On Violence » On Violence

(Non-Time Travel) Thoughts on "Looper"

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:34:00 -0700

Driving home after seeing Rian Johnson’s film Looper, Michael C’s wife brought up the inherent flaw in any time travel movie: how could anyone go back in time and change something without changing the future? Michael C responded, “Time travel doesn’t exist, so debating it is kind of pointless.” (Nevertheless, we discussed time travel for the rest of the car ride.)

Which is fine with me because, when it comes to Looper, time travel is the least interesting thing about it. I’d rather discuss its heroes, or lack of them. Almost every person I know who saw Looper said, “I didn’t know who to root for!”

(For those who haven’t seen it, massive, movie-ruining spoilers ahead.)

At first, you root for Young Joe. This version of Joe works as a “looper”, a hitman who kills targets sent from the future. He does it for the money, but you like him; he’s the classic anti-hero.

Then, on the other side, you have old Joe, who grew old, lost his fortune, turned to crime, then fell in love, kicked his drug habit and started living a good life. Gangsters murder his wife, so he goes back in time to kill the man that ordered him to be killed.

Now you root for Old Joe because Young Joe is still, you know, killing people.

Except that Old Joe isn’t just killing the man that ordered him to be killed, but that man as a child. An innocent child.

Now you’re rooting against Old Joe, especially when Young Joe winds up on a farm with the child Old Joe is trying to kill...until you realize that this kid has crazy psychic powers and might be Hitler! And then Old Joe, played by Bruce Willis, goes on a crazy evil gangster killing spree. As Michael C pointed out to me, you’re now rooting for Old Joe, because who doesn’t root for Bruce Willis when he’s in a bad ass gangster-killing action scene? In the end, it isn’t clear who the audience should want to win.

Recently, I watched The Cabin in the Woods, and the same thing happened. On one side, you have innocent teenagers who drive off to a cabin and certain death. On the other side, you watch the engineers who orchestrate their deaths, and learn why they’re trying to kill the teenagers. You’re kind of rooting for them as well. (I’ll say no more, for fear of spoiling this movie.)

For a 21st century action movie in the age of comic book movies, this is kind of amazing.

Most movies, most popular fiction, simplifies our world to the point of absurdity. Good versus evil. Loki versus the Avengers. Batman versus Joker. Gandalf, Stryder and the Hobbits versus the evil Sauron and Saruman. The Expendables--who in two movies have only lost one guy, which makes them not very expendable--versus an evil central European gangster. Even most dramas make it clear that the viewer should root for the protagonist. (Think of Gladiator or The Insider or The Godfather or Erin Brockovich.)

The brilliance of Looper is that two protagonists--or three depending on how you judge the kid--play out their destinies, based on internal motivations, and the movie doesn’t tell you who to root for. You just watch the whole thing happen, hoping each character succeeds even though you know they can’t. Everything happens as it should and would. The Cabin in the Woods ends with the characters facing a moral choice. Viewers have to ask themselves, what would I do?

Oppositely, The Dark Knight Rises failed to reach its potential--at least the potential I saw in the trailer--because, though it said its villain Bane represented the working class and the 99%, he didn’t. Imagine a version of that film where the rich aristocrat--Batman--battles someone actually representing Occupy Wall Street and the people. Instead, Bane was just another comic book movie villain out to destroy the world--or Gotham.

I enjoy blockbuster summer films--at least the ones I mentioned above--but recognize that something was missing from most of them. Though I loved The Avengers, it’s missing something that Looper isn’t: moral complexity

Art is only as good as its understanding of the world we live in. The media--mainstream, new media, and Hollywood--tend to view the world in binary terms, a world of heroes and villains. Hitler, Nazis, communists, terrorists...all evil.

But the world isn’t that simple. It isn’t that binary. The choices aren’t that stark.

I wish more films were like Looper.

Lone Survivor on Counter-Insurgency: Read It, Then Do The Opposite

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:34:00 -0700

(To read all of our “Lone Survivor” posts, please click here.)

We’ve criticized Marcus Luttrell and Patrick Robinson’s Lone Survivor so many times, in so many different ways, it may feel like there is nothing else left to say.

Au contraire. We’ve yet to tackle the most relevant topic to On Violence: fighting and winning counter-insurgencies, particularly the one in Afghanistan.

While Lone Survivor doesn’t pretend to be a counter-insurgency manual, Luttrell frequently offers counter-productive (and even dangerous) advice about how to fight counter-insurgencies. No soldier or marine should ever look to Marcus Luttrell for guidance.

Here are the worst parts from Lone Survivor relating to counter-insurgency:

Issue 1: Identifying the Enemy

You can't beat an insurgent if you can't identify them. As we noted in our post on the mistakes in Lone Survivor, Luttrell, describing his experience in Iraq, lumps "al Qeada or Taliban, Shiite or Sunni, Iraqi or Foreign, a freedom fighter for Saddam" together. Reread that. He thought he was facing the Taliban in Iraq.

In Afghanistan, he doesn’t distinguish between the various groups like the Taliban, Haqqani network, Hezb-e Islami Gulbadin (HiG), or Al Qaeda. He claimed his arch-nemesis Ben Sharmak (aka Ahmad Shah) was a serious Taliban bad guy, when in reality he was more closely identified with the HiG group. In two places, he links the Taliban with 9/11, which stretches the truth. He writes, "Taliban fighters were nothing like so rough and dirty as Afghan mountain peasants. Many of them had been educated in America," a more accurate description of Al Qaeda than the Taliban. He then says that Kunar was "the place where the destruction of the WTC was born and nourished". That’s just flat wrong. (Most of al Qaeda’s training was based around Kandahar, which is in the south. The Taliban barely controlled Kunar province.)

In maneuver war, firepower wins. In irregular wars, intelligence wins. Lone Survivor doesn’t convey that nuance.

Issue 2: Empathy

No army loves its enemies. But you do need to understand them. And even empathize them.

The best counter-insurgents and insurgents can at least empathize with the people they work for and live with. Lone Survivor misses this. Luttrell describes Afghanistan as "the place where a brand of evil flourishes that is beyond the understanding of most Westerners." Or thumbing his nose at a place that is, in his words, "Primitive with a big P." Hard to empathize with people you consider savages. Or people Luttrell calls, “hate-filled.” If you can’t empathize with the population, you will never be able to separate them from the insurgents.

Issue 3: Hardcore Terrorists and Accidental Guerrillas

In addition to exaggerating the number of insurgents he faced, Luttrell exaggerates their importance. He identifies every Taliban fighter as a hardcore terrorist. The real world isn't so simple, though. Many insurgents, as described by David Kilcullen, are temporary fighters fighting for local causes, like honor or against a perceived invader. Most likely the ambush facing the SEALs was not an expertly trained, company-sized element, but a small group of insurgents (allied with the HiG) bolstered by local Korengalis fighting for their honor.

I say again, intelligence versus firepower.

Issue 4: SEALs as Counter-Insurgents

Special Operations troops, like Rangers, SEALs and Delta Force, fill a vital need in counter-insurgencies, conducting direct action missions. But that doesn’t mean all special operations troops are good for all counter-insurgency missions.

For instance, in one mission, Luttrell said it "required interrogation, a skill at which we were all very competent." But he was never trained in interrogation (we know because Luttrell goes over every single piece of training he ever received), so how could he competently interrogate someone? Or even do so legally since interrogations on objectives have to be approved by an officer equivalent in rank to an Army Colonel or Navy Captain? And, again legally, interrogations must be performed by trained human intelligence professionals. So how did Luttrell do them?

The idea of SEALs as counter-insurgents bothers me because it shows how much Luttrell doesn’t know about his role in the larger war machine. If he thinks he can do intelligence, direct action missions, and reconnaissance, (plus who knows how many other missions) and if he thinks his SEALs will win the war by themselves, then he needs to learn a lot more about working with regular units.

Unfortunately, Luttrell’s attitude is all too common in special operations in general. (Check out this organization chart from Thomas Ricks’ blog to get an idea how little special operations and conventional units work together.)

Issue 5: Fighting the Right War

The way Luttrell talks about warfare, you would think he was fighting World War II, not battling insurgents in an irregular (political) war. For instance, Luttrell describes the Taliban crossing from Pakistan into Konar as, "this was a border hot spot, where multiple Taliban troop movements were taking place on a weekly, or even daily basis." It sounds like he is describing the Germans moving into Poland, except that isn't how the Taliban operates. They move in small units when possible, and live off the population. Saying "insurgent cells crossed the border" makes way more sense than saying the Taliban conducted "troop movements".

But this thinking makes sense for a commando who wants to fight the enemy straight up. You can see this when Luttrell describes his mission, “[al queda and taliban remnants] were preparing to start over, trying to fight their way through the mountain passes...And our coming task was to stop them." Why send in SEALs? “In general terms, we believe there are very few of the world’s problems we could not solve with high-explosive or a well-aimed bullet.”

In reality, a well-aimed bullet is only one tool amongst many needed to defeat an insurgency.

Which is a shame because Luttrell almost gets it.

Just because the bulk of Lone Survivor misunderstands counter-insurgency doesn't mean that Lutrell/Robinson didn't slip in one good nugget of counter-insurgency wisdom. In one sentence, they sum up how to defeat an insurgency: "the key to winning was intel, identifying the bomb makers, finding the supplies, and smashing the Taliban arsenal before they could use it."

He identified that the key to winning is intelligence. As I said several times in this post, in an irregular war like Afghanistan, intelligence, not maneuver, wins the day. Yet the rest of Lone Survivor fails to mention where the SEALs got their intelligence (Marine Corps daily patrols), the value of winning over locals (Luttrell seems stunned the local tribes protected him) and building up the Afghan security forces (Luttrell’s mission is U.S. only). Instead, he talks about the value of direct action missions (”there are very few of the world’s problems...”) to the exclusion of all else.

Again, Lone Survivor isn’t a counter-insurgency manual. But far more Americans have read/will see Lone Survivor and will learn more about Afghanistan from this book/movie than any other source. It is a shame they will come away with the exact wrong ideas about how to wage this type of war.

An On V Update to Old Ideas: Al Qaeda FBI (Again), Sexual Assault and Beards!

Tue, 07 May 2013 09:34:00 -0700

(To check out other “On V Updates to Old Ideas”, please click here.)

As always, more On V updates...

An Update to Sexual Assault in the Military

Unlike the last couple years, we haven’t written about this year’s Oscar contenders yet, which is insane. Between Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s The Slavery Revenge Blaxploitation Feature, we’ve got more than enough war and violence to write about.

Every year the documentary category tends to have one war-related pic (though they never win) and this year was no different. The Invisible War covered an issue Eric C has followed closely since we launched this blog: sexual assault in the military. A trendy upset pick in the category of Best Full Length Documentary, The Invisible War made waves around D.C., including a viewing by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

Sexual assault in the military was also featured in a cover story in Rolling Stone a few months back, and an NPR news story last month. (We could probably do an “On V Update on War and Rape” every other month.)

Unfortunately, the updates keep coming. Just yesterday the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention chief was arrested for sexual assault. And a report released today by the Pentagon today shows that:

"Sexual assaults in the military are a growing epidemic across the services and thousands of victims are still unwilling to come forward despite a slew of new oversight and assistance programs...Troubling new numbers estimate that up to 26,000 military members may have been sexually assaulted last year..."

Growing Beards in the Muslim World Redux

Last December, and again a few weeks back, we questioned the widespread growth of deployment beards by Special Forces soldiers. One commenter pointed out how SF beards tended to be unkempt, whereas locals took immaculate care of their own. Francis Conliffe, an armour officer from Canada, forwarded us this article, pointing out that “It will hardly make anyone an expert, but the main point is that how you wear the beard is even more important than having one at all--a point that may be lost on some of the men in your photo collection.”

Doing other research, we also found possibly the greatest SF beard yet.

This guy knows how to build rapport.

Two More Innocent Criminals Released

I hate it when innocent people go to prison for crimes they didn’t commit. On the one hand, I understand that no criminal justice system can get it right 100% of the time. On the other, why are the innocent people always poor, often minorities, and never represented adequately in court? In recent months, both Radiolab and 60 Minutes showed how confirmation bias encouraged wrongful prosecutions. (I’m also taking Organizational Behavior right now, so confirmation bias is on my mind.) Worse, these articles both show how our justice system refuses to admit mistakes when it makes them.

Check out our series “Intelligence is Evidence” to understand why this is a problem for law enforcement...and the intelligence community. Intelligence folks at Langley should heed the warnings from our criminal justice system, but they have no incentive to do so.

An Amazing Link Drop for the Military’s Culture

Peter J. Munson on his blog (and cross-posted on SWJ) pulled together some thoughts for a panel with the Chief of Staff of the Army’s Strategic Studies Group, creating a pretty exhaustive list of articles about the need to think about our military’s culture, and its implications. On the way, he cites our series, “Our Communist Military”; we appreciate the shout out.

Our Communist Military’s Gun Control/Defense Rhetorical Inconsistency

When we write about guns--which we explained here won’t be for a while--we’ll be on the lookout for sneaky inconsistencies...like those from “Our Communist Military”.

For instance, as Dominic Tierney absolutely throws down, Republicans are crazy hypocritical on this issue. Republicans believe gun control will hamper a citizen’s right to stop tyranny; they also want a giant military--the same military that would enforce that tyranny. Tierney writes:

“In the current debate over gun control, the pro-gun lobby has an ace card up its sleeve: We need weapons to prevent government tyranny, they say. These self-styled champions of liberty see guns as the ultimate insurance policy to protect the Constitution. The problem is that most of those making this argument also strongly support a massive U.S. military -- exactly the behemoth we must be armed against...

“When conservatives take up armed resistance against D.C. despotism, they'll really regret some of the toys they gave the government. Rubio and Palin want the populace to be able to arm itself with assault rifles. But they want the government armed with F-35s -- a $100 million-plus stealth plane with a top speed of Mach 1.6. When President Obama discovers his inner tyrant, it won't be a fair fight...

“Conservatives say that a weaponized citizenry is a necessary shield against dictatorship. I'll take the argument more seriously if conservatives stop arming this tyrant to the teeth.”

We couldn’t have said it better, except maybe to add...

The ACLU on Our More Militarized Police

The ACLU recently launched an investigation into America’s increasingly militarized police forces. We have to imagine that conservatives will be right there with them---we have to stop tyranny. What’s more tyrannical than a police force armed with military grade weapons and body armor?

Finally, a Shout Out to the Center for Army Lessons Learned...

...who, we just found out, linked to Michael C’s article “Influencing the Population: Using Interpreters, Conducting KLEs, and Executing IO in Afghanistan” in November of 2012 about cultural analysis and Afghanistan.

On V's 4th Anniversary

Mon, 06 May 2013 13:06:00 -0700

Four years ago to the day, without much fanfare, we launched On Violence. Over the last four-tenths of a decade, we've written about numerous topics, received countless compliments (and criticisms) and reached more people than we thought possible. Thank you to all the people who have made this possible, they know who they are.

(If you want to see the best posts of the last four years, please look at the sidebar for our centennial recaps.)

The Republican Argument for Population-Centric COIN

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:33:00 -0700

(To read the rest of "Over-Reacting to COIN (Again): On Cultural Empathy and 'Gratitude Theory'", please click here.)

When we first brought up “Gratitude Theory”, I had a basic question, “Does giving people things change their behavior?”

According to many military theorists, not one bit. Since General Petraeus popularized this theory, a number of officers, academics and bloggers have pushed back. To summarize their thoughts, “We shouldn’t just give things to Afghans or Iraqis, and it certainly won’t win over their respect!” Take this misinterpretation of population-centric counter-insurgency from Slate:

“When people hear about the U.S. military doing development work in Afghanistan, they think about ‘winning hearts and minds’ through humanitarian aid or building schools. The idea is that if Americans do nice things for Afghans, they will be so grateful they will begin to support the counterinsurgency.”

Author Bing West--who regularly opines on this topic in conservative outlets--hates this philosophy because he knows it won’t work. He wrote an article titled, “We Were Too Nice To Win in Afghanistan”. As The New York Times described his book The Wrong War:

“He flatly says that the counterinsurgency strategy behind the war — trying to win over the Afghans by protecting them from the Taliban and building roads, schools and civil institutions — is a failure...In Mr. West’s view, counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is a feel-good, liberal theology that is turning the United States military into the Peace Corps and undermining its “core competency” — violence.”

An Australian Brigadier General sums it all up much more simply, “more killing, less good deeds”.

As all the above examples make clear, giving things to people doesn’t work. It’s a strategy doomed to fail...unless you’re president, in which case, it works fantastically.

Why did Mitt Romney lose last November?

“Remind them of this: If they want more stuff from government, tell them to go vote for the other guy—more free stuff.”

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what...there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…”

“It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.”

“In a conference call with fund-raisers and donors to his campaign, Mr. Romney said Wednesday afternoon that the president had followed the “old playbook” of using targeted initiatives to woo specific interest groups — ‘especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people’.”

To sum up: Iraqis and Afghans don’t care about free things, but dumb American voters? They don’t stand a chance. The irony is many “COINtras” are Republicans who think that “giving people things” didn’t work in Afghanistan, but then argued that they lost the election because the President gave away too much stuff. Can giving things away, from building schools to providing free health care, change public opinion?

Absolutely.

FM 23-4, the counter-insurgency manual written by General Petraeus, understood this, and therefore advocated that soldiers should provide security for locals while doing reconstruction. (Reconstruction without security, the manual says, won’t work. It also reiterates the need for both offensive operations and security operations, which are vital to defeating an insurgency.)

Kill-centric advocates don’t just under-value reconstruction, they loathe it. COINtras want a simple war that only involves killing an enemy in a uniform. Counter-insurgencies against the U.S. military don’t have that simplicity. They do feature people, and all things being equal, people do like getting things...which is a pretty good argument for doing reconstruction in war torn nations like Afghanistan and Iraq.

On V's 600th Post: The Best of the Last 100

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:00:00 -0700

This post, the one you’re reading right now, is our 600th post. As we like to do every hundred posts, we’re sharing our best/favorite posts from the last 100. We’ve divided them into our best series and our best individual posts. (To read more “Best of On V” collections, check out the sidebar or click here.)

Series:

Four large series dominated our last 100 posts. First, Michael C tried to offer solutions to the situation with Iran (we don’t like the words conflict or war). Our favorites from that series include “Which Country Do You Prefer? Putting Iran's "Evil" In Context”, “My Solution to the Iran Problem” and “The Best Comment On Violence Has Ever Received”

Meanwhile, we finally wrote about HBO’s seminal war mini-series, Band of Brothers, where we wrote a post (or two) on each episode of the series. Eric C’s two favorite posts were from the last two episodes, “Band of Brothers' "Why We Fight" or: No, That's Not Why We Fought” and “The Myth of the Good War: Band of Brothers ‘Points’” Michael C wrote the excellent post, “The Feeling You Might Live Through It: Band of Brothers' "The Last Patrol".

We also continued our trend of igniting small “Twitter wars” with Eric C’s post “The Sobel Problem: Band of Brothers "Currahee" where he argued that officers weren’t just equal to enlisted men, but better. We defended the idea here, but noticed that a lot of the arguments (“Everyone is equal, regardless of rank!”) were...

Communist.

Oh yes, if you want to piss people off, call the military communist, even if you’re just using the phrase rhetorically. Our favorite posts from the “Our Communist Military” series were “The Most Greatest Institution in Human History...Our Communist Military!”, “Our Politically Correct Communist Milblogs” (which upset the usually imperturbable Jonn Lilyea) and the pro-market “Our Command Economy Communist Military”, “Our Pro-Veteran Communist Criminal Justice System” and asked, “Is Toys for Tots...Communist?”

Finally, Eric C finally learned how to spell “Petraeus” when we wrote our 2013 “Most Intriguing Event of the Year” about Benghazi and the General Petraeus sex scandal.

Posts

Way back, we wrote two art posts that we especially love, “War is War is Film Part I” and “War is War is Film Part II”, where we found quotes from movie characters that espouse “war is war” philosophy. Eric C’s favorite line:

“I expected to find mostly bad ass action heroes like John Rambo or “Dirty” Harry Callahan. Instead, I mostly found super villains. And comparing “war is war”-iors to Grand Moff Tarkin or General Jack D. Ripper is like comparing them to Hitler...

“Or it might just be that if super villains espouse your military theory, you may be on the wrong side of history.”

Eric C wrote up an art post, “I’d Buy That Police Station for a Dollar!: RoboCop and America’s Awesomely Privatized Future”, on how one of the greatest action films of all time predicted America’s militarized-police future. Michael C read it and asked, “Is that all you got?”. He wrote, “The Enforcement Droid is Programmed for Urban Pacification!”

Of course, our still-too-small stable of guest posters contributed some great work. Matty P wrote one of Eric’s favorite posts of last year, “Guest Post: You Think You Know Pain?” Matthew Bradley absolutely threw down academically with “Guest Post: Opportunistic Scavengers in the Sahel”. And finally, an anonymous author sent us “Guest Post: When Saying, “Thanks for Your Service” Doesn’t Cut It”. Thanks for the great work guys.

Though it didn’t get as large a response as we wanted, Michael C’s “The Military’s Gay Shower Fiasco...and 5 Other Anti-DADT Predictions that Never Came True” is also one of our favorite posts from last year.

Hey, want to stop insurgencies? Michael C explained what we’re doing wrong in, “Hearts, Minds and Gatorade Bottles Filled With Urine” and then offered solutions in “Don't Burn Korans, Kill Children, or Drop Bomblets That Look Like Candy: An Incomplete List of Counter-Insurgency Do’s and Don’ts”.

Eric C wrote two posts that got long standing ideas off his chest, first asking how “The Best Trained, Most Professional Military...Just Lost Two Wars?” and detailing the “The World War I Problem”

Michael C, on the other hand, just wanted to break the internet. With that in mind, he wrote, “A New Game: Spot the Navy SEAL!” to (rightfully) piss off special operators. He followed that up with “Growing Deployment Beards Works! So Do These 8 Ideas”. Oh, and Clausewitz happened.

Finally, Michael C’s favorite post from the last year was “Queer Eye for the Straight Navy: An Argument to Paint Aircraft Carriers Rainbow Colors”, offering a suggestion for how the Navy should paint its ships. Unfortunately, he dashed cold water on himself two days later in “A Flock of Seagoing Easter Eggs: Four Reasons Why It Won't Happen”.

Hollywood's Actual Violence Problem

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:00:00 -0700

A few months ago, I received the kind of email that makes me drop whatever I’m doing and call Michael C. The email was from Michael E. Douroux, who spent 25 years as “a literary agent representing writers, directors, producers and cinematographers in motion pictures and network prime-time television”. Since Michael C and I have been trying to break into the industry as screenwriters for the last few years, that got our attention.

Normally, I’d immediately email Douroux and ask for a meeting, except his email included a copy of an article he wrote for Business Insider. Titled “Hollywood Violence Tax”, Douroux proposes a value added tax for violent films.

Unfortunately, every screenplay we’ve ever written is incredibly, incredibly violent. And I mean violent:

- The script we just finished now includes at least two dozen people who get shot, blown up, strangled or...wait for it...lobotomized by an ax--it happens to at least two characters. (We’re incredibly proud of this script.)

- Our first script is about torture...so yeah, it’s really violent...’cause it’s about torture. (We also really love this script.)

- Even our spec script for an animated comedy is about a special ops team...and special ops teams kill people. In our script, they kill a lot of people. (This is also the best script for a half-hour animated comedy about a special forces team ever written.)

A dilemma: how do we contact an industry professional who, apparently, abhors violence? (I’m guessing Mr. Douroux won’t be representing us.)

Since Newtown, politicians and pundits on both side of the aisle have been trying to solve America’s gun violence problem. As I see it, five solutions have been proposed: gun control (endorsed by liberals), expanding gun ownership (proposed by conservatives), placing armed guards at school (the NRA), tracking the mentally ill better (both sides), and the issue that piqued the interest of On Violence’s resident art critic, solving Hollywood’s “violence problem”.

Hollywood does have a “violence problem”, but the problem isn’t violence; it’s morality. Like the screenplays that Michael C and I wrote, Hollywood films tend to be violent. Unlike our screenplays, they lack a moral point of view. They fail to the show the cost of violence and its complexity. Violence itself isn’t the problem, but how Hollywood portrays that violence. As Ebert’s dictum goes, it's not what a movie says, but how it says it.

Michael C and I grew up on action movies. All of Arnold’s films (especially the Terminator films and Predator), Rambo, Die Hard, Aliens, and so on. “Guns, guns, guns,” as Clarence Boddiker quips in Robocop. Explosions. Bullets. One liners about killing people. We love ‘em.

And yet, when we grew up, Michael C joined the military and I marched in peace protests. More importantly, we started writing. This summer, we decided to finally write an action film. The conversation went like this:

“Eric, why haven’t we written an action film?”

“I don’t know.”

“We love action movies.”

“Then let’s write an action movie.”

“Agreed.”

I wrote the first draft in two weeks, but it wasn’t an action film. If you go with The New York Times definition, it has all of the ingredients: a lone wolf hero, an obsession with guns (and axes), and a few explosions. By definition, a shoot-’em-up action film. But it also has something most action films don’t: cost.

Cost. I’ll say it again, cost. If we want to solve Hollywood’s violence problem, Hollywood needs to show the audience the problems with violence: the guilt that comes from killing and the lingering effects of PTSD.

Not to mention the complexity of violence. Hollywood needs to show the difficulty of violence: killing the wrong people and the unintended consequences of killing those wrong people. Or even the unforeseen consequences of killing the right people.

Our action movie? The hero kills a lot of people and it nearly destroys his soul. The torture film? Well, it’s anti-torture, if anything. The comedy? It’s a parody. We like to think that we take the cost of violence into account in every word we write.

Hollywood doesn’t.

In short, Hollywood should stop glorifying violence. Stop presenting heroes who can kill dozens without guilt. Show violence as it actually is: complicated, hard and ugly. Present violence the way it actually is, and we may want to be less violent. (But to show the cost of violence, films will still be violent.)

Back to the original proposal, we shouldn’t try to stop violence through taxation. Not all violence is portrayed equally. When it’s done right, it teaches and evolves society. If we want to solve Hollywood’s violence problem, we can’t just get rid of violence. We just have to portray it the way it actually is.

Guest Post: I Own a Gun

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:28:00 -0700

(Today's post is a guest post by longtime contributor Matty P. If you would like to guest write for us, please check out our guest post guidelines.)

I am a gun owner. Nothing ostentatious, just a single action .22, a gift from my father. I keep it for recreation, home invasion, and the inevitable zombie apocalypse.

When I was five, I saw my first real gun. My dad knew that with guns in the house, gun safety was a necessity. My education was limited to “stay away” and “find an adult”. As I aged/grew older, so did my education. Always, there was an emphasis on danger and respect. It was more than the simple, “this is not a toy” speech, but an explanation of what a gun can do and why it exists. My father made sure there was no confusion. Exposure was progressive. I’m not sure when, but I was finally allowed to handle a gun under supervision after a professionally licensed safety course at a firing range.

I have no intention of ever using my gun on someone. I have been angry and never considered the gun as an option. I have been severely depressed and still never considered the gun an option. I was at home once when someone tried to break in. At that point, the gun became an option; though it never came to that as the burglar ran off after realizing I was home. The only time my gun leaves the house is if I am taking it to the range, and even then it is unloaded. I keep the ammunition and firearm in separate locked boxes as per state law for transporting firearms. I have never fired my gun anywhere other than at a range and I have no intention doing otherwise.

With all the above mentioned; I consider myself a responsible gun owner. As such, I believe I have demonstrated the right to own a firearm. As have scores of Americans who use them at work, for sport, and for recreation. But dangerous people have challenged this right by doing stupid and terrible things.

I understand the motives propelling those who want to reform or even abolish the second amendment. The simple truth is, without guns, there would be no gun deaths. While I will not speculate on how getting rid of guns would affect the statistics on clubbings or knife inflicted injuries, what I will say is that what we need isn’t to get rid of the second amendment, but to better define it and enforce it. Because too much freedom is no better than removing freedom. At this moment in time we have so much freedom we lead the world in non-war gun deaths, which isn’t a tribute to freedom, but to chaos.

The truth is: I don’t trust you. I trust me because I know I know how to responsibly use a firearm. I trust certain members of my family because they’ve demonstrated proper use of a firearm through years of safe use. Some of my fraternity members I don’t trust... And I don’t trust most of you, because I don’t know you or what training you’ve had. Plus, guns are potentially dangerous to me and those I love. And me having a gun doesn’t make me feel safer about you having a gun.

Eddy Izzard had a set of jokes based on the motto “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” in his show Dressed to Kill. While meant as comedy, there’s some truth ringing through the laughs. I have no real answers to the riddle. Only a suggestion that we make gun legislation an issue again rather than avoiding the fact that firearms are constantly finding themselves in dangerous hands. And while people do kill people, guns help.