My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #46, June 28, 1999

THE FINGER-POINTING CIRCLE

The Littleton shootings have given rise to a circular game of finger-pointing. Liberals and media blame the NRA and gunmakers, conservatives and gunmakers blame the media, and all of them blame the kids and their parents, who blame the gunmakers and the media. Hollywood execs wrap themselves in the first amendment, and gunmakers claim the protection of the second amendment, both saying, "We're not responsible."

Yep, they're irresponsible all right. I don't think we should let people off the hook for their decisions. When dreadful things happen because of our actions, even though we never intended those results, we have to accept responsibility and do what we can to rectify things. It's because the choices we make have consequences that we need to think them through carefully.

Unfortunately, judgment and an understanding of cause and effect are not hardwired into children, nor is empathy for other people. It takes a lot of nurturing and teaching to turn babies, who respond only to their own needs and impulses, into thoughtful, caring adults who understand that their decisions affect other people's lives.

Because we know children have poor impulse control and limited knowledge, we give them a protected legal status. We try to limit their exposure to human nastiness while we teach them higher values. We don't let them make decisions that require maturity, forbidding them to drive or marry or drink or own guns until they've reached some arbitrary "age of reason." Their crimes are usually tried in a juvenile court system because we assume they lacked the judgment to understand what they were doing, and that they might be redeemable.

Of course all the young killers we've learned about this year must be held responsible for their decisions, though we should take their immaturity into account. But they were not the only people whose decisions made the shootings possible, and it is not unreasonable to ask other people to do some hard thinking about the consequences of their actions as well.

The gun industry has chosen to fight all regulation. It has resisted technologies that would make it harder for anybody but the gun owner to use the weapons (which means it also bears some responsibility for thousands of children killed by other children in accidental shootings), and has refused to monitor the activities of its customers, the gun dealers.

With the NRA, it has fought every single rational limit on gun ownership. It resists the very notion of accountability for itself, while demanding it for those who use guns to commit crimes. And yet, without access to large amounts of firepower, even the most immature and disturbed people can't become "Natural Born Killers."

Which brings us to the entertainment industry, which promises advertisers it can change people's buying habits but denies it affects any other kinds of behavior. It recoils in horror at the notion that it has any responsibility when children imitate movie scripts in their killing rampages. Journalists and television producers agonize at length over the effects of television violence even as they turn juvenile murderers into media stars.

The argument is complex, since obviously millions of impressionable young people have seen Basketball Diaries, played Doom, and watched the music video of "Jeremy" without feeling any need to go out and mow down their classmates. The media play to a mass audience, but the effects are always individual.

Writers and directors can't possibly anticipate all the ways their words and images might resonate within individual readers and viewers. No studio could have predicted what John Hinckley would deduce from Taxi Driver, nor could the Beatles have predicted that Charles Manson would construe "Helter Skelter" as a call to murder. Their work is just one little mental input, one little molecule that bumps around inside somebody's brain, interacting in unpredictable ways with the molecules that are already there.

And yet anybody who knows media history realizes that our movies and television shows have always given people models of behavior and mental scripts for social situations. The screwball comedies of the thirties gave us sophisticated models for courtship and flirtation. Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best, in continuous reruns, gave several generations models of warm, supportive motherhood, and wise, all-knowing fatherhood. TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends provide hip models of friendship, while beer ads offer a model for male bonding. Harold and Maude gave determined young losers a script for falling in love with life.

But there is a whole class of entertainment that revels in thoroughly anti-social scripts. The Blaxploitation films of the late 1960's glorified Black revenge against Whitey. The Rambo films and countless imitators glorify male rage, vengeance, and firepower. TV talk show hosts put tacky, stupid, amoral guests on their shows and set them up for a fight. Gordon Liddy, Bob Grant and their ilk offer a closed circle of people who radiate and amplify each other's anger, to the point of joking about assassination and the murders of blacks and gays.

Most people will never act on these anti-social scripts. But because of their omnipresence, it's hard for us not to harbor them in some corner of our brains. When situations come up that we have no idea how to deal with, we tend to search our memories for available scripts to use. If the situation is rage at intolerable injustice, even the kindest and holiest people may find their brains contain scripts for violent retaliation.

Now, any time anybody criticizes the media, the industry instantly screams "Censorship" and insists on its first amendment right to say and present anything it wants. I don't question their rights. I just think responsibilities go along with them. And the greater the power, the greater the responsibility.

Radio station owners and network executives have made choices about what talk show hosts they will carry. Movie studios and producers have made choices about which story ideas they will produce, and about which scenes to use as come-ons to get kids to buy tickets. When they make these decisions, I want them to think about more than money. I want them to think about the kind of scripts they are making available inside the heads of millions of impressionable kids. I want them to consider other choices they could make.

The world is full of radio and television talent with interesting ideas. All the little independent films that have to go to Sundance to get Hollywood to pay attention to them suggest that there are plenty of story ideas and talent out there that the movie studios have ignored. Films like The Dead Poets' Society, The Truth about Cats and Dogs, Saving Private Ryan, and Titanic illustrate that Hollywood can, when it chooses, offer comic, dramatic and moving stories about a far wider range of human experience -- and offer audiences far more usable mental scripts.

I don't want to censor the media -- I just want them to understand their power to influence minds and use it responsibly. I'd like studios to consider showing amoral viciousness as a last resort, rather than the first. All I ask of studio executives is that when they choose which ventures to sink their money into, they think about how they'd like living in a world in which more viewers acted on the mental scripts they have made available.

Of course I want young killers to be held accountable. But I don't want to let off the hook the entertainment industry and the gun manufacturers who made so much money providing their scripts and deadly props.