Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

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Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby guruilla » Sun Feb 12, 2012 10:00 pm

NB: I was going to post this at FB, for a less informed crowd, but I didn't want FB to own it, so I'm posting it here instead. As a result, it might seem a bit ... obvious ... to all you Rig-Inties, but so be it.

Anyone see the movie, We Need to Talk About Kevin? (trailer here) It's extremely well-done and superficially convincing, and taken as a psychological horror movie, it's way above average. Unfortunately the film (funded by the UK Film Council and based on a successful novel that won the prestigious Orange Prize in 2005) both aspires to and was received as a serious psychological study, primarily of the relationship between a mother and her teenage boy who murders several of his classmates for no ostensible reason.

Two things bothered me about the film. Firstly, the whole narrative of "alienated-teenage-boy-kills-classmates-wholesale-without-motive" - which has been used as the basis for several recent movies (last year's Beautiful Boy also focused on the parents). As y'all know, this increasingly familiar storyline has been inspired by literally dozens of incidents worldwide, the most famous being the Columbine massacre (reinterpreted in the stupendously boring Gus van Sant film Elephant). As you also all know, there's plenty of room to doubt the official story around Columbine and no doubt many of the other incidents also. There's also all the (non-mainstream-endorsed) evidence of army & intelligence programs psychologically manipulating children and turning them into programmed killers, meaning that even if the events are being accurately reported, there's still a hidden back story that isn't. Point being, there's every reason to suspect that some - if not most - of these seemingly random incidents were created and/or misreported to generate widespread belief that alienated teenagers are growing more and more likely to turn into psychopathic killers.

After watching the movie, I had to admit that maybe they are - only with less and less need for black budget government interventions. Since humans, like the other mammals, are imitative creatures, where once upon a time alienated teenagers (the non-MK-ULTRA kind) only fantasized about mowing down their classmates, there's more and more "space" - social license - for disenchanted and disenfranchised youths to make their morbid fantasies come true. It's a bit like a kind of dreamspace is being created and then slowly filled by actual events. The assumption is always that "works of art" are only reflecting a reality, but never that they are helping to create it, because if movies are ever accused of inciting acts of violence, it's never the "socially conscientious" kind like Kevin or Elephant.

The more precedents that are created for forms of behavior, the more acceptable it becomes. (Trend-setting.) So if the modern "myth" (or myth-information) about teenage shooters (perpetuated by books and movies like Kevin) is slowly creating a reality, the better these works are, the more real the myth becomes. I would assume that these products are made by well-intended, sensitive, creative people and not just shills, since shills aren't known for their creativity or sensitivity. That means a lot of artists are now doing the work for the intelligence community without knowing it. They would genuinely believe they are addressing a social problem, but since they're ignoring, or just plain missing, essential facts (which of course are dismissed as mere "theories"), they are propagating lies under guise of (socially conscious) "art." This means more and more intelligent, sensitive people are being suckered.

The second objection I had to the movie was the obviously "autistic" traits of the teenage psycho. The character isn't presented as autistic (the word is only mentioned once, and dismissed by the doctor), but then he isn't presented as a fully fleshed-out character either. He's just kind of evil, a more creatively and "sensitively" conceived Damian from the Omen films.

Image

But since he's non-verbal in the first few years and he wears a nappy till about five, that obviously links the character to autistic behavior. As if parents weren't already freaked out enough by the incomprehensible behavior of their autistic children! A movie like Kevin can only reinforce the idea that an autistic, or even just alienated child is a hostile child, and that much more likely to turn out as a psychopath. That's probably about as far from the truth as you can get.
Last edited by guruilla on Mon Feb 13, 2012 12:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby vanlose kid » Sun Feb 12, 2012 10:27 pm

have you seen this?



or this:



*
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby compared2what? » Sun Feb 12, 2012 10:46 pm

“If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him.” -- Rand Paul
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Feb 12, 2012 10:59 pm

Wasn't there a really, really excellent movie about a very similar setup, minus the austism spookery?

Sweet Ganesh, I should remember the title, I watched it. They find out their son commited a shooting spree at school and they go into hiding because the press are after them and try to keep their marriage together. It was really good, but so relentlessly brutal I guess I scrubbed the memory banks.
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby Luther Blissett » Sun Feb 12, 2012 11:11 pm

I think the point about the silence and the diaper actually has something to do with the child's conscious sociopathic feelings towards his mother, hiding.what she wants out of him from her.
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Feb 13, 2012 12:37 am

Lynne Ramsay made one astounding film about childhood and about her own home town:



Then she went to Hollywood.
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby guruilla » Mon Feb 13, 2012 12:42 am

Wombaticus Rex wrote:They find out their son commited a shooting spree at school and they go into hiding because the press are after them and try to keep their marriage together.

That was Beautiful Boy.
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby compared2what? » Mon Feb 13, 2012 1:17 am

guruilla wrote:Since humans, like the other mammals, are imitative creatures, where once upon a time alienated teenagers (the non-MK-ULTRA kind) only fantasized about mowing down their classmates, there's more and more "space" - social license - for disenchanted and disenfranchised youths to make their morbid fantasies come true.


Humans, like other mammals, are capable of learning by imitation. But they're obviously not compelled to imitate every single piece of behavior to which they're exposed. In fact, young humans quite frequently flatly refuse to follow the behavioral models that they're actively encouraged to emulate, rewarded for adopting, and to which they're exposed on a daily basis.

And besides, the human capacity for imitative learning doesn't exclude or otherwise diminish the capacity for non-imitative observational learning, including anti-imitative observational learning -- ie, learning by bad example as a form of learning what not to do, a la Goofus and Gallant. Or actually just Goofus. If you want to be all literal about it.

In any event. There's no law of imitative human behavior that says the amount of socially licensed space available for occupation by male teen sociopathic killers will automatically expand in direct proportion to the number of movies that depict male teen sociopaths killing people, in any simple sense. At least as I understand it, they'd have to be depicted as acting with social license for that to be a reasonable possibility, let alone a likely outcome. And even then, my guess is that they'd have to be depicted as pretty damned socially licensed in an awful lot of movies before cold-blooded shooting sprees got much traction with the kids as a real-life pastime.

I mean, most (maybe all) people are born with a very strong natural instinct to refrain from sociopathically murdering others. After all. That's just an evolutionarily favorable trait in a social animal, by and large.

But I haven't seen the movie yet. So maybe there's something I'm not getting.
“If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him.” -- Rand Paul
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Mon Feb 13, 2012 1:45 am

compared2what? wrote:.....
There's no law of imitative human behavior that says...
...

right. s.o.p. for c2w.
Denial of causality from media. Got it. :coolshades

Read the damn thing already.
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Feb 13, 2012 1:53 am

And cutting off the context of people's quotes in order to shoehorn them into fodder for your ongoing monologue is SOP for Hugh.

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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Mon Feb 13, 2012 2:10 am

Several years of compared2what's posts are what I referred to.
So don't be myopic, WR.

Plus, I've been researching media-as-social-control science for some years, too.
Singer and Singer's book is one of many.
Decades of research confirms the ability to wind up a hostility spring and release it as violence in some people.

And c2w's posts on the subject would qualify 'her' to do public relations for the tobacco industry.

Totalist straw men to knock down as s.o.p.
"Just smoking a cigarette doesn't GUARANTEE blah blah...."
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby Simulist » Mon Feb 13, 2012 3:19 am

Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:
compared2what? wrote:.....
There's no law of imitative human behavior that says...
...

right. s.o.p. for c2w.

Oh, criminy, Hugh. Just stop it.

That kind of crap is not only empty. And rude. It's dumb.
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby Jeff » Mon Feb 13, 2012 8:27 am

Simulist wrote:That kind of crap is not only empty. And rude. It's dumb.


And more of it will get you some time off, Hugh.
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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby gnosticheresy_2 » Mon Feb 13, 2012 9:12 am

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Re: Myth-Information Movies (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Postby wordspeak2 » Mon Feb 13, 2012 10:09 am

Holy shit... brazen glorification of sociopathic murder sprees involving children?
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