“Considering there have been over 250 other mass shootings so far this year, it’s an almost incomprehensible tragedy,” a petition circulating the US creative community reads. “Something needs to be done.” Yes, they actually used a version of the opening line from a famous exchange in Yes, Prime Minister. “Something must be done,” Sir Humphrey says in satirical impersonation of a typical politician. “This is something. Therefore we must do it.”
The framers of the open letter introducing the petition may, perhaps, have been watching a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. As part of his exhausting campaign against all things “woke”, the comic pondered Hollywood’s responsibilities in the wake of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. “[A] studio spent $10 million to remove Kevin Spacey from a movie,” he said. “But when it comes to the unbridled romanticisation of gun violence — crickets.”
Well, they showed him. Judd Apatow, Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore and Amy Schumer were among those supporting the campaign to alter how the industry deals with guns and the destruction they cause. The letter is definitely something. It is several somethings. And, as we’ve already heard, something needs to be done.
“We will make a conscious effort to show characters locking their guns safely and making them inaccessible to children,” it reads. There is some guff about being “mindful of on-screen gun violence”. If the industry takes heed it will “model gun safety best practices”. The letter comes closest to the old Hollywood Production Code — the notorious strictures that imposed Christian morality for more than 30 years — in a passage suggesting films will “show consequences for reckless gun use”. One thinks of Howard Hawks being bullied into appending “The Shame of the Nation” to the title of Scarface in 1932. Will the next film in Keanu Reeves’s enjoyable avenger sequence be John Wick: How Not to Go About Dispute Resolution?
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To be fair, the letter does address many of the subsequent objections from people who hadn’t actually read the thing. You will reasonably note that Hong Kong, home of the most violent cinema on the globe, has never had a similar problem with random shootings. “Only America has a gun violence epidemic,” the text reads before going on to blame “lax gun laws”. It then swivels back on itself by noting: “We didn’t cause the problem, but we want to help fix it.” How will showing John Wick lock his pistol up after annihilating half of New York help tighten the gun laws?
This is a terrible idea.
Different studies say different things, but Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, recently offered a balanced assessment of the situation. “While I don’t recommend watching a lot of violent movies or playing a lot of violent video games, and think it is not good for one’s mental health, violent media is not where I look when I consider how to reduce gun violence and homicides,” he said.
The petition emerged in the same week that John Hinckley, who, apparently inspired by Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, tried to assassinate then president Ronald Reagan in 1976, was set to be permitted full release from “certain restrictions”. Would Hinckley have behaved differently if Travis Bickle had been more responsible with his firearms? Should Paul Schrader, the film’s writer, have thought twice about the film’s ambiguous ending? No creator can predict how one unbalanced character will respond to a work of art. “Those guys were out there,” Schrader said. “They were out there. I didn’t create them.”
The framers of the petition do not explicitly suggest that violent media does contribute to gun deaths. The argument is woollier. “What happened is awful, but at least we are doing our little bit to make things better,” runs the implied sense. “Now over to you, National Rifle Association.” Something must be done. Having Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible use a trigger lock is something. Therefore we must do that.
So where’s the harm? It’s not as if Hollywood is really going to shun gunplay. When, for a 20th anniversary reissue of ET: The Extra Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg replaced the agents’ guns with walkie-talkies, he was summarily laughed out of town. You might argue that the petition is no more than a respectful gesture.
The problem is the campaign plays straight into the hands of right-wing lobbyists who will blame school shootings on anything other than the free availability of fire arms. It is about drugs. It is about a lack of discipline in the home. It is to do with the decline of religion. More than anything else, they say, it is to do with the godless libertines who run Hollywood and the video-game industry. Following the 2018 shootings in Parkland, Florida, Donald Trump remarked: “The fact is that you are having movies come out, that are so violent, with the killing and everything else, that maybe that’s another thing we need to discuss.” That argument is easier to make when Hollywood itself seems to be in at least partial agreement.
Don’t look here. Look over there.
