I’ve been diligently digging through cause-and-effect stories about media for more than a decade and a half now. It’s sort of a Plugged In tradition, sometimes even an obsession to find connection points between entertainment and the way people act.
We find funny stories, like the spaghetti taco craze that started on Nickelodeon’s iCarly. We find really positive ones, like when a girl named Miriam saved a friend’s life via Heimlich Maneuver after watching the titular character in SpongeBob SquarePants save Squidward from choking on a clarinet.
And we find awful ones. You’d think I’d get used to those, there are so many of them. But, no. The chills were right there again today when I read this (as posted in our Culture Clips column a few days ago):
Ten-year-old Jason Hall, who shot and killed his father in Riverside, Calif., in May 2011, has admitted he got the idea after watching an episode of Criminal Minds that paralleled his situation. In a videotaped interview with detectives that was shown at his trial, Hall said, "A bad father did something to his kids, and the kid did the exact same thing I did—he shot him. … He told the truth and wasn't arrested and the cops believed him. He wasn't in trouble or anything. I thought maybe the exact same thing would happen to me."
It’s that last bit that really got me this time: He wasn’t in trouble or anything. I thought maybe the exact same thing would happen to me.
“When [Kurt Cobain] died and left that note, it struck a deep chord inside of me,” wrote rock icon Neil Young in his newly published autobiography Waging Heavy Peace (as reported by Rolling Stone). He says he felt devastated after learning that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain had included Young’s famous line “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” in his 1994 suicide note.
Why would something like that get under his skin? Because he was realizing anew how powerful his own words were. How what we say and do affects others. How entertainment affects all of us.
“The first job of the movie is to entertain,” says Flight star Don Cheadle, in Entertainment Weekly. “If a movie is perceived as being a ‘message movie,’ then a lot of times people shy away from it.” But that’s not really the point, is it? Flight screenwriter John Gatins gets more in the middle of the point when he says (in that same publication) that he hopes his movie’s messages about the destructive power of alcoholism might influence audiences as well entertain them:
Some people will probably think it's some dogmatic, proselytizing movie. That was not the intention. I hope you laugh, I hope you enjoy it. And if some people come away thinking, 'Wow, I need to hold up the mirror,' then what a great offshoot of that.
Gatins is rooting for us to see more of those good cause-and-effect stories. And I’m rooting for them right along with him.
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