What to do with this Theater?

What to do with the Aurora, Century 16 Movie Theater, where James Holmes killed 12 people and injured over fifty others? Many people suggest that the auditorium’s owners shut it down out of respect for those who lost their lives inside it. Some feel that the owners should shut down the entire theater, not just that specific auditorium. Still others express the opinion that the theater’s owners ought to transform it into a memorial. While I understand these points of view, and I can only imagine how long it will take for anyone to comfortably sit before that haunted, big screen, I don’t believe we should close it to the public.

Why do people spend ten-to-twenty dollars per person to go to the theater when they could split a buck renting a movie out of a Redbox machine? Theaters offer amazing, human opportunities. They provide stages for reconnecting with friends and family. They are places where couples hold hands or perhaps share their first kiss.

Keep the theater open. Allow wonderful events to transpire there once again. The Aurora theater ought not to close on such a sad, monstrous note as Holmes’s rampage.

In the aftermath of destruction, we must rebuild and continue moving forward. Evil people (and there’s just no better word for them) wish to derail us from our missions to entertain, love, and unite with each other. We mustn’t allow these pitiable (yes, pitiable) monsters their victories.

Should there be a memorial honoring those who died during Holmes’s killing spree? There are. One victim, Jonathan Blunk, served as a seaman with the United States Navy. He also served the civilian world as a certified firefighter and emergency medical technician. During the horrific shooting, he threw himself in front of his friend, Jansen Young, shielding her from the gunman’s bullets. The lives he saved, those are his memorials.

Another victim, Matt McQuinn dove in front of his girlfriend during the shooting. He protected both her and her brother. They are Matt’s memorial.

The victims deserve commemoration for all the positive influences generated during their lives. James Holmes does not deserve commemoration for having concluded them, for having cut short his victims’ accomplishments.

Would it prove tasteless of me to turn this tragedy into a political statement? At such heavy risk, I discovered myself compelled. You see, I have grown shocked by the quantity of people who blame gun control laws for Holmes’s massacre. Let me be clear: I am not discussing the argument that loose gun control laws allowed Holmes to obtain his arsenal (a blog for another day, perhaps). I am discussing the argument that blame rests with gun restrictions.

The debate goes something like this: “Had everyone in that theater possessed a firearm, this tragedy would never have happened. Holmes could never have killed so many people before someone else in the theater had shot him. With that in mind, Holmes would have never attempted his murders.”

Like most easy answers, this is simply wrong. I assure you that in a packed, panicked, dark theater, filling with teargas, additional firearms will not remedy the situation. The belief that violent criminals are deterred by armed victims holds less water than misguided (but usually well intended) logic suggests. Sure, criminals prefer unarmed victims, but a person looking to steal your wallet hasn’t a clue beforehand whether or not you’re packing heat.

Shooters come in two groups. The desperate. The bloodthirsty.

Desperate criminals want to separate you from your money any way they can. These people might be starving, dying for a drug fix, or perhaps owe money to other criminals. The point is, they’re desperate. To them, death proves more desirable than failure. These types of attackers will face any threat to accomplish their goals. They will not say to themselves, “I had better not try to mug someone, because that someone might have a gun.” A possible firearm is a threat already accepted.

The bloodthirsty do not expect to walk into a school, kill several people, and return to normal life. How many shootings end with “Before he turned the gun on himself” or “Before surrendering to the police”? These killers don’t expect to escape their crimes. Few even expect (or want) to survive them. The possibility of an armed victim means little to such irrational people.

Even if Holmes had known that every person in that theater possessed a gun, he wouldn’t have abandoned his mission and gone on to live a normal, productive life. Thirsting for a larger body count and a higher concentration of chaos, he might’ve welcomed such variables (he would’ve been the only one wearing body armor, after all). He entered the theater knowing his life would soon end, in one sense or another. That didn’t stop him.

Fear remains the prized weapon of victimizers. If I purchase an alarm system, train a guard dog, sleep with a gun under my pillow, live under a security camera, and surrender my privacy to the police, then it matters little whether my intruder ever materializes or not. That criminal, real or imaginary, has already instilled in me fear powerful enough to interrupt and lessen the quality of my life.

Living in fear is not living. Feeling naked without a firearm is not daring.

Cause and Effect

Despite the “evidence” that those fantasy-based stories found in movies and video games instigate violence, life does not reflect art. Art reflects life. Cause and effect are often confused in this regard.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reflected (among other things) a young girl’s identity crisis as she grows from a child to a young adult. Alice changes sizes, experiences indecision, pushes back against those who push her, and repeatedly says that she doesn’t know who she is. She even faces a cross-examination by a caterpillar, who demands that Alice identify herself. Yet she cannot. Older girls experiencing puberty often share these moments of crisis (as do boys), but not because they read Alice. The book reflected how its readers felt. They didn’t feel this way because of the book.

By mentioning Alice’s identity crisis, I’ve arrived at another often-unsounded consequence of power fantasies (those experienced vicariously via movies, video games, and the like) having run amok. The most important question any person faces in their lifetime is “Who am I?” We spend our lives answering it, especially during the light-speed-years between puberty and . . . let’s say mid-twenties.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a time when we (males especially) spend a great deal of time wrapped up in the fantasy worlds of online gaming and other mediums that allow us what should only be a temporary escape from reality. Years that ought to be experienced in chrysalis are spent instead in stasis.

Because of this, we have many adults nowadays who never carved out their own, real-world identity. They’re accomplishments, weaknesses, allegiances, and so forth have all been created vicariously in a world that does not exist, with rules far removed from reality.

I’m not saying that these escapes are unproductive. In MODERATION, they are healthy. However, when a person spends more time upgrading make-believe skills for make-believe missions set in a make-believe world, then real skills for a real world, something has gone darkly astray.

It seems that my generation and those behind it have suffered an identity crisis so severe that its members are turning towards any manufactured reality with rules that they can understand. Is this because the world is changing at such a break-neck pace, politically and scientifically, that we can no longer cling to rules we recognize? Have we drowned in a world so curiously cramped by the Internet, socially retarded by the Internet, that we cannot with greater ease discover a place for ourselves?

Perhaps online games such as World of Warcraft offer more than mere escape. More than an identity, even, or a world with rules that don’t change at the drop of a hat. You can log onto an online game and discover a “clan” waiting to accept you, computer generated missions that generate purpose for its players. Such games answer more than “Who am I?” They answer “Why am I here?” and “Where do I fit in?”

So where does personal responsibility for the individual end and national responsibility for gaming and movie producers begin?  In The Guardian, film maker, Harvey Weinstein told reporter Ben Child, “I think as film-makers we should sit down – the Marty Scorseses, the Quentin Tarantinos and hopefully all of us who deal in violence in movies – and discuss our role.”

Does the entertainment industry hold a responsibility to shield audiences from too much violence? How much is too much? Or have we again confused cause and effect? If art reflects life, taking the violence out of movies and games wouldn’t subtract it from real life . . . but it will turn a blind eye to the problem, pretending it’s not there and thus failing to study and correct it.

By reducing the violence in the entertainment industry, we might reduce the violence in real life. A person might argue that such an experiment, even if it preserved only a single life, is well worth the cost. However, I propose that violence in movies and games may actually prevent real-life violence. Those who have violent tendencies, or those with temporary frustrations fast approaching a critical, boiling point, are provided by these mediums a safe, victimless outlet.

Furthermore, since art reflects life, these games and movies give us something to explore, a mirror into our minds, through which we might better understand our darker desires. Such information might prove invaluable in violence-prevention.

In an article for BostonGlobe.com, Ty Burr wrote in regards to the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises and the Colorado shooting that took place in one of the theaters showing it:

“The idea of the mask matters quite a bit . . . The superhero movies that dominate our box offices are all about mild-mannered secret identities and the power that comes with donning a facial covering. We live each day through digital masks: screen names, online personas, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and on and on, each an attempt to show the world the face we want to be, rather than the face we fear we have. The gunman in Aurora wore a mask, too, to protect himself from his own tear gas, or to avoid being seen, or to play to the pathetic fantasy in his head that he was Doom personified instead of an angry 24-year-old.”

I don’t think our gunman wore a mask because Batman does. I think Batman wears a mask because people, as Burr points out, want to become something else, to conceal their humanity and all its limiting flaws. Like Bruce Wayne and online critics hiding behind screen names, we want to act and speak as someone else might.

We mustn’t confuse cause and effect. Violence predates movies and video games. Violence predates the human race, itself.

Children's shows

I don’t know about you, but I recall my childhood shows as being the most morbid, disturbing stories ever written. You remember Sesame Street? It had a vampire with OCD. It also featured a guy with Tourette’s, who lived in a trashcan, and appeared to be made entirely of marijuana.

As a child, I always prayed that Big Bird would finally receive the psychiatric help he so desperately needed. Remember how he was the only one who could see Snuffleupagus? He would tell the other members of his neighborhood, “Look! Snuffy’s right over there.” And the other people would smile and nod and say, “Sure. Of course he is.” And Big Bird would scream, “He’s killing a little girl right now!” And the camera would pan over, and there the wooly mammoth would be, with his trunk wrapped around Prairie Dawn’s neck as he violently and repeatedly slammed her against the asphalt. Then, that night, Big Bird would sit in his nest, his feathers slick with blood, Prairie Dawn spread across his lap, her neck broken, and Big Bird would cry and say, “Look what Snuffy did! It was all Snuffy’s doing. I swear!”

. . . That’s how I remember it, anyways.

Or how about Guy Smiley? That guy was on his way to becoming some sort of freaky super villain. He used to create the most demented games. He had one called Squeal of Fortune. In this game, he would place a pig in a wheel and spin it, and contestants would guess how many times that the pig would squeal before he . . . I don’t know . . . vomited and passed out, I guess. Basically, Guy Smiley was a few inches away from becoming Jigsaw from those Saw movies.

Speaking of the Saw movies, what happened to those things? The first two were so good, and then the series turned to garbage. The only reason I kept watching them was because I felt obsessed with the question: How would MacGyver get out of this crazy, death-contraption? If the producers ever make a MacGyver versus Jigsaw movie, I would jump all over it, drooling.

But back to evil children’s shows. Remember the Care Bears? They were these super annoying teddy bears that could talk Sylvia Plath’s head out of an oven. But they always brought along this one character, aptly named Grumpy Bear. Given the Care Bears’ objectives, I’m uncertain why that they kept bringing Grumpy along with them. In any case, Grumpy was a dark, wonderful character. There might be an episode where a small child is crying because her daddy went to the store to buy milk—two weeks ago, and it doesn’t look as if daddy’s ever coming home. The child would cry, and the Care Bears would try to cheer him up . . . but Grumpy would say something like, “Your father probably left because you’re such a crybaby. Your wussiness probably chased him away. Nice going. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sit under a rain cloud and tell children to believe in themselves.” Great!