I keep feeling guilty about what I write.
A while back I sat here and attacked poor James Cameron, just because of the fawning profile of him on 60 Minutes. For years, I've felt hostile to any subject of a fawning profile on 60 Minutes, ever since Mike Wallace's fawning profile of that monster, Leona Helmsley. Leona was able to get Wallace on her side by bringing up her dead son. Wallace's son had died years earlier, so he was symathetic to anyone with a dead son. Good thing he didn't interview Saddam Hussein blubbing over Uday and Qusay.
No one had the bad taste to mention that Leona Helmsley's dead son was a crook. He stayed out of prison by having enough sense to steal only from his stepfather. And as it happens, Mike Wallace's surviving son is scumbag Chris Wallace on Fox News. Chris Wallace made a name for himself on some network news magazine with an attack on federal funds for special education. Wallace targeted Black parents in the South, ambushed them with cameras and claimed the fact that they couldn't or wouldn't instantly explain why their children needed special education was proof that they were defrauding Uncle Sam. Republicans in Congress used the report to cut funding. I don't know what Mike Wallace's dead son was like, but if he was anything like his brother, good riddance to him.
But poor James Cameron---all he wants to do is entertain! Some people didn't like that he said that he was "king of the world" when he got his Oscar, but he didn't mean that he was literally king of the world. He just meant he was terribly pleased. He did get poor Sigourney Weaver an Oscar for Aliens. And he deserves some credit for being Canadian, although he should do more for his people.
I've never seen Titanic, but apparently it had a scene of Leonardo di Caprio standing at the front of a ship flapping his arms shouting that he is king of the world. This scene had tragic consequences. Cruise ship operators have had to stop passengers from trying to do the same thing. I don't know off hand if there are proven cases of people falling overboard and disappearing while trying this, but there are reports of it. James Cameron's success has come at a cost in human life.
There was the 1993 movie, The Program, which showed football player proving their courage by lying on the double yellow line on a busy street. This stunt didn't work in real life. Two people were killed when they tried to do the same thing, and more were injured.
People murder each other all the time, so it's hard to tell to what degree violent movies cause violent crime. But with The Program and Titanic, the cause and effect relationship is very clear. Nobody anywhere ever tested their courage by lying in the street before The Program, and nobody climbed out on the bow of a cruise ship yelling that they were king of the world before Titanic.
And, yes, I know, the people who did this behaved rather unwisely. But if you make a movie costing over a hundred million dollars like Titanic did, you obviously expect a vast number of people to see it. If a tiny fraction of one percent of your audience was dumb enough to try it, that would still be thousands of people.
And, if you're going to say that the people in real life who climb out on the prow of a ship are idiots whose deaths are their own fault, weren't the characters in the movie idiots, too? Should James Cameron be admired for making a movie about a couple of abject morons?
By the way, does anyone know what the death toll was from Natural Born Killers? How about The Matrix?
Many years ago, The Weekly World News reported that the movie The Deerhunter had killed more people that the Hindenburg disaster. The number of Russian Roulette fatalities has no doubt risen since then.
You do need to be careful about these things.
In Oregon, two morons wanted to be like the main characters in a movie they saw. So they murdered a couple of a beach and fled to Mexico.
The "characters" they wanted to be like were Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in In Cold Blood.
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