aren’t “just” innocent victims being exploited and their worst instincts prayed upon. The film-going audience has to reject this by not participating. Not censorship — but people have to talk and think about it much more. They have to ask the questions — how are these “thrills” affecting themselves and their children? (Never mind the argument of whether or not it encourages “violence” — but the question is — is it harmful in general?)
Hollywood could also consider doing some soul-searching — consider their own motivations — Are they “artistic” motivations? — (and if so, just what is this extreme exposition of violence “expressing? Is it what they really “intend” to express — or something else?) — Or are they just being competitive … copy-catting in a way, by attempting to outdo the last worst, pushing the envelope further and further, in order to stand on the top of the hill as the meanest and toughest on the block.
I say this, not because I think that maniacs will be prevented from acting out if films are less violent — maniacs will always find inspiration to do harm — but because it’s just gone over the top — appealing to the worst elements of human nature — and ultimately DESENSITIZING us in ways we should remain very sensitive.
A pinked up media will not stop it’s destruction on the world. It has no concept of how to build and in reality is incapable of doing so.
A pinked up Catholic Church did much destruction for centuries and only now that the pinking up has been removed is there any chance of its recovery.
Something to think about.
Movies today depict villians as heros and the more gore the better. No longer do we see uplifting themes about life’s struggles and the will to overcome adversity. Now it’s decapitations, disembowling, carnage unchained. All aimed at dysfunctional,delusional, naive and ignorant youth. We are surrounded by narcissistic demagogues with no brains and an expensive lap top computer. Want to change all that? Reinstitute the mandatory military draft for both male and female young.
Ridiculous.
There are levels of pornography. The ultimate taboo and ultimate thrill for the perverted would probably be a snuff film
Hollywood has raised the bar on sex and violence bit by bit to make MONEY. Titillation, appealing to our baser instincts unfortunately works. In order to draw people into the movies or spend money on DVD’s you have to keep making it more and bigger, faster, dirtier. In portraying violence I’m not sure what’s left because it’s already about as gross as you can get. Sex on the other has had the bigger taboo so it’s taken a little longer. We are now in the soft core porn stage with even A list actors stooping to this level. I have no doubt that hard core is fast coming to a theater near you and on TV so your kids can enjoy it too. What’s next? Well there’s kiddie porn. Think a Lolita remake only updated to show the action. Then on to snuff films. Cynical about Hollywood? You bet.
Don’t know who said it but “Guard the portals of your mind”
Call me a pussy or a wimp. I don’t care. But I think that it’s pretty sad that we’ve come to this as a cultural norm for entertainment.
Yes, I do agree with you that we have come to this as a cultural ‘norm’.
But understand and know, that perversion can not build. It is incapable of doing anything … except bringing in ever more .. and more .. and more .. perversion.
That’s all the world will ever get once they open that door.
“Stand porter at the door of thought.” Mary Baker Eddy
I was undecided as I began reading the readers’ posts, but I’ve come down in favor of a violence tax. I have two boys, three and five, and I don’t want them living in the visual cesspool our culture has created.
I would impose a punitive tax on the gross sales (never trust the studios on profits!) for films with violent content. Artists moved to create regardless of profit would still be free to. Violent video games would be subject to a 90% profits tax, and permitting a minor to use such a game would be a stiff misdemeanor.
I’d legalize and subject to similar taxation pot, cocaine and heroin at the same time. Let vice subsidize virtue.
We don’t need to curtail violence in movies, we need to punish swifty, and harshly those that commit crimes and stop bending over backwards to make excuses for punks/thugs that want to do harm to others.
Recently a 70 year old man fired at 2 punks/thugs in hoodies that wanted to commit mayhem in a cyber cafe. Did you see how quickly those punks fled. because they are just bullies.
And the only thing that I regret is that the man’s aim was off and he didn’t put them both 6 feet under with better placed shots.
The problem isn’t violence, Roger, but thoughtlessness.
The Bible tells us we will be judge by every idle word (Matt 12:36) and every work (Ecc 12:14).
Depicting brutality and violence can be quite appropriate in art, but it requires thought and consideration as to the effect.
Hollywood is clearly now using violence without thought and solely to draw crowds and revenue.
Re-reading the comments to Roger Simon’s article, I’d say about 80% of them read like they were written by porn & violence addicts threatened with having the supply of their favorite drugs cut off.
It’s pretty easy to fault the writers but I’mna thinking it’s time to make the studios pay the price. They commission these efforts. If the studios don’t pay for Kill Bill nth there won’t be a Kill Bill nth.
I walked out of Maximum Overdrive before the first 10 minutes passed. This was at a freshly built theater at an army post way out in the middle of north nowhere, W. Germany. We were desperate for entertainment but it sucked on ice.
At this juncture I will only go to a (dollar)theater at the insistent repeated urging of the wife-unit. Hollywood, you’re dead to me.
nice!
Hey Jim you can get all the free porn you can handle @pornstackers!