In the wake of the tragedy at Virgina Tech, all the media can seem to fixate on is the fact that the assailant may have watched Oldboy a few times too many…
As the whole world still reels from the events of 16 April 2007, when Korean-born Cho Seung-hui shot down 32 fellow students at Virgina Tech in the States before killing himself, important questions need to be asked. Questions such as: Why does this keep happening? How can a youngster become so detached from both his peers and reality? What can be done about the seeming ease of availability of guns in the States? That, and just what had he been watching that turned him so violent?
Yep, it didn’t take long for the media to find out that Cho had watched Oldboy once or twice. And didn’t some of the poses in photo’s he took of himself look uncannily like they were from a John Woo film - look, he had a gun in each hand, just like his movies. (Just like his movies… and every action movie since The Killer, in the East and West.) Was he just recreating scenes from the movie? (Yeah, surely you remember the scene where Oh Dae-su ran amok in a University? And in real life, Cho Seung-hui had an incestuous relationship with his daughter?)
And so the hysteria begins again.
Perhaps we can look forward to Oldboy (and maybe every other Asian action movie to boot) being pulled off our shelves - the influence is obviously too strong for our impressionable minds to withstand, we’ll all bound be running outside with guns a blazing. Obviously.
Other than a few iconic poses, it’s hard to see what influence Park Chan-wook’s film may have had over Seung-hui. Chan-wook’s so-called Vengeance trilogy of Oldboy, Sympathy For Mr Vengeance and Lady Vengeance. Despite his reputation as an Asian Tarantino, he looks at the core theme of retribution intelligently. Acting as a powerful diatribe against violence, it only breeds more violence, vengeance a hollow victory, and only his final leading character in comes close to any kind of redemption. Hardly a glamorisation of violent death, and proof that those keen to report such stories have either never seen them, or at least seem keen to fuel the general publics horror.
Throughout the years, publications, radio and movies have been picked out as culprits for behaviour that seems to have no connection with our daily lives. Tragedies in particular seem to necessitate the need for an easily recognisable cause. More often than not movies have taken the spotlight as the chief offender.
Back in 1993, struck dumb by the James Bulger murder by two 11 year-olds the media played particular interest to the video in the possession of one of the boys father. The boys, it was presumed, had been influenced by this violent movie and tried to copy it with a small child - even though it was never proved either of the boys actually watched the film.
(Again, media interest didn’t seem to dwell on the fact that the film itself was more cheesy than scary.)
Films can’t make a normal, well-grounded human being commit such atrocities against their equals. It’s just an acute manifestation of how detached from reality they really are.
When Guardian writer Jon Ronson made his documentary about the six pupils from the small town of North Pole in Alaska, who plotted a Columbine style massacre last April, he found that their disconnection with the real world almost startlingly laughable. After the shootings, the pupils had planned to run to the station and catch a train to Anchorage. They hadn’t however, bothered to check the train times, meaning they’d have had a five hour wait for the next train - hardly a quick getaway.
That same detachment allows them to get totally wrapped in movies, but the movies aren’t the cause. These people obviously have something very wrong with them. Even if these problems are recognised, often we are too late to stop these murders form happening.
Maybe sometimes there is no easy answer to explain away these tragedies; we just have to live with it.
