The Joker in Colorado

 I watched a little of the movie Natural Born Killers. I don't know what kind of audience they thought it would attract. It cost $34 million to make. They expected millions of people to see it. Even if they thought it was an exceptionally clever observation that people who commit terrible crimes become "celebrities", they might have foreseen that some of the scum who are drawn to movies like that might find it a source of inspiration. There's a long list of murders that were inspired by the movie. It's usually hard to place the blame  for a given crime on a movie, but these are cases where the killers stated directly that they wanted to be like the characters in it.

Stephen King pulled one of his novels off the market----it was about an armed teen who takes a class hostage at school. A kid with a rifle actually took a class hostage and he had a copy of King's book on him when he did it. King decided he didn't need the money that badly.

There are other clear-cut cases. There are the people who died playing Russian Roulette after watching The Deer Hunter. There were kids who lay on the center line on city streets assuming that cars would all go around them, like they did in The Program. And I still don't know if there are confirmed cases of this, but cruise ship operators say they've had to stop passengers from crawling out onto the prow and yelling that they're king of the world ever since Titanic came out. These are things nobody did until they saw it in a movie.

People should know better than to lie in the street or play Russian Roulette, even if they did see it in a movie. But if you make a movie that's going to be seen by millions of people, you know full well that it's going to be seen by people who aren't all there.

And now we have this mass murder in a movie theater in Colorado, the killer calling himself "The Joker". He was inspired by the movie but it's hard to imagine anyone watching Batman and thinking, They shouldn't show things like this because someone might decide to act like the Joker.

If you're making a no-budget movie that's going to be seen by a few hundred or a few thousand people, you don't have much to worry about. But if it's going to be seen my millions, why take the chance of setting off a spree killer? Why have that on your conscience?