When a tragedy hits, everyone scrambles around to find a reason. It’s uniquely and sweetly in our nature to do this. Our big brains cannot comprehend the chaos and madness that occurs in our world on a daily basis so there has to be a reason. Terrorism is a thing we can understand. Serial killing, to a degree, is something we can wrap our minds around because the motive is usually clear: they are sexual deviants. Random gun crime is also something we get — angry boyfriend, drive-by gang shooting, robbery. Even accidental crimes we get. But mass shootings, where some angry dude opens fire on unsuspecting people? This is something we really don’t yet understand, at least to the point where we can find a way to unplug the phenomenon.
A few film critics want so badly for it to be films and video games. Even Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly, in his very thoughtful piece The End of Empathy on the shootings, mentioned how Jim Holmes thought he was the Joker and failed to mention, yet again, that the Joker had green hair:
But when James Holmes, the 24-year-old lone gunman of the Dark Knight massacre, sat down in court on Monday, he didn’t recede into “anonymous” blankness, and that, of course, is because he was still wearing the chilling emblem of his madness: the hair that he had dyed bright orange, in a Day-Glo simulation of the Joker’s loony-tunes coif. Seeing that hair was more than just creepy and disturbing as hell. It made me angry, as if Holmes was mocking his victims, saying, in essence: I’m still the Joker -— and you’d better believe I’d do it again.
The media needed an easy tagline explanation. Holmes handed it to them on a platter.
He grabbed the thing that was closest to him. Maybe he borrowed a little of the Joker’s swagger (but I’m gonna bet he never even saw The Dark Knight). The truth about him as far as we know, though, is that he began planning his crime the day he failed his college exams. He wasn’t a Dark Knight fanatic, in case we have to mention that again, in fact his red hair kind of proves that. As he was stockpiling his weapons and working out his plot he was not thinking about Batman. It just so happened that the hype for that movie was everywhere. It was on the news constantly. Sure, he might have identified with Heath Ledger — he was easy to identify with. But that doesn’t answer the why. The why seems simple enough to me: because he fucking wanted to. He wanted to do something unequivocal. An act of shock and awe that would make people remember him so that he was no longer the failed science student but a famous mass murderer. And yeah, when security falls apart for a sick individual it probably feels good to share the misery, unleash that fury, and destroy the security of others.
But that isn’t going to be good enough because we desperately need something grounded to tie this wild phenomenon down:
Let me be one hundred percent clear: I am not saying thatThe Dark Knight, or any other movie, “caused” James Holmes to go out and commit mass murder. That would be a notion every bit as insane as he is. Yet for too long now -— for years, decades -— our society has been haunted by killers who have taken a piece of their demented inspiration from popular culture. Charles Manson, the sicko hippie mastermind who never personally killed anyone (he got others to do it for him), was only convicted because the ingenious prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi laid out, in painstaking detail, how Manson had “taken his cues” from messages he believed the Beatles were sending him. At the time, this was so out there it seemed a bulletin of pure dark schizophrenia, and in all likelihood it was.
And yet, 43 years after the Manson murders, the phenomenon of killers who commit unspeakable acts because they think that they’re imitating, or taking orders from, or acting out of slavish loyalty to characters from pop culture has become an entrenched —- and, in many ways, expected -— dimension of the world of hellacious crime. John Hinckley Jr., the would-be assassin of President Reagan, modeled himself on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Mark David Chapman, who tore a hole in the world the night that he killed John Lennon, did so out of a demented homage to the book that he regarded as his “statement” (and that he was reading at the crime scene when the police came to arrest him), J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. And in 1999, the way that the Columbine killers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, conceived that nightmare school shooting, it was all tangled up with their sinister pop daydreams. Out of a shared obsession with Natural Born Killers, they used the initials NBK as advance code for the massacre -— but what’s less well known is that Klebold played out an unrequited high school romance through his absolute fixation on William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, the Leonardo DiCaprio movie that converted heartbreak into bullet-spray. Of course, the Columbine killers were also videogame fanatics, and while blaming their crimes on videogames may seem as simplistic and off-base as blaming the Manson murders on “Helter Skelter,” it’s videogames that supply a key clue to cracking open all of these killer’ minds.
Yes. A small percentage of killers, let’s call them the more high profile killers, have blamed some kind of pop culture thing with their crime. Art moves us. It moves us to tears, to fuck, to dance around — it can serve as our muse and our inspiration. And it can salve our wounds after a terrible breakup.
If I murdered my ex-boyfriend who treated me and my daughter terribly after listening to Alanis Morisette’s You Oughtta Know repeatedly I’m sure that would be racked up with the other identifications, like the wonderful Beatles having to have Charles Manson trail after them forever. Or The Catcher in the Rye, which was a book about a guy who sees the helplessness of children and wants to rescue them before something bad happens to them.
The need to be rescued is almost always proclaimed as a female thing. But for lost souls it is a male thing too. Perhaps what they need, what they want (not Charles Manson of course) is for someone to rescue them out of their misery. In the case of Columbine, if those kids had been embraced by their schoolmates instead of rejected, who knows how it would have turned out. Empathy, yes, for the, as Dylan would say, “for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed.
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse.” As it happened, Alanis Morisette rescued me from my pain, which is the power of art, the power of cinema and maybe the power of video games. It is only the ones who aren’t able to get what they need that way who have to then lash out at the world that has forsaken them.
Moreover, if you look at the timeline of mass murders in the US you’ll see that there were plenty of murderers who were never attached to any pop culture reference. And perhaps the ones who do have some connection make a better story for the press. Maybe that’s why Gleiberman and others don’t realize how many killers there are out there with a big giant question mark over their head.
Let’s do this one more time with mass murderers — a timeline:
1949 – 49-year-old World War II vet opens fire and kills 13. He is found insane and locked up for life.
1966- 25-year-old climbs a tower and kills 16. Injures 30.
1976 – 37-year-old man killed 7 people in a library at Cal State Fullerton with a semi-auto he bought at K-Mart.
1982 – 40-year-old prison guard kills 13, including 5 of his children.
1984 – 41-year-old man kills 21 adults and children at a McDonalds. He’s shot on the scene.
1986 – Postal worker opens fire in his workplace killing 14 and wounding 6.
1990 – 42-year-old man opens fire at General Motors, kills 9, wounds 4 then kills self.
1991 – 36-year-old man opens fire in cafeteria in Texas, kills 23, wounds 20, then kills self.
1998- 15-year-old boy kills his parents then shoots up the school, kills 2, injures 22, is serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole. Life over, dude. Pop culture reference Romeo + Juliet, video games, Marilyn Manson.
1999-Columbine. 13 die. 23 wounded. Perps kill themselves. Pop culture connection: Natural Born Killers, Romeo+Juliet, Marilyn Manson, video games
2007 – Virginia Tech. 23 year-old kills 32 people, injures countless others, kills self. Pop culture reference: Old Boy, video games.
2008 – Grad student opens fire on University of Illinois, killing 5, wounding 16. Pop culture references: Marilyn Manson, watched horror movies with mother, “horror movies and the Bible” was how he grew up. He was also obsessed with the Columbine killings.
2009 – 28 year-old kills sixteen people and then himself in Geneva County, Alabama.
2009 – 41 year-old man kills 13 then self. in Binghamton, NY.
2009 – 39 year-old man kills 13, injures 32. Is awaiting trial.
2012: Shooter enters a dark movie theater, kills 12, wounds 58, supposedly says “I am the Joker” but it isn’t confirmed. Pop culture references: other than the Dark Knight, none. No violent video games, no Marilyn Manson, no obsession with Columbine, not even “horror movies and the Bible.”
Source 1 | Source 2 | Source 3
You can look for mass shootings over the last 30 years, inexplicable as they are, all over the world and you’ll only find a handful of them have any notable pop culture reference whatsoever. They fall into two categories. The first is mental illness. Onset paranoid schizophrenia is the most common. The second is that they feel they have been wronged or rejected by society. They are ANGRY and depressed. The end is near. They go out with a bang, so to speak. In most cases, they kill themselves.
Is it their obsession with pop culture or ours that has us returning again and again to this mcguffin? Is it our obsession with them that becomes a snake eating its own tail that inevitably inspires other killers to want the same acclaim as the Columbine killers?
If it were only in America, it might be easier to pin down. While mass shootings here have absolutely increased, they’ve also increased in Norway and Germany. Maybe you can look to pop culture for a few of them. But what of the rest?
Movies, Books, Video Games and Music – Is Pop Culture Causing People to Kill More?
I would have to say yes…
The Iron Lady almost tipped me over the edge. Being a pacifist and a masochist , I headed home and kicked my own nuts repeatedly.
The film is the hands of the wrong people is definately a concern. Put it on the video nasty watch list for sure.
Today we are all living a world of “high end” technology.Most people would call you “techie” if you’re always updated with the latest gadgets that came on board. Others say your a geek if your computer savvy, and so on and so forth.
top 50 franchise
Wish I could stay and argue but I’m off to dance :p
Media is media no matter how you spin it. Whether it’s fictional or not does not matter and it’s been shown that kids and even adults don’t necessarily process the differences (“Pro Wrestling” is an example of this…watch Wrestling with Manhood for more)
Oh btw, I studied this topic in both Media and Psychology courses…just can’t find my media notes atm.
“Media is media no matter how you spin it.”
The subject here is pop culture. Violent music, violent video games, violent movies. Look that headline at the top of the page.
You studied something in school. Great. But you studied something that we’re not talking about.
“Ryan Adams / July 27, 2012
Looks to me like the correlation is between violent acts seen on the news, not movies.”
Ryan, let’s not get into semantics…it’s still media and a visual one at that.
^
Reform.’
It’s far more than a matter of semantics. The subject under examination is whether kids imitate violent acts they see in movies or video games. Kids who imitate a fictional depiction of crime.
You’re quoting an incident of 60 copycat crimes that occurred after a real life shooting was reported on the news. Those kids are not imitating any movie. They are imitating other teenagers who committed a crime. Kids who imitate a real crime.
We’re not talking about mmedia. We’re talking about pop culture. News events are not pop culture. They’re documentary fact.
Hollywood is under indictment here for provoking copycat crimes. Wrong. The news is not produced by Hollywood.
If you can’t distinguish the difference, then you have quite a problem.
Applied Gaming / July 27, 2012
Is there a good way to compare the frequency of these kinds of incidents with life before “pop culture”?
Well, this is also from my psych textbook-
“How much are we affected by repeated exposure to violent programs? Was the judge who in 1993 tried two British 10-year-olds for murdering a 2-year-old right to suspect that the pair had been influenced by “violent video films”? Were the American media right to think that the teen assassins who killed 13 of their Columbine High School classmates had been influenced by repeated exposure to ‘Natural Born Killers’ and the first-person shooter games such as ‘Doom”? To understand whether violence viewing leads to violent behavior, researchers have done some 600 correlational and experimental studies (Anderson & Gentile, 2008; Comstock, 2008; Murray, 2008)
Correlational studies do support this link:
In the United States and Canada, homicide rates doubled between 1957 and 1974, just when TV was introduced and spreading. Moreover, census regions with later dates for TV service also had homicide rates that jumped later.
White South Africans were first introduced to TV in 1975. A similar near-doubling of the homicide rates began after 1975 (Centerwall, 1989)
Elementary schoolchildren with heavy exposure to media violence (via TV, videos, and video games) also tend to get into more fights (figure 7.16)”
Sorry I can’t show the figure but the results of the studies are quite staggering…
@ Juan – what are “the Sweden killings”? If you are referring to Behring Breivik´s unspeakable massacre, that happened in Norway.
If killing sprees were simply inspired by violence in films, wouldn´t they happen all over the world? We all see these films. But the killing sprees usually happen in the US. And the violent films are usually made in the US. American culture has a love affair with violence.
I enjoyed the first two Batman films, but Bruce Wayne is a sociopath and the Jokes is a psychopath, and it seems a bit weird that people are defending them now as though they were national treasures.
I think the tone here is fairly balanced and nuanced, yes. That was why I objected to the “cannon-fodder murder drones” talk, because I found that just as one-sided as some of the pro-NRA types that you encounter elsewhere…
I think you have been handling these debates very well, Ryan. In that sense it is unfair of me to pick at you for that one little “misstep”. And who am I to judge, btw? It’s not like I’m the most even-keeled person myself:)
the other mike: Very good point. From my own point of view – as a Hollywood defender – I can say that I have studied this quite a bit, surely more than most NRA people.
There will always be art that click on certain people in a negative way. One thing that I don’t know anything about is gaming. It looks to me that games are more to blame than movies. I’ve seen people play those games and it looks scary sometimes.
The movie Elephant talked about this. Made all characters (realistically) look like game characters that someone (Gus van Sant in this case?) played.
Movies can give crazy people ideas, sure. Definitely. But we can’t stop art. What will we become after banning art? What could we gain by banning some ASSAULT rifles for starters? Maybe quite a bit.
In answer to the question: ABSOLUTELY!
The violence displayed on regular television programming alone is enough to make one want to vomit.
All of those daytime talk shows showing people screaming and fighting and yelling and hitting each other. This is NOT normal acceptable behavior, folks. And it is foisted upon us.
And all of the “dramas” on television are all about murderers and killing people.
I don’t watch television anymore. But when I happen to, I’m stunned at how violent even American commercials have become.
Do an experiment. Try to not watch any television for a month. Then turn it on and you’ll be appalled at how desensitizing and violent it actually is.
also wanted to add, notice the similarities between Hollywood defenders and NRA activists? they both immediately dismiss any criticism of their culture/philosphy. both as bad as each other.
Sorry for confusing you, Ryan. Only the first paragraph of my initial post was in any way directed at you. The last three paragraphs was just my own feeble attempt of coming to terms with the debate (not a rebuttal of anything you wrote).
Mads, what I like about the tone of the discussions here, is how we’re all groping for answers and nobody is claiming to understand it and everyone is open to hearing other points of view. Other sites talking about Colorado this week that I’ve stumbled into are war zones.
In the week leading up to TDKR premiere, with all the passions and excitement getting muddied up with pre-emptive defenses and really vicious battles on Twitter — I wrote a couple of tweets and then deleted them, along the lines of “Let’s all try to get a grip or else somebody is going to get hurt this weekend.” Only phrased in ways that would’ve sounded horrible the day after the shooting. I am so very glad that I had second thoughts about tweeting anything so frivolous. I’ve been wrecked enough this week without the extra stress of wondering if I added to the noise.
Mass murders committed by a single individual are probably quite new phenomenas. It’s very hard to do it without a weapon that allows you to act fast and do massive damage before getting caught. Systematic mass murders/genocides have always existed.
Serial killing – on the other hand – is as old as human kind, I assume. They have not been recorded much in the old days. I believe the first American serial killer is the guy who built the hotel in Chicago in around 1890. Jack the Ripper acted a couple of years earlier in England. First (and still the only real serial killer case) in Finland took place in the 17th century. It was quite easy back then when no finger prints were taken and you could’ve always blamed the Devil and all that. But you know all this, of course.
But since the dawn of newspaper, these serial killers were often interested in what they wrote about him. It fed them. Part of this behaviour is often arrogance and selfishness – becoming famous.
So, pop culture/art probably has very little to do, unless something like books or music were considered dangerous hundreds of years ago.
Sasha just shared a story with many many shootings in USA (from recent months) that were not reported by the media at all, or buried within 24hrs. It all goes down to which act is media-sexy and which is not. Throw Batman in and media is interested.
Ok, Ryan, I just read your last post which kind of “redeemed” your stance (or moderated it to a fair degree). I have no problem with whatever you wrote in that last post.
j the e, I’m glad you don’t think I’m nuts but even if you did I wouldn’t be up for arguing anything today. I’m not trying to pick a fight or stir up trouble. Everybody has an opinion about this, and I’m just adding mine to the soup, even if my own opinion isn’t even gelled yet. Thanks for the indulgence though. Your restrained accord gives me one less thing to be sad about.
Is there a good way to compare the frequency of these kinds of incidents with life before “pop culture”? Did mass murders like this happen as often in the Renaissance or the Middle Ages? I wonder if events like these have always been around as an anomaly of human nature, or if there’s something special about the world we live in today.
Good job with the provocative title, by the way… I clicked on this because I assumed your answer to “Is Pop Culture Causing People to Kill More?” was “yes”, and was all excited to be infuriated (as I’m sure you intended).
With all due respect, Ryan, but you writing that the army is about turning people into “cannon-fodder murder drones” isn’t exactly doing your argument any good. Why turn the defense of your stance (which is a reasonable one) into a full blown attack on the kind of people who you expect to oppose you?
There is a marked difference between a debate focused on pop culture CAUSING shootings like the one in Aurora or admitting that sometimes pop culture might INSPIRE the eventual outcome. It is not unreasonable to suggest that Holmes committed his crime with the knowledge (perhaps even with a sense of “cruel irony”) that he did it at a particular movie premiere imitating or suggesting a style drawn from that universe (whether the Joker’s hair is green or orange, isn’t really that interesting in this context).
That means that a tragic social situation that has NOTHING to do with pop culture in any way, shape or form can possibly be turned into an act that HAS to do with pop culture, because that is a MEDIUM for a way of expressing yourself that ALL teenagers or young men can relate to. In that sense, there is a link, if an INDIRECT one.
We need to separate these two lines of discussion if we want to get anywhere with this debate.
This should never degenerate into a discussion for or against pop culture or for or against free expression (what’s the alternative?).
That means that a tragic social situation that has NOTHING to do with pop culture in any way, shape or form can possibly be turned into an act that HAS to do with pop culture, because that is a MEDIUM for a way of expressing yourself that ALL teenagers or young men can relate to. In that sense, there is a link, if an INDIRECT one.
ok, I see the confusion. I wasn’t referring to teenage boys being exposed to video shooter games to train them like Ender — though obviously by that very example that’s a concept that hasn’t gone unexplored.
I didn’t make it very clear, but I’m more bothered by a society so saturated with warrior mentality that we infuse agression into the heads of male children with toys, sports, religion, politics and the whole culture built on taking whatever we need by whatever forceful means necessary.
*textbook
Let me clarify…there’s correlation but not necessarily causation.
However, here’s the studies I mentioned earlier…pulling these directly from my psych book-
The violence-viewing effect seems to stem from at least two factors. One in imitation (Geen & Thomas, 1986). As we noted earlier, children as young as 14 months will imitate acts they observe on TV. As they watch, their mirror neurons simulate the behavior, and after this inner rehearsal they become more likely to act it out. One research team observed a sevenfold increase in violent play immediately after children viewed Power Rangers (Boyatzis, 1995). These children, like those we saw earlier in the Bobo doll experiment, often precisely imitated the models’ violent acts, including flying karate kicks. Imitations may also have played a role in the first eight days after the 1999 Columbine HIgh School massacre, when every U.S. state except Vermont had to deal with copycat threats or incidents. Pennsylvania alone had 60 threats of school violence (Cooper, 1999)
“Prolonged exposure to violence also desensitizes viewers; they become more indifferent to it when later viewing a brawl, whether on TV or in real life (Rule & Ferguson, 1986). Adult males who spent three evenings watching sexually violent movies became progressively less bothered by the rapes and slashings. Compared with those in a control group, the film watchers later expressed less sympathy for domestic violence victims, and they rated the victims’ injuries as less severe (Mullin & Linz, 1995)”
These children, like those we saw earlier in the Bobo doll experiment, often precisely imitated the models’ violent acts, including flying karate kicks. Imitations may also have played a role in the first eight days after the 1999 Columbine HIgh School massacre, when every U.S. state except Vermont had to deal with copycat threats or incidents. Pennsylvania alone had 60 threats of school violence
Looks to me like the correlation is between violent acts seen on the news, not movies.
Were there 60 acts of school violence in Pennsylvania the day after The Basketball Diaries premiered? Or did the “imitative behavior” imitate 2 OTHER KIDS, as shown in a story piped into millions TV screens around the clock for a solid week by hysteria-inducing cable news reports?
Too many media pundits wants to blame the movies for “desensitizing” people to violence.
I’m so tired of this. Fucking bullshit. When’s the last time a movie had a death toll of 50,000 children? That’s not a movie. That’s Iraq.
A country deliberately raises teenage boys in a climate of “gaming” rage so that they can be quickly transformed into cheap cannon-fodder murder drones, and then wonders what Hollywood did to “destroy society’s Christian values.”
hey, I’m not saying movie violence doesn’t pummel us. But this summer’s finger-pointing at comic-book violence is misplaced.
Tom and Jerry, Roadrunner and Coyote, Batman and Bane. Those are equivalents. BAM! POW! WHAM! Hulk Smash! That’s anvil-dropped-on-coyote-head violence.
Psychopaths latch onto great art because the art has a powerful pull. The art does not need to be violent to incite their damaged brains to violence.
The examples Sasha provides help to disprove the rickety theory that movie bullets cause bullets to fly in real life. Catcher in the Rye, Romeo and Juliet — these are creations of beauty not instruction books for cruelty.
Smarter people than I have made the argument that seeing brutal tragedies enacted on stage and in films is not a catalyst for violence. It’s cathartic release valve that blows the steam off the pressure in human heads.
Firm believer that pop culture reflects society, not directs it. While public excitement can probably enhance behaviour, the seed has to have been planted already.
I believe Scream said it best with the line “Movies don’t create psychos, movies make psychos more creative”…
Everytime an act of violence like this happens we always look to the cause and try to point the finger on pop culture. The fact is movies, music and video games do not create mental illness. YES James Holmes and the like are mentally ill. What we should be looking at is the lack of resources in the United States for people to get psychiatric treatment or looking to eradicate the stigma that comes along with getting the help that one needs.
sometimes its good to question Hollywood and pop culture. Knee jerk defenses of it help no one. We should always hold the industry accountable the same way we do government. we can’t just bow down and think they are absolved from their impact on society. Heath Ledger, great actor, but his Joker is the the most horrible creation in film history. just the worst about humanity is reflected in that character, and in the nut who killed those people.
To quote Michael Moore — Canadian kids watch the same videos and movies and Canada has about 200 murders a year.
Pop culture does NOT cause these things. I’ve spent my life watching violent movies/tv, playing video games with serious violence (I was obsessed with playing Goldeneye on N64 when I was a teenager), etc. Despite all this, I don’t have a violent bone in my body. Neither am I desensitized to real world violence. Hell, I can barely tolerate the sight of blood.
I’m a psychologist and this kind of murders don’t happen because of movies, music, books, whatever. This type of pure nonsensical acts are that, nonsense it’s the result of the delirium of a psychotic person that god knows what he was thinking about, but to him killing those people made perfect sense and was something he HAD to do, he had a message to prove to himself, NOT to the others, and the regrettable thing of this is that apparently he wasn’t on a complete state of delirium as he sent his collage professor a detailed plan of his attack, meaning he was desperately calling for law of some kind, somebody to stop him because he couldn’t stop, he was obligated to do it, perhaps whatever he thought was the joker “possessed” him. I’ve talked and analysed mental ward patients and this sort of thing is very common in that pathology, it’s something that has always existed in human history and there is no way around it, only the symptom will slightly change according to the culture that surrounds the psychotic. Believe me, no sane person does this kind of random thing and that’s what separate this kind of crimes with terrorism, those evil acts the soldiers do to the prisoners, the Sweden killings, etc. all of those had a MEANING and were intended for the others to see, this had none or it only made sense to himself in his deranged personal world.
Why does this website keep calling the killer, “Jim” Holmes….is he a friend of the site or something?
Oops, I shouldn’t have directly copied over cause now I see I made a few typos when I was on my soapbox late last night, lol
I addressed this before but it’s perhaps more relevant here. While it may not be a direct link perse, psychology has shown that violent media can have an affect on people….this is pretty obvious, just look at how the media shapes our lives when it comes to body image and such. We all have something called mirror neurons in our brain and though these are typically more active in children, adults can still be affected. Another thing that occurs is de-sensitization and studies have shown that after being exposed to sexually violent content the viewers were less likely to show to express empathy and would rate a victim’s wounds as less severe.