“I can see where it would drive somebody crazy”

By Tom Quiner

Should we blame Hollywood?

Peter Bogdanovich

Is the pornography of violence they’ve lavished on our culture for the past generation responsible for the spike in public mass murder?

I suggested there’s more to it than that in my post last week, “The corrosion of humanity.”

Pornographic, violent entertainment that targets young men is epidemic. But does that really make some folks snap?

Yes, suggests iconic Hollywood director, Peter Bogdanovich:

“People go to a movie to have a good time, and they get killed. It’s a horrible, horrible event. It makes me sick that I made a movie about it.”

Mr. Bogdanovich refers to a film he made in the 60s called “Targets,” starring Boris Karloff:

“It was based on something that happened in Texas, when that guy Charles Whitman shot a bunch of people after killing his mother and his wife. Paramount bought it, but then was terrified by it when Martin Luther King was killed and Bobby Kennedy was killed. The studio didn’t want to release the film at all. So they released it with a pro-gun-control campaign, but that made the picture seem like a documentary to people, and it didn’t do too well.”

Charles Whitman was the first public mass murderer that I was aware of, since it happened when I was about to enter Junior High School. I found the whole idea of random, mass violence unsettling. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to randomly kill a whole bunch of strangers. Bogdanovich said Targets was meant as a cautionary fable:

“It was a way of saying the Boris Karloff kind of violence, the Victorian violence of the past, wasn’t as scary as the kind of random violence that we associate with a sniper — or what happened last weekend. That’s modern horror. At first, some of the people [at The Dark Knight Rises] thought it was part of the movie. That’s very telling.”

Bogdanovich admits Hollywood violence has gotten out of hand:

“Violence on the screen has increased tenfold. It’s almost pornographic. In fact, it is pornographic. Video games are violent, too. It’s all out of control. I can see where it would drive somebody crazy.”

In this land of free speech, what do we do about this kind of entertainment?

I propose self-censorship. Liberal elites impose censorship on the rest of the country via political correctness. I suggest the time has come to turn their focus on their buddies in Hollywood who are polluting the minds of our kids.

If they don’t, what in the world does that say about them?