Killer culture
THREE 18-year-olds queue at the cinemas to watch Joker, a blockbuster film that mines the tortured psychology of a homicidal clown.
The trio is waiting to buy tickets, ducking behind walls from pretend bullets and leaping out from behind poles to assume the combat position. It’s harmless fun, just like the cowboys and Indians their grandfathers played in sprawling suburban backyards with sticks for pistols and willow branches for bows.
The buffoonery quiets once the film starts. The scenes are explosive and irresistibly win attention in the same way curious onlookers are drawn to an ambulance’s lights.
Joaquin Phoenix as Joker is vicious in his murderous game, but it is his sniggering joy at watching others die in pain that shapes the character.
Phoenix is the latest incarnation in an illustrious heritage in the portrayal of the Joker. The cartoon character began in Batman comics in 1940 but has over the decades been fleshed out by the likes of Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger who bring psychological rigour to the madman.
Vanity Fair reviewer Richard Lawson drew an analogy between the psychosis of Phoenix’s Joker and those “who shoot up schools and concerts and churches, who gun down the women and men they covet and envy, who let loose some spirit of anarchic animus upon the world”. Jim Geraghty of the
National Review was worried “a certain segment of America’s angry, paranoid, emotionally unstable young men will watch Joaquin Phoenix descending into madness and a desire to get back at society by hurting as many people as possible and exclaim, ‘finally, somebody understands me!’”
Viewers, however, are voting with their feet. The movie has delivered more than $560 million at the box office worldwide. People want to be frightened.
The three Tassie lads with their eyes glued to the screen were not forced to watch Joker, they could just as easily have gone in the cinema next door to watch a different movie, say, IT: chapter 2, a film about another homicidal clown that has grossed almost $500 million.
Send in the clowns indeed.
THE younger brother of one of the three boys watching Joker at the cinema was at home, grumpy. His parents had decided he was too young at 15 to see the R-rated film.
So the younger sibling stormed off in a sulk to his bedroom where he played Fortnite Battle Royale, an online shooting game. He took out his frustrations on anyone who walked into his crosshairs, and within minutes of playing had forgotten all about his brother, and everything else for that matter.
Concerns have been raised about gaming violence and its role in shaping the attitudes of players, especially teens, but they are howled down with claims that gamers can distinguish between reality and fantasy and there is no evidence of a link between online violence and its prevalence in reality.
Fortnite Battle Royale generates hundreds of millions every month. It made $2.4 billion last year alone.
Millions play online shooting games, including Canadian teens Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod, who a few months back murdered Australian Lucas Fowler, 23, and his US girlfriend Chynna Deese, 24.
The father of one of the killers, Alan Schmegelsky, said his boy was obsessed with online shooting games and that they had been his son’s biggest influence growing up. The two killers were reportedly part of a video game network that worships the Third Reich.
One mother whose son had gone to school with the Schmegelsky boy said “after a while he started making people feel uncomfortable, just with the comments that he would make and how much he was into video games, a little bit more on the violent side of the video games”.
“Bryer seemed to take it very seriously,” Lisa Lucas said. “My son told me that he would mention things like, ‘What if this was real? Can you imagine if this was real?’ when playing video games. He’d get a little too excited about it.”
THE parents of the boy playing Fortnite and of the other son at the movies with friends slumped on the couch to watch the nightly news — images of Syria in flames, smoke rising from ruins, refugees fleeing, soldiers and artillery firing are set to a soundtrack of rapidfire weapons and explosions.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose forces are slaying Kurds no longer supported by American troops, exchanges veiled threats with US President Donald Trump. They both warn of severe consequences if crossed.
It’s nothing new. In a line that could have come from Batman, Trump not long ago threatened to destroy North Korea. “Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime,” Trump said of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. If the US is “forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea”.
Later in the nightly news, the Australian Government announces plans to ramp up defence spending. Australia’s spending for 2019–20 is $38.7 billion, just short of the Federal Government’s target of 2 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product each year by 2020-21.
The Morrison Government announces it wants to raise spending to 3 per cent of GDP.
HUMANKIND is building and celebrating a world saturated by a bloody culture of killing. Whether motivated by a cruel psychology of deep personal revenge, or by the bloodlust of a predator on the hunt, or as the ultimate display of dominance, the act of killing has become the cultural motif of the 21st century. We are surrounded by killing.
I am not calling for a blanket ban on violent games — nor to censor movies, limit artistic expression or halt military spending — but we need to ask ourselves why we are creating this culture.
We need also to ask ourselves whether we are destined to instinctively chase this deadly rabbit down the hole like a bloodhound on a scent without so much as a thought for the consequences.
We need to ask whether — as a creative, artistic species — we have the free will to choose our path and consciously shape our culture.
We have always been fascinated by madmen — look no further than Shakespeare’s characters such as Richard III, Macbeth, Iago and Shylock — but is there no subject in the world today that can generate revenue other than killing?
LET the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. — Arms and the Boy by Wilfred Owen, 1918.