In his last class, cataloged as Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino burned down the damn Third Reich, Hitler included. This time, with Django Unchained, he lines up slave traders so a black man can blow their fool heads off.
As noted in detail in my post after the Batman cinema shooting in the US earlier this year, there are few people in the world who note anymore the extent to which violence as entertainment in the cinema has reached levels that would simply have been inconceivable 45 years ago. Back then, Bonnie and Clyde was very controversial, and although it has been years since I have seen it, this critical reaction remains to my mind entirely appropriate. (Interestingly, Tony Martin, a real cinema fan and sometime director and screenwriter, made the point in his autobiographical book that it was this film, shown perhaps by mistake to his class at high school, that showed him the power of movies, due to the highly excited reaction the ending got from one of his schoolmates.) That movie should make people think hard about whether it is violence being depicted as quasi porn. To my mind, all realistic ultra violence in cinema that is being presented for entertainment should make people think.
But now it rarely does. It doesn't matter that movie reviewers are nearly all politically liberal; they nearly all accept it in all forms and in all contexts - praise it even if it is "done well". I am not one of those people. Tarentino is at the forefront of moviemakers who use violence for entertainment, and he concentrates in particular on realistically depicted, violent revenge scenarios. He does not deserve his success.
I also have a son who is of an age where computer games are of intense interest, and we usually watch together the ABC's Good Game, which reviews computer games of all varities, including quite violent ones.
Even from the clips I see there, I frequently object to the level of violence, regardless of whether the splattered figures are meant to be zombies or not. Call me naive, if you want; but games featuring increasing realistic buckets of blood sprayed all over the room, often from a first person shooter perspective, are not a healthy thing for society. Parents frequently ignore age ratings for games, and simply let their kids play them because their mate has it already. Again, this would have met with some moral outrage only (say) 20 or 30 years ago. Not now.
Yes, I know: bright people play them; they are not made into rampaging killers by doing so, and sure, they tell the difference between reality and games. (As can nearly all movie goers - see my comment regarding ironic detachment in my earlier post linked above.)
And yet, when mass rampage killings show up in countries such as the US, with the appalling and upsetting Connecticut school shooting, people are always asking "but why"?
As with some previous shootings, it appears this guy did the shooting in military like dress. It is said he was very much into computers and (I would guess) gaming. It is being reported this morning that he had some altercation with staff at the school last week - hence revenge for a real or imagined slight is once again an issue, as it frequently seems to be for the socially isolated who take it out on school or university grounds. (Mind you, it is also early days since the incident, and there already are signs that there has been much initial misreporting.)
Where do mentally disturbed people get the mental image of the (to them) justified vengeful excitement of a mass shooting? Is it that hard to tell? Really?
Of course, Americans are (in very large proportion) sickeningly mad when it comes to the issue of gun ownership, and of course one of the responses to this year's shootings should be a legislative response which any other country would be able to manage.
But to my mind, it is a pity that it takes a shooting to happen inside a cinema to make the country, and indeed the world generally, to think culturally about the depiction of fictional violence and the "frog sitting in the slowing heated pot" situation that has developed with scant objection over the span of my life.
And finally - Charlie Brooker had a point about the counterproductive nature of over publicising mass shootings in 2009. It is a lesson impossible for the media to follow, it seems. Mind you, without such an approach in the US, it would seem that the political movement to increase gun control would never have a chance of making any inroad at all. It is, therefore, a dilemma in that nation as to whether the blanket coverage is for good or bad.
Update: William Salatan has an article up at Slate in which he, quite rightly, notes that the problem with guns in the school yard attack scenario is the speed with which they allow large numbers of people to be killed. Laughably, gun advocates in the US thought they were on a winner when, by co-incidence, there was a school yard attack in China on the same day. They were so overjoyed to run the "this can happen anywhere regardless of guns" argument that they forgot to note the number of kids killed via the knife attack - none.
Salatan also notes a Wikipedia list of school yard attacks. Now, Salatan takes the view that these have happened in so many countries that:
They’ve falsified every pet political theory about what kind of culture or medical system or firearms legislation prevents mass murder.Maybe, but here's what I've noticed from the list: look at the decades in which they have occurred.
Even though there was the largest shooting of all in 1927, there is a mere handful of incidents before the 1970's. The concentration of incidents in the 1990's and 2000's is clear.
It can be dangerous to draw conclusions from Wikipedia lists, but I would have thought that my general concern with the cultural influence of fictional violence in games and the media is given a bit more credence with this information.
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