The year was 1983. Director Brian De Palma, writer Oliver Stone, and actor Al Pacino, better known to some as Tony Montana, would make Scarface the grandaddy of all glorious Hollywood mass murder massacres.
Gangster movies had long since been a staple in American movies. However, these action shootouts tend to undergo much scrutiny when a nation sees its citizens fall victim en masse to the trigger-happy hands of a single shooter of multiple semi-automatic weapons.
Mass shootings like the one that occurred in Sandy Hook have become quite routine in the U.S. By this time, we’ve all lost count how many, but we’re accustomed to the caravan that follows.
Cable news networks resurrect the issue of gun control.
Film outlets point a finger at Hollywood.
Hollywood cancels anything that remotely resembles the silhouette of a gun.
Following the Sandy Hook shooting, Discovery Communications, Inc. canceled its new season of American Guns, a reality show about a family of gun makers.
Paramount Pictures canceled its Pittsburgh premiere of Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, which features Cruise as a cold-blooded former military sniper.
Fox pulled graphic trailers for its upcoming serial drama The Following – just like trailers of Gangster Squad were pulled following the Aurora shooting.
The Weinstein company canceled a Los Angeles premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, although the movie had a New York premiere last week.
The road only ends after we’ve discovered the depths of an intelligent but troubled though misguided soul, ratings have declined, the last premature bodies have been buried, and the ambulance chasers in news rooms have found a shiny new toy to entice them. (Fiscal cliff, anyone?)
Meanwhile, serious issues like gun control flounder in the ebb and flow of media hype.
Voices of dissent abound.
Violence is necessary. It creates drama and tension. It spices up films and heightens your adrenaline.
Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
Video games and movies don’t teach people bad things. These are the same people who say children shouldn’t look up to athletes and entertainers as role models.
Let’s all consume hours upon hours of entertainment and then pretend that we are not affected by it.
Star of Django, Jamie Foxx maintained that movies do have influence:
“We cannot turn our back and say that violence in films or anything that we do doesn’t have a sort of influence. It does.”
Tarantino, however, disagrees with the revolving spotlight on violence in his films:
“I just think you know there’s violence in the world, tragedies happen, blame the play-makers,” he said, adding: “It’s a western. Give me a break.”
That being said, violent films, TV shows, and video games do make easy scapegoats for senseless tragedies.
It’s true, millions of people watch violent movies and do not imitate those violent acts. But one must ask: if these films have absolutely no influence on American culture and individuals, then why are media companies so quick to cancel premieres in the event of shootings?
There was a time when tobacco companies insisted their products did not impose harmful effects on individuals… and then they got warning labels.
The action genre, however, has suffered (substantively if not financially) ever since it became a tribute to ammunition and artillery. There used to exist a time when action movies had story and plot and not just trails of bullet casings demarcating the path from fade in to fade out.
There’s a difference between action movies in America and other nations. There’s a difference in the number of bullets fired, the number of people wounded and killed. But do these nuances matter?
Normally, it’s a credit to receive a superlative – most athletic, most attractive, most likely to succeed. Roger Ebert called the 1932 Howard Hanks movie Scarface “the most violent gangster film of its time.”
Lucky for us, Hollywood keeps outdoing itself.
To say that Hollywood is spring on guns would be to say quite the contrary – that American society itself is strung on violence. We enjoy to see people die on the screen, get shot, skulls split open, bowels opened, limbs dismembered, you name it. That’s what we enjoy!
We also enjoy other people’s sufferings. Like watching people die in parts of Africa with civil war.
We just enjoy violence!
We enjoy it also because it puts food on our table. We sell people guns for civil war, we sell our own Americans guns to defend/kill another and the list goes on.
Of course, Hollywood is just a free-rider in a system that feeds on the poor, the desolate even to the extent of killing them with lots of guns.
But it ain’t Hollywood’s fault. Far from it! What they make is a reflection of society, our psyche, no matter how we want to think about it.
Alas! Whose fault?
The system is broken, we have to fix it – Hollywood can help; by cutting down the ammunition barrage they display in their movies.
Movies will still be good if we are spared the gory details. The French do it and as Ann has point out here, “there’s a difference between action movies in America and other nations. There’s a difference in the number of bullets fired, the number of people wounded and killed. ”
The nuances of course matter!
Do you want freedom or not?
Some have called for ‘Hazing’ Hollywood. And I disagree. This is America – land of the free! We shd be free to buy as many guns – though pay the price when we use our freedom to hurt others. This is America!
Hollywood is free to make money how they know best. You can decide to see their films or boycott them – that my friend is called Freedom. The country was founded that way. Now you wonna change it? Why?
Because we now have so many people immigrating into America now whose forefathers hated freedom – the people we had run away from. Now that they are here and enjoying the freedom our fathers shed blood for, they are conniving again to loot us, to loot our freedom.
No, it will not happen.
And Quentin Tarantino is right, “its a freaking western yo!”
Would you care to elaborate on how the AR-15 which was used by a community-college-bound 20 year old to ‘loot’ 20 free 5 yr olds lives qualifies as your America?
The America you want to call free, dear friend, is not free anymore when 26 people can be robbed of their freedom in seconds. Or let me put it your way; when 26 people minding their gaddamn business have their lives looted, and many thousands have their family members looted from them in seconds, it’s more than sad, more than unAmerican!
The America you want – the free one – is what some of us are fighting for. It’s only sad that your mis-education fails your comprehension of the issue at hand here.
“Where does your freedom end and mine start?” — the age old unresolved question of democracy once again rules its ugly head amongst us.