Lazy screenwriters, the lazy MPA, and American gun violence
If the pen is mightier than the sword, why are so many people dying?
No, I’m not going to blame Hollywood and video games for gun violence. I think it’s pretty clear that movies don’t cause violence, otherwise we’d all be dead by now. But the fact the military uses video games for training should tell you something. And so should the fact that Hollywood dialogue is a mainstay of military culture (and obviously culture in general).
Movies teach us that a hero’s journey isn’t complete until every bad guy is dead. Video games teach us that you can’t get to the next level without killing everyone. This is our shared narrative, our shared understanding of how to win the game.
What do you think goes through the head of EVERY mass shooter?
We are all the hero in our heads. Shooters (who don’t kill themselves) often relay a dissociative state during the act where they don’t feel like they’re in control and they just kill and kill until there are no targets left. Guess who’s in control when they’re not? Their programming. Their biases. The narratives that shape their consciousness.
You, dear screenwriter, are in control. And you’re doing a crappy job.
Ain’t Nobody’s business
I went and saw Nobody this weekend where Bob Odenkirk plays a retired government assassin pulled out of retirement to avenge…. stuff or something or other. Maybe just to scratch an itch? I’d be hard pressed to connect all the story dots, suffice to say there are evil Russians.
I enjoyed the movie. I’d even go so far as to recommend it. Bob Odenkirk was great. Christopher Lloyd was great. The bad guys were tough and charismatic.
But Bob Odenkirk, and by proxy, screenwriter Derek Kolstad kill a lot of people. It’s not surprising. Kolstad is famous for his mass killings. He previously killed around 91 people in John Wick, around 119 people In John Wick: Chapter 2, and around 167 in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum.
What frustrated me about Nobody were the lost opportunities. There’s clever dialogue, reasonably clever plot twists, but most of Kolstad’s clever came in the form of violence. Clever injuries, clever fights, and, over and over again, clever shootings. Bob Odenkirk and Christopher Lloyd are in the same film and they’re only in one scene together. Bob Odenkirk and his brother, played by RZA, share almost no screen time together.
Dear Derek Kolstad, that’s lazy writing. You can do better.
Great expectations
These types of violent depictions feed the mental illness of shooters. They help create a fantasy where killing all of your perceived enemies is possible. And the bodies add up, except, these aren’t just movie extras without a line of dialogue, they’re real people:
Las Vegas, 58
Orlando, 49
Virginia Tech, 32
Sandy Hook, 27
Sutherland Springs, 26
Columbine, 13
Aurora, 12
Boulder, 10
It’s likely impossible to count total video game deaths. I hesitate to even ponder. My own deaths in Halo and Gears of War must number in the thousands.
The aggregate death toll of every movie and TV show is almost impossible to count, much like the death toll of American mass shootings.
For f**k’s sake
An interesting tidbit about the Motion Picture Association (MPA) is that a single use of the F word will garner a PG-13 rating instead of a safer, family-friendly PG rating. A second F word guarantees an R rating. There is no correlation between ratings and body count.
Why the f**k do we care more about language than violence?
Literally no one has ever been killed by an F Bomb.
The MPA rated Nobody R for “strong violence and bloody images, language throughout and brief drug use.” This is an understatement. And lazy.
I’m no Tipper Gore, but I think we need more clarity in MPA ratings. I can count every damn gram of carbs in my Fruit Loops. I’d like to know how many people I’m going to watch die before I go into a movie.
If the body count is over 10, I might skip that film since I just saw 10 people die a few weeks ago a mile from my office.
Be more clever
After I started writing this, I stumbled across a great piece in Scientific American by Dr. Abrar Karran, arguing that the film industry should take some responsibility for its contribution to gun violence.
I would focus my plea to the writers and directors who choose to fuel this fire every day:
High body counts don’t make a hero. Stop killing so many people. Don’t be lazy. Write a couple more scenes with Lloyd and Odenkirk together.
Filmmaker Jean Luc-Godard once famously posited that all you need for a film is a girl and a gun.
I think those days are over.
