Tragedies such as the massacre in Virginia this week invite journalists and other media "commentators" to muster every bit of their breathtaking stupidity to offer an analysis of the events and what lies behind them. At the apogee of the idiotic kneejerk responses on this occasion is Gerald Kaufman MP, in a column in today's Daily Telegraph.
Among the profound observations: "Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies, and his earlier Reservoir Dogs, which I personally flinched at viewing, are explicitly inspired by other films." Precisely who this ought to surprise is far from clear, certainly anyone who has seen an episode of The Simpsons will recognise the banality of the statement as utterly boneheaded. And if The Telegraph's readership are so detached from the rest of the world to have learned the lesson this way, they might at least recall Virgil's Aeneid from their school days.
While Chan Wook Park's Old Boy, and (even more baffling) John Woo's excremental Face/Off are Kaufman's major targets, he also tries to pin some of the blame of Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine. Now, since fictional feature films, even those as dull and undeveloped as the work of John Woo, deliberately employ some level of ambiguity as a stylistic device - something Kaufman makes clear he is unable to comprehend - we will focus on Moore's documentary, which does not. Michael Moore can be accused of a certain level of self-righteousness, but certainly not of a lack of clarity. He goes to great lengths in Bowling for Columbine to make his message as unambiguous as possible, and in this at least, he succeeds. So we are left with two possibilities: either Kaufman is unable to grasp the meaning of an extremely simple message, repeated many times in the course of a 2-hour documentary, or he has written a comment piece about films which for the most part he has not seen. In either case, he is not fit to remain in his job. If the first is true, and Kaufman is unable to grasp the message of a straightforward documentary, then he cannot be expected to assess the nuances of intricate legislation and represent his constituents' interests. If the second is true, and he is happy to hold forth on films he has not seen, we can only assume he is equally comfortable voting for laws he has not bothered to read.
Which brings us back to the subject matter of Moore's documentary. The major argument, repeated again and again, was that media sensationalism about violent and criminal activity generated a climate of fear which made violent crime more likely. One does not have to agree with the message, but real effort is required to fail to understand it. The scenes of violence, CCTV footage of the Columbine massacre, and description of the events featured in the film had all been taken from television news. The point was that they were presented in such a way that contributed to a climate of fear and social dislocation and isolation which increased the likelihood of further instances of this kind of atrocity. If Kaufman had understood this, he would be able to recognise that the scenes of violence and descriptions of the Columbine massacre were not original material. They were, in essence, redistributions of television news footage. Moore's critics have accused him of contextualising these in such a manner as to manipulate his audience's emotions - that is, to use them to reinforce the horrific nature of the crime, when originally they were contextualised in such a way as to dull the television audience's reaction, to desensitize them to the crime.
If Kaufman had seen the film and understood this, he would have realised that the material he identifies in Bowling for Columbine as inspiring the Virginia massacre was in fact television news footage, and if this footage did inspire Cho, Moore's film is only responsible as a redistributer of television news. It should also be clear enough that Moore's contextualisation of the same footage could not by any means increase the likelihood that it would inspire a similar killing. So if this footage is really to blame, then Kaufman's targets should be the television news media who produced and broadcast it in the first place. And this of course would generate a rather different argument.
To reiterate, if Kaufman is unable to see the contradictions inherent in his article, it is because he has not seen the films he wrote about, or because his ability to follow an argument is utterly appalling, or because he is willing to be utterly dishonest to exploit a tragedy to get an article in the newspaper. Whatever is the truth, his constituents ought to have no faith in him whatsoever.
