The Littleton Massacre: Bang, You're Dead

Revenge fantasies are proliferating in movies and on TV. But should they be blamed for Littleton?

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Revenge dramas are as old as Medea (she tore her sons to pieces), as hallowed as Hamlet (seven murders), as familiar as The Godfather. High drama is about the conflict between shades of good and evil, often within the same person. But it's easier to dream up a scenario of slavering evil and imperishable good. This is the moral and commercial equation of melodrama: the greater the outrage suffered, the greater the justification for revenge. You grind me down at first; I grind you up at last. This time it's personal.

Fifty years ago, movies were homogenous, meant to appeal to the whole family. Now pop culture has been Balkanized; it is full of niches, with different groups watching and playing their own things. And big movies, the ones that grab $20 million on their first weekend, are guy stuff. Young males consume violent movies, in part, for the same reason they groove to outlaw music: because their parents can't understand it--or stand it. To kids, an R rating for violence is like the Parental Advisory on CDs: a Good Housebreaking Seal of Approval.

The cultural gap, though, is not just between old and young. It is between the haves and the self-perceived have-nots of teen America. Recent teen films, whether romance or horror, are really about class warfare. In each movie, the cafeteria is like a tiny former Yugoslavia, with each clique its own faction: the Serbian jocks, Bosnian bikers, Kosovar rebels, etc. And the horror movies are a microcosm of ethnic cleansing.

Movies may glamorize mayhem while serving as a fantasy safety valve. A steady diet of megaviolence may coarsen the young psyche--but some films may instruct it. Heathers and Natural Born Killers are crystal-clear satires on psychopathy, and The Basketball Diaries is a mordant portrait of drug addiction. Payback is a grimly synoptic parody of all gangster films. In three weeks, 15 million people have seen The Matrix and not gone berserk. And Carrie 2 is a crappy remake of a 1976 hit that led to no murders.

Flash: movies don't kill people. Guns kill people. "What's more troubling," asks Steve Tisch, producer of Forrest Gump and American History X, "a kid with a sawed-off shotgun or a kid with a cassette of The Basketball Diaries? It's not just movies. Lots of other wires have to short before a kid goes out and does something like this. It's a piece of a much bigger, more complex puzzle."

Some images in recent films are both repellent and (the tricky part) exciting. Some song lyrics express a rage that's not easy to take as irony. And, yes, a movie or song or TV show may inspire some sick twist to earn satanic stardom with a gun. But most kids deserve the respect their parents wanted when they were kids: to be able to consume bits of pop culture and decide on their own whether it's poetry, entertainment or junk.

There is a lapse in parental logic that goes from "I don't get it" to "It must be evil," and from that to "It makes kids evil." Today, moms and dads gaze at the withdrawn souls across the kitchen-table chasm. They see what their kids wear; they may know what their kids see. But, in another Manson lyric, they "fail to see the anguish in my eyes." Parents should try looking into their kids' eyes. If they do, and do more, they might even "see the tragic/Turnin' into magic."

--With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York

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