Same Lame Blame Game… what a shame.
Posted: June 6, 2010 Filed under: Rants, Raves & Randoms | Tags: BBFC, Blame Game, Childs Play 3, Daily Mail, Derrick Bird, Jamie Bulger, Kick Ass, Lady Ga Ga, Mail Online, On Deadly Ground, Severance, Steven Seagal, Telegraph, The Antichrist, violent cinema 4 Comments »
Well, I suppose it was only a matter of time. No doubt we were all shocked when a shooting incident in Cumbria reported on the news just before lunch time on Wednesday developed into a killing spree in which twelve people were murdered by taxi driver Derrick Bird but, following the inevitable and vital search for context, it comes as no great shock that the media would find their way round to once again pointing a finger at film. What is surprising is that it took The Daily Mail so long…
“Further insights into Bird’s mental state were revealed today, as one of the last people to see him alive told how he watched a violent film the night before he went on a shooting rampage.
Best friend Neil Jacques said Bird spent hours pouring out his anger towards his twin brother, David, and solicitor Kevin Commons – who were to become his first victims.
Mr Jacques and Bird then watched violent action film On Deadly Ground, starring Steven Seagal, which features multiple killings.”
Mail Online, 6 June 2010 (full article)
So what is to be made of this? Personally, I don’t think that this is quite as blatant as the attempt to link the killing of Jamie Bulger to Child’s Play 3 (1991), a link that is still generally believed to this day, but is instead the sign of a desperate organisation trying to fill a 24-hour news cycle with any old nonsense (witness the Lady GaGa ‘outrage’ from earlier in the week). Also, judging from recent attempts to pin blame for this or that on films such as Severance (2006) and the ridicule of reactionary reviews for Kick Ass (2010) and The Antichrist (2009) (plus the utter lack of support for the British Board of Film Classification (Accountability to Parliament and Appeals) Bill), it seems that the public has no appetite for these moral crusades. This suggests that whilst many might accept the notion that violent people are likely to enjoy violent entertainment, there is no longer a popular consensus that the latter is responsible for the former and to seriously suggest there is feels less like a condemnation of violence in cinema and more like an attack on the mental capacity and individual free will of the reader.
…oh dear, it seems that The Telegraph has got onto this since I started writing this post with a lovely article in which they do a great job of wilfully mis-characterising the ponytailed one’s inane blowing up a massive industrial site to save the environment lecture / borefest in order to force some kind of parallel with the terrible events in Cumbria.
I’m shocked as hell nobody pointed a finger at “Taxi Driver” THE FILM. Maybe it was too obvious, but that’s where I’d go, if I were to play the “let’s blame a random visual art form for someone’s unhappiness.”
well, there was a later article from the Daily Mail that said he watched Exit Wounds… still Steven Seagal but perhaps someone actually watched On Deadly Ground and thought it wasn’t violent enough.
This is ridiculous… however, I typically feel violent after watching Seagal movies… mainly because I’m enraged at how horrible they are!
Sometimes people snap… Do they realize that? What about blaming the easy availability of firearms or the underlying reasons for why he snapped in the first place instead of a goddamn Steven Seagal movie?