The horror at Newtown, Connecticut put a damper on the unending rounds of end-of-year parties. And that includes my own Christmas blast at the Boom-Boom room in honour of Lindsay Lohan and some of the prettiest girls in the Big Bagel. At times I think I missed my vocation: Protector-Confessor of fallen women or those about to take the plunge. My only salvation lies in good old Helvetia, where the mother of my children will whip me back into shape in no time. No booze, no sex — just salads and mineral water. Ugh! Mind you, I’m not so sure about my marriage to Miss Lohan. Too many cops around her, and they make me nervous. My party began at nine in the evening and eight hours later was still going. My bill was bigger than the Greek debt, and then some.
Ironically, I had driven by Newtown the day before the massacre of innocent children on my way to Newport Rhode Island to inspect a sailing boat up for sale that was once owned by my father. (The brave and extremely fast Nefertiti, built by Ted Hood for the America’s Cup in 1962, back when racing boats were elegant and beautiful, and vulgar hustlers like Larry Ellison — the present holder — were eating out of garbage cans. Daddy never lost a race with her.) One person dies every 20 minutes in America from gunshot wounds, and children in America are five times more likely to be murdered with guns than in any other country of the industrialised world. What I would like to know is what a mother and housewife was doing owning four semi-automatic assault weapons? Especially with a weirdo of a son, who probably spent his days watching violent DVD games and listening to rap music by people whose lyrics glamorise violence and glorify murder.
Yes, I’ve read all the stuff about guns, but no one is going to take them off the street, certainly not Obama, a man whose only talent lies in fooling all the people all of the time. Uncle Sam is the world’s greatest arms dealer, and the gun lobby has almost as much money as Aipac does. So whom are we kidding? But just imagine if one of the slain teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School had had a gun on her and had killed the scumbag nerd — perhaps she might even have gotten away with it. We tend to criminalise the good and absolve the guilty. Many professional football and basketball players in America, 85 per cent of whom are African–Americans, own guns and have permits to carry them. There have been murders and accidents galore where famous athletes have been involved, but less than a handful have gone to jail. These are supposedly role models, so no wonder black tots get caught regularly bringing guns to school. One week before the Newtown massacre, a Kansas Chiefs’ black football star murdered the mother of his two-year-old, then drove to the stadium and killed himself in front of his coaches. Yet people tell me that America is the greatest country on earth.
Which brings me to those whose subliminal messages through violent DVDs and films help anaesthetise us towards violence. Just as there is no doubt in my mind that hard porn can lead to rape, watching violence on DVD and on screen can make the viewer immune to the horror of shooting a fellow human in the face — like the nerd did his mother. I for one would love a rigidly enforced production code in the manner of the one during the Thirties and Forties. Not so much governing sex, but certainly violence, which has become, like ‘fast food’, totally normal in American- and British-made films. The 1942 best actor award went to Gary Cooper, for his morale-boosting performance as the deeply religious Tennessee mountain farmer and first world war hero Sgt Alvin York in Howard Hawks’s patriotic film Sergeant York. Can you imagine anyone today (besides Mel Gibson) making a movie about a deeply religious backwoods farmer who wouldn’t fight on Sunday but captured hundreds of Germans after killing tens of them as they shot at him from their machine-gun nests?
The greedy types who produce violence on screen and DVD have utter disregard for our kids and communities. They pretend to see no connection between what they do and the results of what they do. People turn into ratings, demographics and sales. Who could impose a new production code that would stop the gratuitous violence on screen? Well, the only one I can think of is a half-African–American residing in the White House, but don’t hold your breath. Obama is a decent man who obviously wants the best for us, but is smart enough not to go against the untalented Hollywood sharks who know that violence pays and extreme violence pays even better.
Once upon a time movies played on our dreams and deepest longings. They transformed, enlightened and delighted us. Now they subvert and imprison us in a lower, violent world. It’s time we took violence off our screens. Even my fiancée Lindsay thinks so. Happy New Year!
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