month seemed so shocking, irrational and fantastic partly because it was so This wasn't the kind of violence that you expect to see in real life. With its mass carnage and senseless overkill, it resembled something else: the "Oldboy," the Korean revenge thriller cited later by Virginia Tech film (played by Choi Min-sik) who is mysteriously imprisoned for years, and then breaks out and goes on a one-man, if largely gunless, rampage against his rich There are other echoes: "The Killer" and "A Better Tomorrow," two explosive Hong Kong gangster thrillers by director John Woo, in which the supercool Cho affected in real life -- blaze away, a gun in each hand, and kill dozens of people (again, like Cho). Or there are the martial arts movies of Bruce Lee, the samurai adventures of Toshiro Mifune or Tatsuya Nakadai, the spaghetti westerns of Clint Eastwood, "The Killer," "Die Hard" "The bloodbaths in which loners or gangs go on a seeming war against the world, such as "Natural Born Killers," "Bonnie and Clyde" "Clockwork Orange" "The Many of these movies almost seem to prefigure the massacre, and so may the violent screenplays he reportedly wrote in his English classes, blood-drenched psychosis also fed it?
I've got to admit that all these similarities gave me pause. Can someone -- violence? Shouldn't we be worried about the massive doses of cultural violence he may have ingested?
Of course we should. But the more important questions involve what we breeding violence, ever since the 1960 release of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" -- a movie with horrific murder scenes, accused in its day of inspiring copycat killers. And I've always worried more about the toxic effects of censorship than the alleged pollution of the culture.
Still, something as bloody and extreme as the Virginia Tech shootings has to give you pause. The thought of all that suffering, evil and dementia, as well as the history and Some of the parallels have been exaggerated, of course. There's no evidence that Cho saw "Oldboy" or any of the other films mentioned above, or that, even if he did, it would have been a crucial factor in setting him off.
And though Columbine High School killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, did see and emulate "The Matrix" and "Natural Born Killers," in their dress and behavior before their murder spree, it's questionable that those movies were keys to behavior, and there's no reason we should second the attempt. And, in a way, it trivializes the event itself to look for cinematic links. But we shouldn't ignore the effects of culture either.
Or its roots. The real quantum jump in movie violence took place in the late '60s, and it paralleled the bloodshed, shockingly revealed on TV, of the Vietnam War years, as well as, among other things, the escalation of drug-related crime. There's been a parallel opening up and coarsening of the culture.
Some movies treat violence responsibly, with an eye on its consequences, and some don't. In some cases, the moviemakers are less to blame than the system. "Natural Born Killers," for example, may seem to have an amoral effect because the movie's killers, Mickey and Mallory, get away so joyously in the end.
But that the audience. In the original, more effective (and more moral) climax, the More important is the question of why audiences started responding, and continue to respond, to movies that go to violent extremes. Isn't a big part around us, and often feel powerless to cope with it?
The movies, at their worst, exploit this. But at their best, they reveal and explain it. Attractive as it may seem in a time of tragedy such as this, pacifying the movies would probably be merely a cosmetic crusade.
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