Coping with foolishness after Columbine

Little Black Box
    By Alex DeMille

About a month ago I went with a few of my friends to the local cinema to see the South Park movie. Among the crowd milling around the box office were some awkward pubescent teens asking an adult stranger to buy tickets for them. I inwardly smirked. It wasn't so long ago that I was partaking in similar activity. Every trip to the movies used to carry an inherent risk (since most movies we wanted to see were R.) But now, a good two years beyond the required age, I confidently approached the box office to buy a ticket.

I was ID'ed.

What? I haven't been IDed for a movie in at least two, if not three years. I didn't look that young. I had even forgotten to shave that day. Only mildly phased, I flashed my college ID and was on my way. Except when I got to the ticket taker I was IDed again. This was getting stupid. I made it past their secondary defenses, but before entering the screening room I was again stopped by the Gestapo and asked to show my papers. Once half the employees at Loews Cineplex were convinced I was of satisfactory age to watch paper cut-out characters fart and curse, I entered the Holy Kingdom of R-rated cinema.

What I experienced that day at the movies was part of a growingtrend of misguided caution and Puritanical paranoia in the entertainment media. As I was reading the news one day it struck me to read the phrase "post-Columbine America," in reference to a change in attitudes since the massacre at Columbine High in Colorado. The phrase struck me because it was indicative of how much the event has become a part of our culture and national psyche. It has become a tragic symbol for all similar incidents before, since, and probably forever after. Before the dead of Littleton were even buried, the national media was scrambling for the "lesson" from the tragedy, like this was some sort of after-school special or symbolic fable. This inspired about five minutes of intelligent and appropriate debate before devolving into a simplistic crusade against all things naughty, from the relevant (guns and violence) to the not-so-relevant (sex and profanity.)

Hollywood responds. The release of The Matrix on VHS is delayed indefinitely (Keanu sports a black trenchcoat.) The last episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is pulled off the air (it involves violence at a high school.) Pretty soon the MPAA issues a mandate urging all theatre owners to strictly enforce their IDing policy. Meanwhile, Stanley Kubrick spends the last weeks of his life tinkering with computer graphics to cover up Tom Cruise's penis in Eyes Wide Shut (only in the American version, of course).

Are American youth so stupid and impressionable? Will a game of Quake sabotage their healthy respect for human life? Will a bunch of four-letter words and some naked people making love turn them into misanthropic monsters? Are there perhaps more complex questions? Shall we not turn a critical eye on the bleak American invention that is cookie-cutter suburbia? Maybe the problem with Littleton, Colorado is Littleton, Colorado. And forget fictional entertainment, what about the news media's role in perpetuating a cult of youth violence? No one stops to think that perhaps the copycat crime in Georgia two weeks after Littleton was inspired not by the glorification of violence in movies and video-games, or the endorsement of crude and antisocial behavior in South Park and its ilk, but rather by the obsessive media coverage that has turned the Littleton massacre into a monument to misfits and outcasts, to all things deviant or excessive (The New York Times actually referred to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as "losers").

No one wants to consider such things, because then suddenly it's not so simple. They're ugly indictments and there's no easy way out. We find it much easier to censor than enrich. Just don't let the kids see those R movies and they'll be fine.

Welcome to post-Columbine America.

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