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For the Children AKA Film Violence
A few months ago, director Oliver Stone finally had charges dismissed against him from 1994. The Problem: his 1994 feature Natural Born Killers apparently gave a couple of young nuts the idea to go on a cross-country killing spree. Seeing the movie over and over again on various drugs, Benjamin Durrus and Sarah Edmondson decided it'd be a great idea to go out and mimic the things Mickey and Mallory did in the movie. Gee, they're real bright kids, aren't they? So they go out, do their thing…and get caught. As if they didn't see that coming, they're quick to blame the movie and not their sanity on the whole thing. Of course, they killed a few people, and a woman working in a convenience store, named Patsy Ann Byers, was paralyzed from a gunshot during their little crime spree.
So began a lawsuit by Byers and her family against Stone and Warner Brothers. Byers died not too long ago from cancer, and so her family continued a frivolous lawsuit that any sane individual would have thrown out years ago, but it took until March of 2001 for a judge to determine the suit for what it is and dismiss charges.
My sympathy does not lie with Byers and her family, or Durrus and Edmondson for being so viciously subverted by Hollywood. My sympathy lies with Stone and Warner Brothers. Those who've heard me speak about Oliver Stone know I have no love for the man, especially in the last few years. His special tinkering in the editing rooms have ruined his last three films for me. But since when have we allowed American art to be held culpable for the crimes of a few sick individuals who can't differentiate fantasy and reality?
This isn't the first example of litigious parents and politicians eager to censor everything so it doesn't get to the darling children's ears, but it is my personal favorite. It's not often that a multi-million dollar Hollywood movie gets sued, although we've seen it a few times with music. Ozzy Osborne found himself under the hotseat after some stupid bastard teenager blew his brains out and Ozzy's "Suicide Solution" was in the record player. Osborne had to explain how the song wasn't an anthem for us all to kill ourselves, as if such an explanation were necessary.
This rant isn't about music, but parallels can be easily drawn. Have we turned into fucking lemmings, ladies and gentlemen? I know most of us are hopeless herd animals who will eventually do whatever the next guy is doing, but there is a line drawn at ultra-violence. When a song tells us to kill ourselves, who's going to do it? The fucking nut! So when a movie tells us to kill, only the nut is going to do it.
Stephen King wrote an early book about a teenager who went into his high school with a rifle and did a similar thing to what we've been seeing in the papers every few months. When these real school shootings started he pulled the book from publication. In this case, I applaud it. King didn't say that a psycho would become a psycho from reading the book, and then mimic. He said that a psycho would do something violent no matter what, and his pulling the publication simply absolves him from guilt. I agree with this. As that insipid Scream movie stated, "movies don't create psychos, movies make psychos more creative."
I suppose this comes off as somewhat rambling; using a book and a musician as lines to film violence. But this rant isn't just about film violence, it's about people taking the violence they see in fiction and turning it into reality. What the artistic medium is becomes kind of secondary compared to the fact that people are around who are willing to blame that violence on crimes and poor upbringings.
So I suppose Hitler watched Natural Born Killers one too many times? I seriously doubt that. For every million of us who just like to see shit get blowed up good in the movies, there's that one lone nut out there who thinks he could do it. And yet we're supposed to believe the parents and politicians that we should censor violence for our children and to keep the adults from being swayed to the "dark side."
It all comes down to the children. We want to protect them from every proverbial bump and bruise in life and we refuse to let them grow up. I'm 20 years old and I can't say "fuck" at home. I say it anyway, but that's beside the point. Children have had it easy for too long and now people want us to give up our violence (gratuitous or not) in favor of safe, neutral, and lifeless family programming. I suppose you're wondering if I'm attacking the children. FUCK THE CHILDREN. If they can't be taught that there's a difference between art and reality, I suggest a nice mental institution. Shit, this country just loves the death penalty. Why not use that?
I'm not saying that family movies can't be every bit at fun or intelligent as adult oriented films. It's just that sometimes violence is necessary to get the point across. Sometimes it's funny when a fuck is thrown in for punctuation. There's poetry in language, and occasionally profanity is necessary. My problem is that people think we're so stupid that we're going to mimic everything we see. Yes, a two-year-old doesn't know the difference; doesn't know that it's not real. A parent teaches his or her child this delineation. Sometimes a negligent parent doesn't teach this distinction, or the child has trouble comprehending it for whatever reason, but the rest of us who can figure out the difference between a bloody Saturday matinee and Monday morning work shouldn't be punished for the shortcomings of others.
We've all had nightmares from scary movies when we were kids; that's the basis for what I'm trying to drive home here. A child doesn't know, and has to be taught. Sure, I agree that we shouldn't let little kids see this stuff unless they can handle it. But the solution is not to clean up the entire world for the little bastards. The solution is to teach them that this violence is out there and that there is this thing called "art" that isn't real. We don't protect them their entire lives, we teach them how to protect themselves. We teach them to understand, and even laugh, at the shortcomings of the world around them. The world is a violent and unfair place. From day one in school, I've been told that the world isn't fair. It's time this message became available to everyone else. Life isn't fair all the time, and life isn't particularly easy either. The idea is to become prepared for it young so we can deal with it. Finding scapegoats in the very thing that we are entertained by is not the answer.
One last note, a PS maybe. Isn't it odd no one ever blasts the "clean" bands like the Beatles for inspiring violence? There aren't many examples of this in film, so again I go to music. Charles Manson was very inspired by The White Album, but to this day no one's said that the Beatles did anything wrong. Nope, unless you say the F word you're not doing anything wrong. Bullshit.