Good point. Movies rarely originate anything, they mostly reinforce what's already happening in the public domain. The language and the visuals in many of today's movies are only an exaggeration of what is already occuring in society.
Very few movies lead us in a new direction. And I don't think we can blame films for dumbing down society or leading us to the devil. We can't blame the movies for being a reflection of what is happening in the world.
But that's really the question. Can't we?
The public may have an appetite for junk food. It may have an appetite for "green" food.
Both of those things, in a sense may be in the "public mind."
But if you're in the food business, you get to choose what kind of food you market.
And it may very well be that junk food sells better, but unless that's your only criterion for what you make and what you sell -- what sells better -- you don't get to walk away from the table with a clear conscience.
You want to make TV -- you can make "John Adams" or "Recount" -- or you can make the new "Flavo-Flav" show.
You can make "Sixty Minutes" or you can make "Jerry Springer."
Inevitably, the public will "vote" to support shows like "Jerry Springer" in the same way that the public will vote to support junk food -- and I have no doubt that those that make the Springer show have made a great deam of money making it.
But I think that we really kid ourselves if we try to say that this show and shows like it that celebrate and glorify human trashiness, haven't hurt this country. I think that they have.
And one can't blame the "market" for this. We as makers of movies and of television shows have to bear the responsibility for what we do. We can make trash because trash that celebrates the worst in human beings because that sells or we can make work that's good -- because good stuff also sells.
And I'm not advocating some polly-anna-ish "no sex/no violence" approach to movies or television. My position as somebody who's written a lot of horror is that art is about illumination and it's the dark corners of the human experience that are the ones that most need illuminating -- and that's the scary places that people aren't particularly comfortable looking at or thinking about.
Whatever people do -- and that includes sexual behavior and violent behavior -- is legitimate material for art and drama. But how any subject is treated determines how an audience is going to respond to it.
And if we're going to be grown up about it, we have to accept that if we put something on the screen that encourages bad behavior, that it might very well contribute to someone's bad behavior -- that if we put something stupidly imitatable on the screen that, indeed, someone stupid or irresponsible or mentally unbalanced may imitate it, with tragic results.
It's not as if we didn't know that our audience contains people who are stupid and irresponsible and mentally unbalanced. You have clear evidence of that every time you go to a movie theatre. So you know that they're going to be there in the audience.
So, yes -- you can show a movie with such images to an audience and the overwhelming majority won't imitate it, or won't be negatively effected in that way. In the same way, you can make a drug and you know that most people won't have an allergic reaction to it. But you pretty much know that, for any drug, a certain percentage of the people who receive it *will* have an allergic reaction -- and they'll get sick, and some of them will die.
And you put certain things in a movie, it may very well be that a certain number of unstable people will see it and imitate it -- and the result will be that people will die.
I don't think that we get to simple shrug and say, "Well, they're just nuts. Not our fault."
Didn't we know that that there were crazy people out there -- in the same way that people who make medicine know that there are people with allergies in the world?
They get to say -- hey, our medicine saves lives and that's an acceptable upside to the occasional death that it causes.
What do we say that the upside is to the art that we create, when the downside is that, every so often, somebody may imitate something that he sees on the screen -- and people are killed as a result?
And I'm not just taking aim at movies. News is the same. We always hear about "copycat" killers. But it isn't really the killings that copycat killers are imitating. It's the news coverage of those killings.
I"m sure that everybody remembers the "Tylenol" poisonings that were such huge news years back. That story just swept the country for months. And because it was such an enormous story, it triggered a number of imitation killings.
Again, the justification for the scale of the story was *not* the public interest, no matter what anybody might say -- it was market forces -- it was the public demand for the story.
Market forces drove the story to a scale vastly out of keeping with the actual scale of the danger involved from the actual killer and once it had achieved the kind of international dimension that it ultimately achieved, the "copycat" phenomenon took off.
It's the same thing with all of these school shootings. The enormous national well-oiled publicity machine that descends upon these events, the extent to which these shooters become, in effect, celebrities in their own right, I fully believe is part of what is driving this phenomenon.
It's very much in line with what you're saying. On one level, the news agencies are simply responding to the public's intense interest in these events.
But the result, I believe, is a kind of diabolical feedback loop, in which the media coverage quite literally drives the "school shooting" phenomenon itself, in which part of the appeal for many of these disaffected characters is the idea of having their "fifteen minutes of fame" with all of the networks and news choppers there for the eulogy.
NMS
