The Academy Award Winners That Should Have Been: Part 4
I have grown so excessively tired of people continuing to make this argument, and it sickens me to actually see a court case going forward that will attempt to fine Oliver Stone and Warner Bros. for releasing a movie. Have people lost their minds? Lately in this country, when someone commits a murder, the media and everyone else immediately starts to analyze "well, what influenced him to do this? Who else can we blame?" How about blaming the murderers???? Or their parents???? Are people honestly trying to say that a filmmaker is somehow responsible for the shooting of a convenience store clerk??? I am willing to bet you anything that all of these crimes which someone tried to attribute to a film influencing them would have happened if the films had not been made.
It's way past time for people to realize that films like these are a reflection of society, and crime and murder would continue to take place even if those films did not exist. I guarantee you that those two teenagers would have ended up shooting somebody even if Stone hadn't made NATURAL BORN KILLERS, so any attempt to try to blame the filmmakers for someone else's actions killing someone is amazingly irresponsible and solves nothing except to move our country in a more dangerous position of censoring free speech, which believe me, is one of the greatest freedoms we have in America.
Look, I know that films influence people. Motion pictures are perhaps the most powerful art form for its ability to move people so emotionally. Another Oliver Stone film, the masterpiece JFK, even caused a new government panel to make public more documents that had been sealed in the JFK assassination case, and it even inspired a whole new generation to investigate the case on their own. But saying a film has the power to make a person kill is quite a stretch in my opinion. And it doesn't even matter if a film makes violence look cool, which I don't even think Natural Born Killers did.
I can think of many other lesser films that made violence actually look like something fun. But I wouldn't even fault these films, because ultimately, there is something extremely wrong in a person already if they kill someone, and any of these people who blame something like a film for their crimes is a person looking for a scapegoat, another
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