Harvey Weinstein, producer of movies like Kill Bill and the upcoming Django Unchained taking the shootings in Aurora, Colorado as a reason to call for a summit of filmmakers, producers, and other Hollywood pezzonovante to discuss what to do about violence in movies. Making sure to pepper his plea with lots of self-serving statements about how sensitive he is.
Dear Harvey, I would ask you to not take this personally, but since it is a personal jab I will say take this extremely personally:
HARVEY
WEINSTEIN
YOU ARE
FULL OF
SHIT!
The psycho douchebag in Aurora wasn't driven to do what he did by any movie violence. He was driven to do it by whatever moral/mental malfunction is currently going on in his head. Whether it's a lesion, a tumor, a chemical imbalance, or a parasitic alien worm it wasn't put there by movie violence.
I even doubt the shooter's claims that he was deluded into thinking he was the Joker. If he really was that sort of delusional he would have dyed his hair Joker green and not Ronald Mcdonald orange. I'm pretty sure even psycho comics fans are just as big nit-pickers as the normal comics fans.
So why is Harvey Weinstein doing this?
Well, we're pretty sure he's not actually going to do anything for real. He's made a lot of money off of violent movies, and I don't see him stopping anytime soon, and I don't really see anyone else joining in on this summit, because everyone besides Weinstein's publicist knows that it's a pointless empty gesture.
The only reason I can see is some vain attempt to look like he's doing something that makes him look like a sensitive soul, as well as more important and influential than he actually is.
So please shut up about any inane pointless summits, I can smell the hypocrisy all the way over here.
Is there definitive proof he's threatened and inflicted physical abuse onto other people, often over things like a single scene in a movie?
ReplyDeleteAlmost everybody who has done business with him talk about the temper tantrums, the threats, and the occasional attempts at physical intimidation, so there must be some truth to it.
ReplyDeletebut as everyone knows, there were NO VIOLENT MOVIES made before around 1980, when Reagan took office. None. I dare you to name a single one.
ReplyDeleteRainforest Giant here,
ReplyDeleteI don't believe an individual movie can set off anything but a person who is primed to go anyway but it can channel the direction they go. Natural Born Killers has been cited as inspiration by more than one killer.
Media coverage is -proven- to effect copycat suicides and homicides. That is the primary reason teen suicides used to recieve little attention. That was why I was stunned to see all the satturation coverage of bullied gay teen suicides. Until I realized that they were more concerned about the agenda than the kids who would be effected by the coverage. Glamorizing these actions in any way ensures some will repeat it that would not have otherwise. We've know this for decades.
So no, Nolan et al are not responsible even indirectly for the madness but how the media responds will shape what is to come.
Media coverage is not proven to do anything of the sort and you are full of it. Teen suicides are, and have always been at an extremely low rate. They are just shocking. Men in their 50s (my age group) commit far more suicides, yet no one ever focuses on their deaths.
ReplyDeleteMedia coverage might on rare occasions affect the form in which a crime occurs, but not whether the crime will exist in the first place. And even then the preence of such "copycat" crimes is grossly exaggerated. How many people were killed with swords after Kill Bill came out? How many people were disarmed by darts being thrown into their hands after Enter The Dragon came out. Pfui to any claim that films cause violence. This is about on a par with the claim in the 1800s that novels led to violence.
No it is not. I'll forgive your rudeness because you've written a nice game thirty years ago. I would think some one who wrote a game that had rules based on numbers would understand you can still have a statistically significant increase in something even if a number is small. The suicide rate of 50 year old men has no bearing on the issue. It is a strawman although, if American media sensationalized it, I am willing to bet there would ge more.
ReplyDeleteAs for not addressing a single point I made, fine. I did not say books or comics or movies made them do it. I said the media could shape how people percieved and responded to the events. I know suicides can and do set off others and how the community deals with the first makes a difference.
While you were writing about eldritch horrors I was cutting kids down from beams off their porch, then a couple months or weeks later finding their classmate or a kid in the next town over in a car with a shotgun in their mouth.
Talk about something you know about.
I know there are teen suicides. I also know they are shocking. It does not mean that media creates them. In fact as the author of a roleplaying game who had the weather the dismal claims of BADD, and the author of a video game (DOOM) which got blamed for Columbine (and was denounced in congress), I have had some experience in dealing with false claims of media-caused violence.
ReplyDeleteFrom 1980 to today, the murder rate in the USA has dropped steadiliy. Has our media been less violent? Over the last decade, violence in Mexico has skyrocketed. Did Mexican movies suddenly get more violent? Canadians watch the EXACT same films and TV shows we do, and except for Furious D of course, they seem remarkably non-violent. For that matter, what is more stereotypical than the looney redneck killer, and yet actual rural folk have an incredibly low rate of violent crime compared to cities. In almost every way, the media fails to depict violence accurately.
I am not sure we differ as much as on my first reaction - you seem not to be saying media causes violence, but that it affects the form which it might take.
If we consider some of the major times that media was blamed for violence (E.C. comics, violent video games, and paper roleplaying games. Even Psycho was cited as the cause of a murder.), to see that the same thing is happening here with Weinstein.