Posted on 07/26/2012 8:21:25 AM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
Peter Bogdanovich, the legendary director, has broken ranks with his Hollywood brethren. He may never eat lunch in that godless town again.
In a disarmingly-honest first-person jeremiad appearing in the August 3 issue of the Hollywood Reporter, the auteur known for such films as “The Last Picture Show,” “Paper Moon” and “Mask” indicts the motion picture industry for playing a role in last week’s massacre in Colorado.
“People go to a movie to have a good time,” said Bogdanovich, “and they get killed.”
“At first,” he noted, some of those watching the massacre unfold inside the theater, “thought it was a part of the movie. That’s very telling.”
The director lamented, “Violence on the screen has increased ten-fold. It’s almost pornographic… It’s all out of control. I can see where it could drive someone crazy.”
Bogdanovich wasn’t just ranting in the wake of tragedy. He was speaking truth.
Indeed, Ameirca’s youth are inured to violence through saturation exposure to violence-laden movies, like “The Dark Knight Rises,” as well as television shows and video games.
Before the average American child even finishes elementary school, he or she will view 100,000 acts of violence just on TV, including some 8,000 murders. And when they become old enough to go to the movies without their parental units, they’ll see even more ersatz violence.
Of course, most of Bogdanovich’s Hollywood brethren (and sistren) will strenuously object to suggestions that the violence and mayhem they are putting on the screen has any effect whatsoever on mass murderers like 24-year-old James Holmes.
But there is prima facie evidence of the influence Hollywood has on the hoi polloi.
All the way back in 1934, Columbia Pictures released “It Happened One Night,” a romantic comedy starring Clarke Gable and Claudia Colbert. In one memorable scene, Gable took of his shirt and revealed his bare chest.
In so doing, the actor inspired millions of American men to abandon their undershirts, temporarily devastating the nation’s T-shirt manufacturers.
More recently, there was the 1982 science fiction movie, “E.T.,” starring young Henry Thomas and a very young Drew Barrymore. In one noteworthy scene, the character played by Thomas lures an extraterrestrial out of hiding by dropping Reese’s pieces on the ground.
For months, Reese’s pieces were the most popular candy in America.
Warner Bros., the movie studio that released “Dark Knight Rises,” did not cause the bloodshed in Colorado last week. I still maintain that young man Holmes was operating under demonic influence.
But Warner’s certainly contributed.
In the previous installment of its Batman franchise, the most compelling character was not Batman, the good guy, but the Joker, who delighted in murder and mayhem.
That clearly was an inspiration to Holmes, who went so far before his real world killing spree as to dye his hair red in worshipful tribute to Warner’s evil-doing character.
THIS WAS AN OCCUPY MAN ...HE HAS NO VALUES SO HOW COULD HE BE INFLUENCED . EVEYONE THAT SEES A MURDER MOVIE DOESNT KILL
I thought that was debunked as a NO 1-2 days after the shooting?
Generally speaking, Hollywood has brutalized our society.
Somehow, these entertainment people think that gratuitously depicting violence and other shocking and outrageous conduct and events IS art.
THAT was never art.
People without talent think that excesses in depicting deviancy and shocking images will mask their lack of talent. Shock is meant to take the place of authenticity or originality.... for them THAT is art.
NOT!
I think violent movies desensitize to a degree but I don't want censorship by a bureaucracy either...that would be a worse "cure'
Hollywood lacks the moral and cultural wisdom to recognize the destruction they create in the real world. We need movie control. There are certain movies that people don’t need to see in theaters, or have in their homes. They are assault movies, and they need to be regulated. In addition, there should be a national registry of movie goers, one that can be reviewed by the FBI to see which movie goers, or owners, might frequent too many of the wrong kinds of movies. Laws and regulations have to be written to stop the bitter movie clingers.
I want movies to be realistic..good or bad..For instance, I like the current westerns with sweaty, grubby, defective, real to life characters.. Don't want to go back to the 1950's fake Westerns of cowboys in pressed pants and the women in perfect makeup and salon hair.
I think they do, and also the computer gaming people. For the longest time, before there were so many good sports games, almost all of the earlier computer games involved shooting. A large portion of kids grew up blasting away with all sorts of weapons. I think a lot of it stuck in kids.
Guns don’t kill people, Movies don’t kill people
You started to get me scared after the second sentence...then I read the rest and no more worries..at least I hope you meant sarcasm...
The entire movie-tv-media culture has about destroyed traditional American culture
because we let too many foxes in our henhouse
Hollywood would correctly respond that the individual, and not the movies he watches, should be held to blame for the atrocity he commits. But, hypocritically, most of the Hollywood leftists would blame the gun and not the individual in any argument about gun control. And if the criminal were black, the leftist would blame racism and the oppressive white culture surrounding the individual, but neither the movies he watches nor the video games he plays should be held accountable. Having been in these conversations many times I’ve ceased trying to convince the thought-disordered liberal of anything.
No, it doesn’t.
James Holmes bears every last bit of responsibility.
Knock it off, stupid America.
There’s a big big difference between buying candies and committing violent acts.
And I think the idea of people being inured to violence by the movies is silly. I was just discussing this while watching the season finale of Deadliest Catch with the wife Tuesday. I’m a fan of Dario Argento, I’ve seen some of the most violent movies ever committed to film, never a flinch. In the beginning of Tuesday’s DC a guy gets his finger caught in the wrong place and loses the first segment of one of his fingers, I squirmed for the whole scene. There’s a big gap between movie violence and real blood.
Meanwhile of course during the age of violent entertainment, from the first release of the video game Doom in 1993 to now, the violent crime rate has dropped by more than half.
It stands to reason that if advertising on television and radio can influence people to buy products or even modify their lifestyles based on the content they see, that sex and violence in media can change the culture in the direction of increasingly gratuitous sex and escalating violence.
As early as 1964, Marshall McLuhan coined the famous phrase "the medium is the message" in writing about mass communications in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, a long treatise on the social effects of media, and how media changes culture not just according to its content, but by its very presence and capabilities. We see this today in people's toxic involvement with social media, dangerous self-disclosures and addictive gaming.
Hollywood has found that in seeking profits in international markets, media content with dialogue and subtle, culture-bound nuances do not make a lot of money with the prime media user group, young males. Violence and sex, however, need no explanation or subtitles; therefore they are cash producers for media producers.
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* The University of Pennsylvania is not to be confused with Penn State of recent notoriety. The University of Pennsylvania, nicknamed Penn or UPenn, is an Ivy League university located within the City of Philadelphia, and was founded in 1740 by Benjamin Franklin -- before there were "states."
***Generally speaking, Hollywood has brutalized our society.***
I remember when the movie critics were agast at the “sadistic movie” DR NO back in 1963. It was still so safe you could drop off your kids to see it.
Then in 1968 Bobby Kennedy got shot. The MSM blamed violece on TV! Toy guns! comic books! TV shows! The NRA! Saturday night specials! Army surplus rifles and handguns!
TV shows dumbed down and became kiddie oriented shows. Comic books backed off the violence for a while. Toy guns disappeared from the shelves. Congress passed that travesty the 1968 gun control law. Movies from 1940-1968 were recut to remove any violence before being shown on TV.
But the movies? They said they would police themselves with a joke of a rating system.
Hot digidy! Censorship was gone! The screens began to drip blood and sex like you wouldn’t believe. Some new movies had scenes re-shot to make them more sexual or bloody. The most vile language came over the sound system. It has gotten worse.
“R” rated movies are aimed at pre-18 aged teens, knowing they will find a way to get in to the theater.
Now we got video games in which you can blast your way through a series of zombies or other attackers.
It will get worse.
Is a bear catholic?
Pssst
Down here,
down here
We have to keep this very quiet. Hollywood earns millions and millions of dollars from companies simply to have a product placed or used in a movie. While not a word is said, millions of viewers will buy something simply because the hero uses it. Or they’ll repeat a saying simply because the hero uses it. But when one of these kind of events occurs, just remember to say that movies have absolutely no effect on the viewers. But be careful around our advertisers, because we like the money, and everything people see in movies DOES influence them.
It CAN be done and done well without rubbing my face in excessive displays of deviant behavior, pervasive ugliness meant to depict ‘reality’, gratuitous gore and violence.
It would take actual filmcraft, originality and you'd call THAT art... succeeding without descending to smut and brutality!
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