And these are just the big events that get widespread news coverage. Every community in the country suffers less lurid tragedies on a fairly regular basis. Even as I write this, a local news station is covering a the story of local man who, for whatever unreason that wormed its way out of a feverish brain, has taken his kids hostage and barricaded himself in his home.
Violence, of course, is a commonplace in our cultural lives, as “American as cherry pie,” as H. Rap Brown memorably put it. (That Brown is serving a life sentence for murder gives his truism all the more credibility.) Gratuitous violence is apparently a historical pastime, being part and parcel of such patina-tinged myths as Old West outlaw John Wesley Hardin shooting a man for snoring. Violence is the language of the rugged individualist who must answer his challengers, of loners who face a hostile environment in the same way America must face a hostile world.
As with other art forms, film mirrors the culture that produces it. With its emphasis on visual patterns to tell a story, film is particularly conducive to communicating graphic violence. Add to this gradual decline of narration in mainstream American film since the 1970s brought on by our growing dependence on sundry electronic media. The multiplicity of distractions has undermined our ability to follow complex (or multiple) plotlines. And so the art of American film has come full circle: The narrative conventions established by D. W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation have given way once more to fleeting images meant to leave emotional impressions rather than tell a story.
Conventional narrative, then, is becoming a thing of the past, sacrificed to moviegoers’ short attention spans. To attract paying audiences, most successful mainstream films in the past decade have relied on varying formulae of CGI effects, comic book characters, improbable stunts and pyrotechnics, fart jokes, and teens or twentysomethings hooking up. Films with actual storylines and fully developed characters are relegated to art houses. It’s not terribly surprising that the Colorado theater shootings took place at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises; in fact, the one thing that James Holmes and his victims seem to have had in common was execrably bad taste.
While bad taste is common, it’s not universal. The occasional gem does make its way onto the big screen. The debasement of human relationships—of human decency—in contemporary America is the theme of Bobcat Goldthwait’s dark comedy God Bless America, which melds the sensibilities of Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down with those of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy with shades of Taxi Driver thrown in for good measure. The middle aged protagonist (a sad-eyed Joel Murray) has had enough of the narcissism and incivility of the people around him and goes on a killing spree against entitled reality TV stars, loudmouthed conservative pundits, would-be pedophiles, and double-parkers. Our antihero is joined by an equally disaffected teen, a sociopathic Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Tara Lynne Barr) who becomes the Bonnie to his Clyde. God Bless America climaxes in a hostage standoff on the set of an American Idol-style talent show, with the ill-starred couple falling in a fusillade of police bullets on national television as the screen fades to black.
Goldthwait’s satire is unnervingly spot-on, to the point where I visibly winced at the sight of Murray’s character gunning down a bunch of teens chattering on cell phones in a movie theater screening, of all things, a documentary on the My Lai massacre. Fiction mimics fact mimics fiction, seemingly ad infinitum. The verisimilitude of film is intensified by the emotional impact of real life events.
It also gives new life to the chicken-and-egg riddle of whether mass media images trigger violence or are merely reflect an already violent society. Movie violence has been accused of inspiring copycats for decades. The 1974 “Hi-Fi murders” in Ogden, Utah were inspired by a scene in the Clint Eastwood movie Magnum Force in which a pimp exacts revenge on a wayward hooker by forcing her to drink a bottle of Drano. John Hinckley was driven to shoot President Reagan by the exploits of Travis Bickle, Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver. Occasionally movies are influenced in turn by real events, as in the case of Sidney Lumet’s Network evoking the actual on-air suicide of Florida TV newswoman Christine Chubbuck.
The 1990s saw a surge in movie and TV copycats. Natural Born Killers has been cited as the model for several teen spree murders, including the Columbine massacre. The subway tollbooth arson scene in Money Train is said to have prompted an actual firebombing of a New York City tollbooth. Even MTV’s cartoon series Beavis and Butthead was implicated in the case of a small child who set a fire in imitation of one of its characters.
Arguably, media violence is catalyst rather than cause; folks predisposed to violence merely need an excuse to do wrong. However, this and similar theories, such as the purported link between pornography and sexual violence, suffer from weak causality. Although I’m loath to draw a parallel with the claim, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” the motive to harm comes from within. When violence becomes an internalized social norm, it is bound to inspire individuals to employ it as a first and last resort. It’s still a mean world, regardless of whether it’s on celluloid, in digital, or in the flesh. Expect it to remain so until our values change for the better.
© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar
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