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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Films and violence
Friday 27 April @ 13:28:03 |
 by Max Sparber
Of all the startling images that came out of the ghastly mass shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, there’s one that is starting to become ubiquitous. Surprisingly, it’s not an image of direct violence, such as the heartbreaking photograph of the hip-shot man being awkwardly carried out of Norris Hall. No, it is instead an image of impending violence, a photograph that shooter Seung-Hui Cho took of himself, part of the strange multimedia packet he sent to NBC, in which he holds a pistol in each hand, perhaps the exact pistols he used to slay 32 people and eventually end his own life.
 http://imgred.com/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a2/ChoSh.jpg" align=righ hspace=10 vspace=10>The photo, which our own Minneapolis daily newspaper splashed across the front page, looks like a still from some bizarre action hero—and you’ll find many photos just like it with a quick search of Flickr. Gun owners, particularly young men, seem to enjoy preening, like film stars, with their weapons. This despite the fact that cinematic guns, particularly in heroic action films, belong in the realm of fantasy. They never need be reloaded, except, as in the films of Robert Rodriguez, when a dramatic pause is needed in the action. They are easily concealed, never jam, and apparently aim themselves when fired by the hero (when fired by villains, they tend to miss). They rarely hit bystanders, they kill discreetly, and the bodies they create can usually just be left behind for someone else to clean up. As anyone who has ever fired a gun or witnessed a shooting can tell you, this isn’t how it works in the real world.
When Seung-Hui Cho’s package arrived at NBC, after several days of confusion owing to an improper address label, there was some speculation that he had been inspired by films, or, more properly, a film: “Oldboy,” a South Korean film from 2003 that won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Two of the pictures Seung-Hui Cho took of himself seemed to echo scenes from the film—one in which Seung-Hui Cho wields a hammer menacingly, and another in which he presses a pistol to his own forehead. Aside from the fact that Seung-Hui Cho’s photographs resemble stills from “Oldboy,” there is no evidence the young man had ever seen the film, or was particularly inspired by it.
Indeed, at this moment, the likeliest scenario is that Cho suffered from an untreated and growing mental illness. (There are some reports, unconfirmed at the time of this printing, that Cho had been taking antidepressants.) He had previously been detained for a psychiatric assessment, and the attending magistrate determined that Cho presented “an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness.” Interestingly, this decision meant that Cho’s name should have been submitted to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which should have prevented him from purchasing handguns. Somehow, he slipped through the system, despite the fact that those close to him reported that his behavior was deteriorating. His roommate described Cho as transforming from shyness to outright refusal to communicate prior to last week’s massacre.
If the massacre was indeed the result of mental illness (and his rambling communication with NBC certainly shows him, at the very least, as totally incoherent), it’s hard to point to the event and claim it is the result of larger societal factors, such as movies or video games. Violence from mental illness is a bit like lightning from the sky—when it kills, we don’t question what comic books the lightning has been reading or if the lightning strike was the result of a particularly nasty Quentin Tarantino film. We do ask what we can do to prevent it in the future, though; otherwise, no houses would ever be equipped with lightning rods. It is worth visiting the reason why Cho’s mental illness went unaddressed as it did, and, given his diagnosis, why he had access to guns. (It’s worth noting that even without guns, people experiencing psychotic episodes are capable of disturbing violence. A doorman managed to kill 18 people in Beijing in August of 2004, armed with only a knife; it’s fair to assume he did not watch violent western movies or play amoral western video games.)
That being said, Cho’s rampage is an opportunity to open up a dialogue about the way we use violence in popular entertainment, not because it might cause the mentally ill to become murderous, but because it tends to celebrate a sort of consequence-free, prettified violence that is so divorced from the reality of violence—as tales and photographs from Virginia Tech make so explicit. It does not speak well of our culture that we celebrate on film so many characters whose behavior —defined by a strange comfort with bloodletting, and a casual disregard for its consequences—would seem positively insane if it were enacted in the real world. Do we really want to celebrate onscreen characters that so closely resemble Seung-Hui Cho in their behavior?
Filmic violence can be tremendously sophisticated and subtle—even a filmmaker as apparently callow as Quentin Tarantino never shies away from the fact that killing is a ghastly affair and that killers are often lunatics. But too often popular film regards consequence-free brutality as worthwhile entertainment, which seems to me less dangerous than simply lazy and immature. Ultimately, the consequences of presenting violence as unsophisticated entertainment might not create real-world killers, but it creates something that’s also worth discussing: Bad art. ||
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