Sometimes the best way to to bury our secrets, and bury them deep, is to air them out. Cartoon movies are populated by CEO villains, rendering environments destroyed by corporate capitalism in bright Pixar colors. Man himself becomes the enemy of gentle anthropomorphized animals, of the fragile environment struggling to survive in the face of our catastrophic narcissism. Even those contexts in which we could once expect the reassuring triumph of pseudo-legal good over anarcho-evil, the comic, the superhero flick, have become so shrouded in moral ambiguity that it’s often hard to tell who deserves to come out ahead in the end.
Popular culture and everyday talk are saturated with the truths we think we’re revealing to ourselves. Between cheering for Dexter to literally get away with murder and feeling the detached thrill of watching millions die at the hands of a villain who’s fighting, ostensibly, for the people, we perform cathartic self-realization on a large and daily basis. Look at what we’ve done, we sit in the theater or on the couch and think. Look at what we are, we’re monstrous.
And yet this kind of self-realization rings about as true as dropping some change in a cup, shoving a buck out of a cracked car window, donating fifty dollars to some campaign to end hunger in a far away country you can’t even find on a map then turning and walking away with a sigh of relief on your lips: I’ve done my good work today, the world is better now, for my dollar, than it was when it was still in my wallet.
And so we walk out of the air conditioned cinema and into the fresh air which still hangs around some places. Already numbed by the scale of the violence witnessed inside, we turn our phones back on and read a trending article about a man who walked into this same movie premiere in Colorado. Given the temporary lack of feeling in our prefrontal cortices, our sensory overload, and the exhaustion of the little cricket inside of us still trying wrap its head around the moral muddiness of the Hollywood story, we are not surprised. In fact we’re a little excited, it’s like the movie never ended. We can all be heroes now and stop the bad guy!
But, wait, who is the bad guy? And the media tries to paint it clearer for us. Some nut job. Anarchist tendencies. Radical politics. All those would-be assassins and mass murderers keep triggering the same immuno-rhetorical response from those faces we watch on TV. Anarchists. Nut jobs. Good for nothings. Failed cases. Radical politics. Dramatic shifts in behavior. So what, nut jobs? All? Doesn’t anybody remember the unabomber? He was strangely attractive to me as a kid, a Harvard educated man with a PhD who decided to do something less stupid than sit around and make money for the rest of his life. He did what the Lorax told me to do last time I was at the theater, the same thing Dr. Seuss-spouting parents have been telling their kids for decades: stand up for what you believe in! If you see a problem, fix it! This is not to encourage the killing or terrorism of innocent people, but only to present the possibility that people who do surprising, outlandish, and frequently violent things like shoot up theaters or blow up empty buildings to stop deforestation, might not just be crazy but might also be intelligent, rational people just like me or you who are trying to make a point. Maybe if we weren’t so quick to dismiss every newsworthy story not about celebrities and their families as a case of a nut job, we might actually understand why our social contract is cracking in so many places. For goodness’ sake, we give plenty credence and respect to those crazy movie villains blowing up people by the thousands on the big screen.
But what the media does when conflating violence and insanity, delinquency and radicalism is stop the conversation. This kind of dismissal says hey, look, the movie’s over. These are real people who were murdered. By a real crazy insane violent person. And that’s not funny or fun or thrilling. At all. Despite what the movies may have led you to think.
And so we respond like wolves to a pack-call yeah, you’re right, violence just belongs in the movie theater or the coliseum. This is how we take out our species’ rage and destructiveness. We watch movies and we think we enjoy the violence. For a second. And then it’s over and this, this right here, this is real life. And violence is not enjoyable, and it shouldn’t come outside with us.
And we forget for a moment the mass incarceration of black bodies happening across the country, the disenfranchisement and murder of folk who are houseless, or of color, or women, or gender-nonconforming or disabled. We forget the price much of the world pays for our standard of living. We forget about the genocidal governments our country has backed. We forget about the hundreds of soldiers, falling in the line of duty or by their own hands overseas. We forget the people starving and dying right here in our own backyards. Much easier to call out one senseless act of violence as the work of a crazy man than to indict our society, our own civilization, and ask it to answer for all the crimes committed at home and abroad.
Much better to buy a ticket and watch a movie about humans destroying each other and everything around them. Much better to sit there in the dark and think the truth is finally being told, we’re taking responsibility, finally coming to terms with the destruction we’ve caused and are liable to cause in the future, then emerge into the blue gray light of a parking structure and read an article dismissing violent behavior as somehow being as uncharacteristic of human beings.
Ah, ¡qué sabroso sandwich!
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