A history of movie violence
Even the most infrequent moviegoer knows the fake movie clip they play at the start of a film: It depicts the boor in the theatre who forgets to silence his phone, which rings during the climax with a crying-baby ringtone. This clip may soon be replaced with one of a man standing up and shooting the phone offender in the head with a .380 calibre handgun. It wouldn’t even need to be a fake clip.
In the past five years, movie theatres have carved out — literally — their own sinister brand of violence. To pick just one example, in 2009, after a New York City screening of My Bloody Valentine, 24-year-old security guard Ricardo Singh got into an argument with a boy who wanted to wait inside the theatre lobby for a ride home. When the boy refused to leave, a shoving match ensued, which ended in Singh stabbing the boy in the stomach with a folding knife. So he did get his ride home — in an ambulance.
Interestingly, the Valentine film was marketed as a date movie for slasher film fans, and if you saw it in 3D, blood, hacked off limbs and body parts flew toward you.
Friday morning’s shooting at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo., is interesting for a different reason: Eyewitnesses say the alleged masked gunman, 24-year-old James Holmes, opened fire on the movie theatre at precisely the same time a firing scene was happening in the movie. This caused some confusion, as the crowd assumed the shooting was part of the show.
It’s been done before. On Jan. 16, 2009, in Greensboro, N.C., during a Friday evening screening of Notorious, an assailant opened fire in the theatre lobby and a 32-year-old man was shot twice in the stomach. Notorious is a biopic of rapper Notorious B.I.G., who was killed in a 1997 drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. Seven hundred people were evacuated from the cinema complex; most of those in the lobby mistook the sound of the gunshots for balloons popping, as a lady with a balloon bouquet happened to be crossing the room at that time.
While Friday’s shooting may have had little to do with the content of the movie, The Dark Knight Rises created an unsettling stir on movie aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes earlier this week. The site was forced to shut down comments after a negative review of the film received a slew of unprecedented and alarming threats of violence.
But this phenomenon is far more than a case of life imitating art. It’s an indication of an alarming increase in the use of extreme physical violence as a dispute resolution mechanism at the movies.
On Dec. 26, 2008, James Joseph Cialella Jr., 29, asked a man and his son to keep quiet during a Philadelphia screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. A confrontation occurred, culminating in Cialella pulling out a .380 caliber handgun and shooting the dad in the arm — on Christmas Day. After firing the shot, Cialella is said to have serenely resumed watching the film in complete silence.
Perhaps most bizarre of all is an incident during a 2010 screening of the Leonardo DiCaprio thriller Shutter Island in Lancaster, Calif. After a man complained about a woman being on her cellphone during the movie, the woman got up and left with two male companions. The companions returned a few moments later and stabbed the complainant in the neck — with a meat thermometer. This horrifying and senseless act of violence raises a lot of questions, including, where does one even find a meat thermometer at a cinema? Although the theatre was packed, the suspects are still at large.
These cases raise questions about the liability of the cinemas for failure to monitor or intervene in such instances. Will movie theatres become the new airports, where ticketholders get frisked and patted down before entering a screening of Bridget Jones’s Diary 3? Will their water and Junior Mints be confiscated? If theatres have to install panic buttons and employ more security guards, will that impact the already larcenous $12.99 admission fee? Let’s just hope that the fake movie clip in the beginning of the show will not have to resort to demonstrations of the appropriate brace position to assume during a shootout. At least not anytime soon.