I'm a mass murderer many times over, and I must be stopped. I've shot numerous people, sometimes multiple times, beheaded innocents and slaughtered countless turtles and ghosts. I've hunted and been hunted, all in what might be best called "ways of killing time." I've taken on the Empire, the Russians, fellow British secret agents, and my own brother Luigi. When I haven't killed anything, I've watched others kill (serial killers with fey British accents, undead drowning victims with a beef against randy teenagers, space aliens, and Nicolas Cage) and done nothing to stop such crime waves. I am truly a monster.
I am being facetious, of course. But in the wake of the UC-Santa Barbara killing spree last week, and the revelation that the scumbag who perpetrated the attacks was posting his rants online prior to his dastardly deeds, the media has seized upon the pop-culture impact on the killer's state (instead of asking how it is that someone obviously deranged was able to get ahold of guns). You've no doubt heard a lot about nerd culture, nerd entitlement, misogyny, and how movies and video games turn otherwise harmless nerdy guys into stone-cold killers with no moral compass.
And to be fair, there's something to that: unbalanced people will take something that they see, read, or hear, and twist it so that they can "relate" to it. So will normal people, however. If you've never seen a movie or TV show and found yourself identifying with a character or two, then the people who wrote and made that show or movie have failed.
Because debating the gun laws in this country is hard to do without pissing off segments of society who make their bread and butter on protecting gun owners (and because Hollywood doesn't have a lobby as powerful as the NRA to back them up), we've decided instead to blame Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow for the killing spree. Well, alright, though I think that's a stretch. But it's far easier to say that culture has an influence on the way we think and act.
Of course culture has that kind of impact on us, if it's to be culture that sustains itself in the wake of countless imitators, usurpers and the like. Who doesn't like a good (or bad) action movie in which a lot of shit gets blow'd up? Who doesn't enjoy a movie where a good-looking woman gets naked for no apparent reason? I remember how, when the Columbine killers did their nasty deeds in '99, the media seized upon the fact that they both loved Marilyn Manson. It's far easier to look at what a killer likes or collects (besides victims) than to ask if the laws we have in place, the ones that are supposed to protect us, are faulty and out of date.
Much has been made of the killer trolling internet message boards, talking about how much he hates women. Sadly, he's just one of many such voices of frustrated and horny men who, for whatever reason, lack success in the romance department. I also suck at dating and relationships, and I've probably vented about that to friends, acquaintances, random strangers online. But I know that women aren't merely pieces of meat, there for our visual enjoyment and lustful gaze. Movies exist on the lustful gaze, of course, and it's no wonder that attractive women have had little trouble getting film roles since the dawn of cinema. And the quality of "to-be-looked-at-ness" is a major reason why we go to romantic comedies or raunchy sex comedies equally, because we want to see what the girls are going to look like. It's easy to forget, when presented with an unreality on several fronts (the expanded size of the woman due to the screen, the fact that she's an actress playing a character, the amount of make-up needed to render her blemishes invisible, etc.), that we're seeing something that isn't real. Movies have to suspend your disbelief in order to work, no matter how contrived the plots or situations (how many times has a community center *really* been saved by a dancing competition?). They have to suck you in; the problem occurs when you find it hard to get out.
Mental illness is a serious issue, of course, and just as serious as gun laws. So naturally we once again would rather talk about how bad Inglorious Basterds is on the minds of impressionable teenagers than the real issues (with guns, availability; with mental illness, unavailability of help).
No, it is easier to blame the boogeyman of pop culture, the countless images we see of murders and sex-crazed maniacs, than to ask if we should really have the right to bear arms. I'm gonna confess, I don't know what the solution is for killers like the guy at Isla Vista. It would be nice if we could ban all firearms, but Wayne LaPierre (who kills teenagers in their dreams in his spare time) and the NRA have a point: responsible gun owners deserve the right to have their guns. Mental health should be more looked-after, but it's hard to tell when someone is having a bad day and when they're gonna climb the nearest clock tower and unleash their rage on the world.
I know that, thanks to pop culture, I have been influenced in ways I didn't think I had been. Music is big for me, and I spend a lot of time thinking about it, reading about it, writing about it, and listening to it. I love to read, I love movies, and I enjoy the occasional violent film, no matter how many nightmares it might give me (the original Alien especially; I'm too much of a pussy to watch it all the way through, though I've seen quite a bit of it). I do sometimes fall into the notion that someone onscreen is "like" me, because that's what a good screenwriter does: he makes the characters relatable. And I have my crushes on actresses whose physical appearance pleases me. But I know that pop culture runs on illusions, illusions that, no matter how convincing they are, are just that. This doesn't take away from their power to sway me, but I do need to keep it in mind (as do all people). No, Seth Rogen didn't kill those people, anymore than John Carpenter, Jason Vorhees, or the Super Mario Brothers. But it's a lot easier to blame them than it is to blame the guy who did it, the real monster who doesn't need fangs or claws when he's got guns and knives. Let's remember that you can blame all the movies and songs you want, but in the end it's the guy whose finger is on the trigger who is to blame, not the movies he watched.
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