Jewish World Review Oct. 17, 2002 / 11 Mar-Cheshvan, 5763

Bob Tyrrell

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Consumer Reports

Mourning the loss of the "yellow-belly"


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Not much of a consensus has jelled regarding the identity of the brute or brutes that have been shooting innocent, unarmed citizens from ambush in the Washington area. Some students of crime believe the killer to be a loner. Others believe the killings to be the work of a team. Some claim the killings have been committed by marksmen. Others deny the shootings reveal any great proficiency with guns. Most believe that the killer or killers are relatively young, and I assume most agree with me that the killer or killers are moviegoers.

Hold it -- some of you out there are taking offense? You are movie fans? You are members of "the industry"? My old friend John Wayne used to get very prickly when I would speak ill of Hollywood. Since his departure heavenward, I fear my assessment of Hollywood has gone even more tenebrous. Yet, I would bet a year's supply of popcorn that the brutes, who have suddenly made themselves so famous from deeds so vile, are devotees of today's Hollywood "blockbusters."

Where else would one get the idea of carefully mapping out the streets of an urban center, strategically planning random snipings and then killing unsuspecting people? Read "Mein Kampf" -- Hitler never dreamed up such a deed. Stalin never chuckled about such ghoulishness, and Stalin was known to chuckle about murder. Remember his little joke, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" Incidentally, Stalin, wherever he might be today, has found out.

Brutal deeds unimagined by murderous dictators now are the raw material for Hollywood movies and prime-time television. Jim Bowman, the movie critic I admire most, says that Hollywood has replaced "the old-fashioned hero who did great deeds with stars who do evil." In today's films, "there is not much difference between cops and bad guys. And the bad guys are really bad." Bowman mentioned Anthony Hopkins brilliantly playing Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer and cannibal. Hollywood has slathered attention on Lecter. The attention he gets leaves him as a kind of pop celebrity. That is morally confusing to viewers with unsteady moral compasses. In a celebrity society where celebrity is dependent not on talent but on attention, such scoundrels become role models.

But morals aside, movies have for a generation provided blueprints for some grisly crimes. Stalkers, snipers, even banal thieves have had clever scenarios provided to them by Hollywood. A couple of weeks back, before the ambushes here in Washington, I attended a French movie that could have been made in Hollywood. "8 Women" contained not one noble character or noble deed. Yet it was edifying in comparison with the Hollywood previews anterior to it. One depicted an urban sniper holding a man (actor Colin Farrell) and many others in his grip for hours, after the man innocently answers a pay phone in, I believe it was, Times Square. Like so many other sniper films, it struck me as ghoulish, infantile, romanticizing the irrational and preposterous.

It was all of those things, but we now know it is not wholly preposterous. In a free and prosperous society, evil people are free to play the role of the sniper. If before the recent outbreak here you doubted it, you could always go to the movies. That movie that I saw in previews, "Phone Booth," has now had its release delayed, its producers, 20th Century Fox, fearing that viewers would find the plot "tasteless." Variety had reviewed it as "simple and suspense-deficient." "Suspense-deficient"? What do viewers go to movies for? After decades of this "suspense," do viewers still need new evocations of it?

John Wayne used to chide me for my distaste for "violence" in film. He thought it harmless, and in his day he was probably right. In most of his movies, the violence was but a small part of the movie. There was also right triumphing over wrong. The good guys were always more appealing than the bad guys. There was little of Hollywood's present infatuation with grimness, insanity, cruelty and other blessings from the French Existentialists, most of whom were frauds. The scenes in a John Wayne movie were often very beautiful and rarely fantastical, as they are today with cars exploding out of buildings or fist fights going on underwater or while the fighters fall from buildings -- all in slow motion, blood dripping poignantly.

Many of Wayne's movies were Westerns. Westerns are almost unheard of among today's film productions, which apparently are packaged to appeal to -- well, to disturbed young people, mainly young men, possibly snipers. The Westerns were usually filmed amidst stupendous scenery, where great struggles had actually taken place between good guys and bad.

Moreover, very few gunmen, even bad gunmen, ever shot a person who was unarmed or shot a person in the back. If a gunman did, Wayne would bring down on him that epithet that everyone in the West hated and feared, "yellow-belly." Of course, all snipers, even by today's standards, are yellow-bellies.

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JWR contributor Bob Tyrrell is editor in chief of The American Spectator. Comment by clicking here.

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10/03/02: A man above the law, a bully
09/26/02: Is Bob Greene a victim of an anti-Clinton backlash?
09/19/02: I knew Mafiosi and …
09/12/02: Chickens and poseurs
09/05/02: Sympathizing with the Europols
08/29/02: 9-11 did not change us forever
08/22/02: Public persons frivoling with serious matters
08/15/02: Beachcombing among the fat of the land
08/08/02: They pave the way for corruption, not personal responsibility
08/01/02: Believing the unbelievable
07/25/02: The congressional posse comitatus
07/18/02: Cosmopolitan Arab fashion
07/11/02: What the prez actually knows
07/04/02: The vindication of a truly original thinker
06/27/02: The perfect book for Hillary
06/20/02: To say that they were ordinary is not to slight them
06/13/02: Daschle must begin to act like an adult
06/06/02: Lack of "intelligence" --- and sheer stupidity
05/30/02: Revealing a carefully guarded media secret
05/23/02: In these times, thank Heaven for Clinton!
05/16/02: Fast Times at the Church of the Nativity
05/09/02: "Name the Prettiest Suicide Bomber"
05/02/02: Vindication for the Boy Scouts
04/25/02: A topic almost no other columnist will touch
04/18/02: 'Conventional Wisdom' --- and those who defy it
04/11/02: Let the Sun shine in
04/05/02: Hooded men of color in sheets
04/01/02: A McCain-Feingold Act for Hollywood
03/21/02: Yakkin' on Yates
03/15/02: No role for Paul Volcker in Enron: the movie
03/07/02: My membership in the Communist Party U.S.A.
02/27/02: This award is bestowed by 'contrarians'
02/21/02: Mike Tyson: Made for Washington?
02/14/02: Enron as underdog?
02/07/02: Freed from the presence of money -- hard or soft -- most politicians would be just as bad
01/31/02: Needed: Bush to make a preemptive strike against his enemies …. Ones who'd like to see him fail even during war
01/24/02: Hucksters will move on to make their next marks
01/17/02: Debonair prez should begin to do the High Life
01/10/02: Move over Twinkies --- "the acne medicine made him do it!"
01/03/02: Leaving the Nazis looking comparatively humane
12/27/01: A "self-made journalist"
12/20/01: Calamities and unanticipated benefits
12/13/01: America's grief ought not to give comfort to those who caused it
12/06/01: Leahy, the strict civil libertarian!? A short-term exploiter of the Constitution is more like it
11/29/01: Welcome to Afghan, Maryland?
11/26/01: So, why don't more folks hate us?
11/15/01: America's quagmire and other certainties
11/09/01: No longer the smug statists, the prodigal Keynesians?
11/01/01: The New Seriousness
10/25/01: Bright lights and the Taliban
10/18/01: Is bin-Laden propaganda from Western intelligence?
10/12/01: No yellow ribbons
10/05/01: Bubba's back --- again!
09/28/01: Exposing peacetime's frauds
09/21/01: So protected, we're vulnerable
09/14/01: At Barbara Olson's home
09/11/01: Duh! All conservatives are racists
08/31/01: Arafat's terrorists have created their own hell
08/24/01: Time for some political prophecy
08/16/01: They claim to be doing so much good
08/10/01: Visiting the source of the White House braintrust
08/03/01: Morality and reality
07/31/01: Blinded by success?
07/24/01: The latest Kennedy capitulation in Massachusetts
07/13/01: Talk about tawdry
07/06/01: Delighting in the Dictator
06/29/01: The Godphobes
06/21/01: Fashionable Washington is sempiternally in a stew
06/15/01: The limits of hypocrisy
06/08/01: Flagging our general apathy

© 2001, Creators Syndicate