Off Screen

“I grew up in a tough neighbourhood, and we used to say, ‘You can get further with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word’.”

- Robert De Niro as Al Capone in The Untouchables

Let’s face it: the world has gone to shit. Everywhere you look there’s war, starvation, persecution, environmental destruction, murder, rape and madness, Manchester United have been knocked out of the Coca Cola cup and you can’t even get a pint of lager for under £2. Personally I blame Quentin Tarantino.

Well, somebody’s got to take the rap, so it might as well be the young maestro of ultra-violence, director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, writer of True Romance and Natural Born Killers, and producer of Killing Zoe. If you put together all the bloody shoot outs, sadistic torture scenes and graphic brutality depicted in his films, you would have a body count approaching, oh, say, the average Arnold Schwarzenneger movie. But that’s not the point. Because we all know Arnie’s just an inflatable doll, whereas Quentin’s characters live, breathe and frequently die in extreme pain, with buckets of blood and a trendy seventies songs on the soundtrack. Arnie is a fantasy. Quentin is a bad influence.

The latest furore is over the Tarantino-scripted, Oliver Stone-directed Natural Born Killers. A frenetic parody of TV live news bulletins, courtroom coverage and sensationalist chat shows in which a pair of dumb-as-shit murderous serial killing lovebirds attract so much hyperbolic media attention that they are vicariously turned into cult heroes, the film itself has attracted so much hyperbolic media attention that it has allegedly spawned a series of copycat killings. When two young men went on a cross country crime rampage in New Mexico, a Los Angeles TV newscaster labelled them “real natural born killers”, the phrase was mimicked in the media across the country and before long their three murders were being “attributed” to Stone’s movie. The fact that police involved with the case stressed there was no evidence to suggest the killers had even seen the film was conveniently ignored. Besides, they might not have caught the movie, but they couldn’t have missed the publicity. After a couple of months on release, Stone’s self-proclaimed satire about the media’s unquenchable thirst for violence had been blamed by the media for ten murders, and has spawned its own mini-industry of outraged analysis.

“When we set out to make Natural Born Killers in late 1992, it was surreal. By the time it was finished in 1994, it had become real,” wrote Stone in his defence, citing the cases of OJ Simpson, Lorena Bobbit, the Menendez brothers and Tonya Harding. “Each week America was deluged by the media with a new soap opera, ensuring ratings, money and, above all, continuity of the hysteria. Our society is bloated, not just with crime; but with the media coverage of it.”

It’s a post-modernist controversy: film maker blames media blames film maker for all of society’s ills, suggesting America’s real problem is an irony deficiency (although the little matter of gun control might also be taken into account). Quentin Tarantino has been a little more direct in defence of his own cinematically murderous instincts: “Violence in the movies? It’s fun!” But he may not sound so glib in the future. Already Britain’s newspapers have been jumping on the bandwagon, the Daily Mail screaming from its front page: Why this movie MUST be banned from Britain.’ The censor, who has as yet failed to grant video certificates for Reservoir Dogs and True Romance, has now suspended a UK cinema release for Natural Born Killers while it considers the implications of unleashing this film on the nation’s delicate psyche. There are important questions to be addressed: can a movie deprave and corrupt the nation’s youth, and turn us all into rabid psychotics? And if I do want to go on a murder spree, where can I find a weapon more lethal than my Master Blaster high-powered water pistol?

The implications of all this is that the world would be a safer place if only we watched nicer, gentler, less violent movies. If people really are so gullible that they are compelled to act out scenes from their favourite films, wouldn’t you rather they had just been to see Love Story than Zombie Chicks In Chopper Town? I decided to personally test out this theory, by going to some of the more notably up-beat, feelgood movies on release at the moment, and behave accordingly. My research provided some interesting results.

I started the day with a video of one of the all time feelgood classics, Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, in which despairing do-gooder James Stewart is saved from suicide by an angel who shows how empty his friends’ lives would have been if he had not lived. I thought I would skip on the suicide attempt, on the grounds that you can never count on divine intervention when you really need it. Instead I asked my girlfriend what she thought her life would be like if I did not exist. She gave me a peculiar look and said I shouldn’t start building her hopes up. I laughed, kissed her on the forehead, and told her how much I loved her. She looked at me suspiciously and began to wander around the flat, apparently checking that all of the electrical appliances were still functioning. I informed her that I was going to take a stroll down to the shops to buy us something nice for breakfast. “It’s the car, isn’t it?” she said. “You’ve done something to the car.” I assured her I would not need the car, as I was only going as far as the deli, to buy her some of those almond croissants she was always lusting after. “Do you have to keep going on about my weight!” she snapped, mysteriously. I placated her by telling her she would always be beautiful to me, no matter what size she ballooned up to. She burst into tears and stormed off to the bedroom.

Out on the street, I bade a cheery hello to everyone I encountered. Most were too overawed by my good humour to reply, although one man did stop for a moment and ask “Do I know you?” (apparently he had not had time to put his contact lenses in that morning) while an extremely attractive young woman simply shrieked and ran over to the other side of the road. I looked around to try and see what had frightened her, but I couldn’t work it out. I imagine she had been watching too many scary movies.

At the deli I contemplated the trays of croissants, until I noticed two young children, gazing over the cream cakes and counting out their change. It seemed they did not have quite enough. Here was a real dilemma: should I spend my money on myself, or should I buy these starving young innocents their cream cakes? I thought about what James Stewart would have done, and then I thought about what my beloved would do if I came home empty handed after all that carry on this morning. I bought the almond croissants, on the basis that I couldn’t do good on an empty stomach.

Meanwhile, the young scallywags had grabbed a handful of cream cakes and made a dash for the exit. The influence of too many crime movies, I suppose.

When I got back to the flat my girlfriend was checking the collars of my shirts, and muttering something about another woman, although there didn’t seem to be anyone else there. When I offered her a croissant, she told me that I knew where I could stuff it. I wondered how James Stewart dealt with pre-menstrual tension. Maybe that’s what had driven him to attempt suicide in the first place. I decided that this wasn’t working out. Time for another movie.

I went to the early showing of Forrest Gump. Afterwards I got a really bad hair cut, sat at a bus stop and tried to tell my life story in a low monotone to anyone who would listen. The trouble is, nobody would. People would sit down for a moment and then leap up as soon as I mentioned my birth by caesarean section. I kept having to go back to the beginning and consequently never even got to the really interesting part about my toilet training. By mid afternoon I still hadn’t met anybody famous or had any influence on world events, so I decided to go to another movie.

The problem is there really wasn’t much to choose from. Even children’s movies like The Mask, Baby’s Day Out and War Of The Buttons were too violent for my experiment. To act them out I would have to have robbed banks, harassed women, destroyed buildings, kidnapped babies and run around cutting the buttons off children’s shirts. Next thing you know, I would be in jail and the media would be writing more stories about Quentin Tarantino. So I settled on the Capra-esque comedy It Could Happen To You, in which a good-hearted but temporarily financially embarrassed cop played by Nicholas Cage tips an equally good-hearted waitress played by Bridget Fonda with the promise of sharing any winnings from his lottery ticket with her, and winds up splitting a few million dollars (much to the chagrin of his Quentin Tarantino-influenced wife). The cop and the waitress fall in love, the wife divorces him, everybody loses all their money and lives happily ever after. The film should have just been called It Could Happen. Like, rilly!

After I had finished wiping the vomit off my shoes, I went out into the world to attempt to emulate the good-hearted feat at the centre of the plot. My most immediate problem was finding a good-

hearted waitress who looked anything like Bridget Fonda. I found a couple of pleasant waitresses, but they looked more like Nicholas Cage in drag, and I found a couple of beautiful waitresses who I wouldn’t mind falling in love with, but they kept whipping away my plate before I was finished, and hovering over my table saying things like “You can’t sit there all day with one cup of coffee.”

I had been to so many different establishments, ordering the bare minimum, that I suspect I was beginning to suffer from a caffeine overdose. That’s when I found her. She didn’t look like Bridget, but she could have passed for Jane in poor lighting conditions, without the breast enlargement and waist reduction. But she would have to do. I ordered a currant bun and a cup of coffee, which she served with a smile. Afterwards, as I went to pay my bill, I hit her with the spiel. I told her I did not have enough to tip her, but I had a lotto ticket, and if I won anything I would come back and give her half of whatever I made. She drew my attention to a line on the menu stating that there was a £5 minimum charge. I spluttered that I had only had a cup of coffee and currant bun. She said it made no difference, that was the rule. I told her I didn’t have £5, but I would negotiate: I’d pay for the coffee and the bun, and she could keep the whole of my lotto ticket and do whatever she liked with the winnings. She pointed out that the odds on her making a profit on this deal were in the region of a million to one. I was running out of ideas, so I shot straight to the end of the movie, and asked her to marry me. She called the manager, who suggested I put my ticket in the same place my girlfriend had wanted me to insert an almond croissant. I coughed up the five quid, and told them that if I won, I’d come back and buy the place and give them both the sack.

The day had not been an enormous success, but I decided to round it off by taking my two boys to a Disney cartoon. What could be nicer and more life enhancing than that? We went to see The Lion King. We laughed, we cried, we sang songs and ate popcorn. Afterwards, as we spilled out into the lobby, the youngest yelled “I am the lion king, and you are just a smelly antelope” leaped onto his brother’s back and sank his teeth into his neck. They tore off into the street, making animal noises and pelting each other with the left over popcorn.

As I watched them gambol violently into the distance, I sighed a contented sigh. I figure Disney know what they’re doing. Let’s face it, it’s a jungle out there, so if you have to have a hero from the movies, they might as well be top of the food chain. Bring on the natural born killers. My boys and I will be ready for the worst they can throw at us.