-Caveat Lector-
>From Int'l Herald Tribune
Paris, Saturday, April 24, 1999
Out of the Dark, Into the Mainstream: America's Cult of Violence
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
By Kevin Merida and Richard Leiby Washington Post Service
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
WASHINGTON - In what used to be the dark corners of American culture, there
are a prime-time cartoon with a neo-Nazi character, comics that traffic in
bestiality, movies that leave teenagers gutted like game, and fashion
designers who peddle black-leather masks and doomsday visions.
It's all in the open now, mass-produced and widely available. Celebrated
even. On countless personal computers, killing is a sport. And then there's
Marilyn Manson, a popular singer who named himself after a mass murderer and
proclaims he is the Antichrist.
Film, television, music, dress, technology, games: They've become one giant
playground filled with accessible evil that is darker than ever.
After any tragedy involving children, commentators strive to find cultural
signifiers that will somehow explain the carnage. Fifteen dead in a
prosperous suburban high school? The killers part of a clique dubbed the
Trench Coat Mafia? The reach for explanation is irresistible.
Some will consult the lyrics of Marilyn Manson and the German industrial
band KMFDM or cue up a video of ''The Basketball Diaries.'' Others will
peruse the new comic book ''The Trenchcoat Brigade.'' And did anyone notice
that the friend of the killers being led away Tuesday was wearing a black
''South Park'' T-shirt featuring the cartoon character Kenny, who is
bloodily dispatched in every episode?
And yet any such zeroing-in may overlook the bigger picture: For young
people, the culture at large is bathed in blood and violence, a Grand
Guignol where the more extreme the message, the more over-the-top
gruesomeness, the better.
Consider this: Of the 11 major movies released on video in the United States
since April 6, seven have violent themes. ''Apt Pupil'' is about a
high-schooler obsessed with Nazism, ''American History X'' is about the rise
and fall of a skinhead, and ''I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,'' a
teen-slasher sequel.
''There's no question in my mind that film and society interrelate,'' said
Douglas Brode, a professor of film at Syracuse University and author of 18
books on movies. ''And not just film but music, video games, all of it.
There is a connection.
''It may be tangential; it may be tight,'' he said. ''Nobody knows for
sure.''
It is surely one of the great debates of this decade: Does the culture
simply reflect the dark, decadent times in which we live? Or is society the
way it is because the proprietors of culture have run amok?
Take ''Basketball Diaries,'' the 1995 movie based on Jim Carroll's
autobiographical book about his tumble from New York City high-school
basketball star to heroin addict. In the film there is a dream sequence in
which Leonardo DiCaprio, wearing an ankle-length black-leather coat and
brandishing a 3-foot-long (1-meter) rifle, walks into his high-school
classroom and starts blowing away students. One by one. In slow motion. To a
score of rock music.
Kills his teacher, too.
His friends in the class are saluting each other with celebratory high fives
and laughing.
So was Bryan Goluboss, the screenwriter, drafting from reality to make his
screenplay authentic? Or was his creation copied by real students in
Littleton, Colorado, who wore real trench coats and blew away their real
peers?
''Basketball Diaries'' already was cited as a factor in the shooting two
years ago of three students in West Paducah, Kentucky. Authorities said the
14-year-old shooter in that incident may have planned his attack after
watching the movie.
In the wake of this latest tragedy, Mr. Brode urges taking a wide look.
''The way I see it,'' he said, ''is there is not more darkness or more
lightness than before. It's that everything is more extreme today. The middl
e is gone. The darkness is darker than before.''
In the past six years, as computing power has increased, computer games have
become horrifically realistic and horrifically vicious. An entire genre of
games, called ''first-person shooters,'' encourages the player to dismember
monsters and slay people.
The trend began with ''Wolfenstein 3D,'' a game in which an American soldier
in a Nazi prison must kill Hitlerlike people to survive. Today there are
such games as ''Postal,'' in which the goal is to slaughter bystanders.
The cover of the game ''Blood II'' promises: ''Over 30 screamingly fast
totally immersive blood-soaked levels! Run a savage gauntlet of multiplayer
mayhem from BloodFeud to BloodBath for Maximum BloodShed!''
Mike Davila, editorial director of GameWeek, a trade magazine, said:
''They're incredibly violent, and they're the most popular games on PCs
right now. The object is to kill people; you see chunks of the body flying
in different directions.''
Eric Harris, one of the shooters in Littleton, reportedly was an expert
player of Doom, a shooter game introduced in 1994 by id Software of Texas.
Doom's marketing strategy was hard to resist: The game was given away over
the Internet. Players could customize their killing rooms, selecting from a
cache of weapons. They could add new levels by paying for software.
At least a half-million copies of Doom were sold or distributed. Doom led to
Quake, a $50 game that has sold about 700,000 copies.
The similarity between such high-tech pursuits and the high-school slaughter
was obvious to Joe Rosenthal, an editor of Rolling Stone's on-line service:
''It's as if these kids were playing a game of Doom, going from room to
room, shooting people up, using multiple weapons.''
Mr. Rosenthal was among those sifting for clues in the lyrics Eric Harris
left behind in his America Online user profile. The lyrics were from the
band KMFDM, which released its final album Tuesday. Some are brutal and
nihilistic - ''Iron will,'' ''Born to kill'' and the like - but no more
shocking than hard-core rap music or any other forms that have flourished
since the advent of punk music in the 1970s.
Much armchair analysis dealt with the subculture of Goth music, a genre
characterized by gloomy lyrics and a poetic fascination with misery. Goth
rock captures teenage angst, its adherents say, and does not promote
violence.
''If wearing black makes you Goth, then Johnny Cash must be awfully Goth,''
said Sam Rosenthal, owner of the label Projekt, whose Goth acts include Love
Spirals Downwards and Black Tape for a Blue Lady.
Increasingly, musicians must push the edges of taste because it is truly
difficult to shock their audiences. When your parents grew up with rock and
roll and still flock to concerts by the Rolling Stones, how do you rebel
against them?
The slide to the shocking takes many forms. You can see it in ''professional
wrestling,'' whose televised stompfests bring a ratings bonanza. You can see
it in cartoons such as ''South Park,'' ''Futurama,'' which Tuesday night
featured a planet run by robots whose goal is to kill all humans, and
''Family Guy,'' a cartoon about an infant neo-Nazi who keeps killing people.
Dark themes pervade the comic-book industry, too. The trend started in 1986,
according to some industry watchers, with ''Batman: The Dark Night Returns''
and ''Watchman.'' In one, Batman ruthlessly kills off bad guys to clean up
the city. The other is a murder mystery in which someone keeps snuffing out
superheroes who are found to be flawed characters.
''Both were hugely influential,'' said Joel Pollack, the owner of Big Planet
Comics in Bethesda, Maryland. ''They both had a very dark vision.''
More recently there have been such over-the-edge comic books as
''Preacher,'' in which child abuse and bestiality are subtexts and
obscenities and blood flow.
Fashion is not exempt.
In March 1996, the British designer Alexander McQueen showed his work in New
York for the first time. As a setting, he chose a darkened synagogue, an
imposing structure with sharp angles and filled with flickering candles.
Amidst a display of corseted jackets and asymmetrical hemlines were such
accessories as a half-mask adorned with a crucifix and a silver ''crown of
thorns.'' Subsequent collections have included metal leg braces and arm
cuffs.
The fashion industry has for years been enamored with the dark side of life,
the murky underground and a nihilistic sensibility. A generation of young
designers has stepped into the foreground with a doomsday vision of the
future; their work is marked by a black palette, a fetishist relationship to
sexuality and a view of the environment as hostile, even deadly.
This dark view of the world is one of the most powerful examples of the way
in which fashion acts as a sponge, with designers pointedly absorbing
inspiration from music, the nightclubs and the street.
Designers such as Olivier Theyskens, Veronique Branquinho and Mr. McQueen
all have grown up on a steady diet of visions of gunplay and rampant,
sometimes eroticized, violence.
Just like the teenage shooters of this decade.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
A<>E<>R
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
