In the wake of the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut just over a month ago, debate raged across the United States on two major fronts. First, who, or what, is to blame for the increasingly horrific violence in our nation? And second, how do we keep it from continuing? Everyone seems to have a different answer, ranging from gun control or mental health issues all the way to violent video games and movies.
The last of these came to the forefront of the discussion two weeks ago in my home state of Maine. The state’s largest paper, The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, published a front page story by columnist Bill Nemitz, entitled “Horror all around over teen filmmakers’ bloodbaths set in Brunswick”.
The story concerned a group of local high school boys who have banded together to create short films and post them to YouTube under the banner “USN Films”. The problem?
These films are violent, often explicitly so, and feature the ‘deaths’ of young people. They were also filmed on private property, including a decommissioned Naval Air Base in the town. This, ostensibly, is what got the young filmmakers in serious hot water with local authorities, who served them with criminal trespass warnings.
Why does any of this matter to us? It didn’t even happen in this state, right? True. But the problem here is not the location of the incident, it’s what the incident is symptomatic of: a potentially dangerous and detrimental backlash against creative artists in the wake of tragedies like Newtown.
We saw similar issues (on a larger scale) after the Dark Knight shooting in Aurora – there was brief talk of pulling Rises from theaters, and the film Gangster Squad had its release date shunted back nearly six months following the excising of a scene involving violence in a movie theater.
The question is, how far is too far? At what point does respecting the impact of an event like Newtown become instead the scapegoating of certain types of creative work?
This is certainly not a defense of violence for violence’s sake, or an argument that we should place the importance of tragedies, such as Newtown, below our own desires for entertainment.
However, it seems clear to me that splashing the front page of a statewide paper with a blistering indictment of young aspiring filmmakers doesn’t help anyone. All events like this one can do is discourage our next generation of writers, filmmakers, and artists from telling their stories.
This is a problem because all creative work must be recognized to hold some sort of value. The nature of that value may be subjective, but it is unequivocally present in one way or another. In the case of these teenagers, the true value of their work doesn’t necessarily lie in the content – shoot ‘em-up backyard movies are a dime a dozen. And yet: how many of our greatest filmmakers and storytellers in any medium started out making backyard movies?
In the end, film teaches us about ourselves. Even if the knowledge we gain amounts to nothing more than the realization that we didn’t like what we saw, it forces us to ask the question, “why not?” and, hopefully, motivates us to seek out, or maybe even create, something better.