By Howard Rosenberg
Los Angeles Times, 23 April 1999
After presenting Terror in Littleton like a blockbuster ratings-sweeps production, TV has become one of its casualties. That’s because some myopic Americans see media as the root of all evil. The mantra: If it’s bad, television–or the movies–caused it. This becomes their knee-jerk response to every violent tragedy, the latest being Tuesday’s slaughter at Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., where the body count soared to 15, courtesy of two gun-blazing, bomb-lobbing members of the school’s Trench Coat Mafia, who capped their efforts by apparently taking their own lives. Now comes the question everyone is asking. What turned Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold–whose class pictures project them as ordinary and benign–into cold-blooded assassins?
Although several possible explanations are being floated, one is especially familiar. “We have to look at television, we have to look at cable,” Colorado Gov. Bill Owens told reporters this week.
Of course, blame TV.
In a fleeting gesture of benevolence, the Rev. Jerry Falwell acknowledged Wednesday night that Hollywood was not entirely to blame for violence in the U.S. Having contributed that, however, no more Mr. Nice Guy. “Certainly the media must take a good part of it [the blame],” Falwell added during a discussion of Littleton on “Hannity & Colmes,” an interview program on the Fox News Channel. “TV and movies have been glorifying violent bloody crime and so forth,” Falwell said. “And now it’s reached critical mass.” Things will get only worse, he predicted, “until we have a spiritual awakening, until we get violence off the screen.”
In other words, scapegoat time.
Falwell passed the anti-TV baton to another easily lathered media watchdog, L. Brent Bozell III, who immediately began frothing over “virtual reality death shows,” with opposition from another guest, former talk-show host Richard Bey. The latter’s insistence that TV “doesn’t make children murderers” was flicked away by Bozell like someone brushing lint from his lapel. As if TV made Harris and Klebold do it, Bozell declared: “Night after night, you are desensitized to very serious issues, and you don’t care about life and death, and you blow people away.” Bozell bleated out the usual statistics about numerous acts of TV violence seen by the average kid watching entertainment shows, ignoring the point that there are probably 10 depictions of goodness on TV for every one of hatred.
Thus, if TV is the icon that some insist, it must be making us nicer, right? Or is hate a more powerful influence than love? In any case, while fishing through his trove of statistics, Bozell omitted those other figures, the latest ones from the FBI showing that violent crime has diminished in the U.S.
The big screen was the program’s next target. Specifically, The Basketball Diaries, a 1995 movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio wore a long black coat while blasting away in a classroom with a shotgun. Parents of three high school kids gunned down by a classmate in West Paducah, Ky., in 1997 are suing makers of The Basketball Diaries, claiming that the movie helped motivate the killer to shoot their children. Just as a paralyzed shooting victim is suing makers of Natural Born Killers, insisting that her assailant was influenced by that film.
CBS said that plaintiffs in both suits were being interviewed for a segment on Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” in which they apparently will issue strong indictments of those movies and other elements of media.
The reality is that there are some among us who might receive a message to kill from Bambi. And what’s to be done about that?
There’s loose talk now about The Basketball Diaries having been a primer in Littleton for Harris and Klebold, who reportedly wore long black coats during their murderous rampage. In that regard, the movie’s alleged homicidal influence didn’t stop “Hannity & Colmes”–nor newscasts everywhere–from repeatedly showing that scene of DiCaprio blowing away classmates in the movie.
Also pondering the villainy of TV vis-a-vis Littleton this week was that buck-skinned smoothie Gerry Spence. Wednesday, on Oprah Winfrey’s syndicated talk show, he preached the catchy gospel (“Once we disarm the heart, we don’t need to disarm anything else”) that he developed the previous night on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” After hearing him, disarming Spence’s tongue seemed like the best idea of all. The famous defense attorney had TV mostly in mind when mentioning the “seeds of violence that we plant in this country.” As evidence that he doesn’t watch TV, he cited movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the “television heroes” serving as role models for kids, asking, “How many does he kill in a night?”
Another guest, Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, pushed hard for child-proofing guns in response to Littleton: “We have safety locks for aspirin, for cars and for lawn mowers. Why do we continue to put guns in a separate category?” King was sympathetic. “It does seem insane, Gerry.” Spence wouldn’t budge. “Well, I tell ya what I think. She’s talking about teaching responsibility to kids, but who’s gonna teach responsibility to the parents? That’s where it starts. It starts with television.” Going from Schwarzenegger to parents to television seemed quite a leap. But like juries that Spence is famous for charming, King never questioned it. Instead, their selective memories merging, King and Spence talked of the good old days. “You know, when you and I grew up,” said Spence, “we had these nice, quiet, soft . . . nobody got . . . we didn’t have blood all over. We didn’t have people’s heads exploding. We didn’t see life as valueless. We saw there were the bad guys and the good guys.”
The talk turned to such super heroes as the Batman of old.
King: “Never killed anybody.”
Spence: “Superman never killed anybody.”
King: “Gene Autry never killed anybody.”
Spence: “In my time it was Tom Mix and Wild Bill Hickok. They shot somebody, but it was nice and clean, and it was always the bad guy.”
In other words, violence presented as “nice and clean” passes the test, but the bloody consequences of violence–as reflected in the gore of Littleton–does not?
King and Spence appeared to be arguing for depictions of violence to be sanitized and glamorized, exactly what antiviolence advocates for years have been arguing against. Wasn’t it Falwell who was objecting to “glorifying violent bloody crime”? Just as critics of The Basketball Diaries object to how cool DiCaprio looks when he pulls the trigger.
Not that it probably matters. Trench coats don’t kill, guns and pipe bombs do.
Contributed by Gail Ames
Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved