Blue Story and Moral Panics

Blue Story and Moral Panics

The film Blue Story, which tells the story of two young black men caught up in gang violence, hit the headlines this week when Vue - Britain's third largest cinema chain - banned it from its screens. The reason given for the ban was a mass brawl, involving machetes and knives, outside a Birmingham cinema where the film was being screened. In justifying its decision, Vue cited "25 significant incidents" in the 24 hours after the film's premiere. Vue's decision provoked a major backlash, and accusations of racism, with Twitter hashtags, such as #NoBlueNoVue and #BoycottVue, calling for a boycott of the company, and a petition on change.org (which I signed) calling for the film's reinstatement: eventually, the company backed down and is now once again showing the film. It is certainly noteworthy that many other films depict gang violence - think, for example, of much of Martin Scorsese's work or The Football Factory, a film which glamorises a group of white working-class football hooligans in London - without being banned. In addition, West Midlands Police did not ask for Blue Story to be withdrawn, and have made no connection between the film and the brawl outside the cinema - indeed, the brawl occurred before Blue Story had begun showing, as people were queuing to see the Disney family entertainment film Frozen II, a fact which has often been lost in the reporting. Four of the five people arrested over the brawl are too young to have been allowed to see the 15 rated film. Also, the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises was never banned despite a mass shooting during a 2012 screening in Colorado. Sheila Knowles, who runs BBE, a company that runs events for the black community, has pointed to the lack of reaction to the Islamophobic incidents linked to the 2015 film American Sniper, a film that glorifies the killing of Iraqis. However, in this blogpost I would like to make a different comparison - with two 1990s films that were also accused of triggering violent crimes, only for the moral panics that surrounded them to turn out to be at best flimsy, and at worst entirely unjustified. Both these films, Child's Play 3 and Natural Born Killers, just like Blue Story, highlight how, based on a kneejerk reaction, links can be established between a particular film and violent crime, yet how the alleged link almost never stands up to scrutiny.

Child's Play 3

Child's Play 3, released in 1991 and directed by Jack Bender, tells the story of Chucky (voiced by Brad Dourif), a murderous doll. It gained notoriety in Britain in 1993, after two-year-old James Bulger was abducted by two 10 year old boys in Bootle, Merseyside, before being brutally tortured and murdered near a railway track. Shortly before the murder, the father of one of the boys, Jon Venables, had rented Child's Play 3, in addition to many other violent or pornographic films. It was alleged that the killers had imitated a scene from the film where Chucky abducts a young military cadet and attempts to kill him under the wheels of a fairground ghost train, only to be mutilated himself by a ventilator fan. In addition, the fact that James was splashed with blue paint, the same colour splashed on Chucky's face in the film, seemed to confirm the link. As a result, a huge moral panic sprang up around the film and other so-called "video nasties", with the Sun newspaper mounting a campaign for such films to be burnt. In sentencing the boys, Mr. Justice Morland also speculated that "exposure to violent videos" had caused the crime. BSkyB cancelled a broadcast of Child's Play 3, and Ireland's largest video chain withdrew the film from its shelves. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 toughened the penalties for supplying age-inappropriate videos to children (the government apparently forgot that it was Venables's father, not the boy himself, who had rented the infamous video). However, Venables was not living with his father at the time, and in fact disliked horror films. Both boys' solicitors stated that their clients had never seen the film. The police therefore concluded that there was no link. One detective said, "I don't know where the judge got that idea from. I couldn't believe it when I heard him. We went through something like 200 titles rented by the Venables family. There were some you or I wouldn't want to see, but nothing - no scene, no plot, or dialogue - where you could put your finger on the freeze button and say that influenced a boy to go out and commit murder". According to Inspector Ray Simpson of Merseyside Police, "If you are going to link this murder to a film, you might as well link it to The Railway Children". Certainly, any link between the murder and Child's Play 3 seems to be very weak: the killers did not force James under a train's wheels, as happens in the film, nor did the murder take place in a fairground.

Simultaneously, Child's Play 3 was linked to the 1992 murder of 16-year-old Suzanne Capper in Stockport by Jean Powell, Glyn Powell (Jean's ex-husband), Bernadette McNeilly and Michael Dudson. The crime rivalled the Bulger murder in brutality, and the defendants' trial coincided with that of the Bulger killers. Over five days before the murder, Suzanne was tortured with a song from the film, Hi, I'm Chucky (Wanna Play?) played at 150 volts. According to Jean Powell, McNeilly told Suzanne, "Chucky's coming to play" when injecting her victim with amphetamine. She also testified "Chucky is Bernie. I had heard the word 'Chucky' on a rave tape and I have also seen the film about a doll that comes to life and kills people". As a result, there were newspaper headlines such as "The curse of Chucky" (the Sun) and "Demonic doll Chucky links the horror crimes" (Daily Mail). However, Detective Inspector Peter Wall of Greater Manchester Police, who led the investigation, stated that during the police interviews there had been no indication that Child's Play 3 had any role in causing the murder. The killers did not own a video recorder: the song used to torture their victim was a popular track at the time, taped from a local radio station. Jean Powell's claims of such a film link may simply have been a tactic to divert blame by mentioning a film she had vaguely heard about but never seen. She was probably also aware of the claimed connection between Child's Play 3 and the Bulger case, and chose to make an assertion that she knew would make headlines. Broadcaster David Elstein condemned the "false story . . . branded into the consciousness of the media", stating that "There is no reason to believe that Suzanne Capper would be alive today if the audiotape had instead contained the torture scene from King Lear, or a catchphrase from Bruce Forsyth . . . But the Child's Play hare has been running ever since the last day of the James Bulger murder trial". Elstein described the film as a scapegoat that the press "made a three-course meal out of". In response to a Guardian report that 21,000 four to nine year olds had watched two BSkyB screenings of Child's Play 3 (before the broadcaster cancelled it), Elstein explained that this figure was "simply a projection based on an average of just two actual viewers from BARB's [the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board] reporting panel, and that the margin of error means even the two may have been just one. But why spoil a good running story by asking what the figures mean?" Why, indeed.

In April 1994, Professor Elizabeth Newson published a report which claimed that to have "definitively established the long sought-for link between screen violence and the real-life variety". Not surprisingly, her report attracted widespread media support, citing the Suzanne Capper case. However, the report simply drew inferences from press speculation: it was not based on proper independent research. When she subsequently appeared before the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee on Videos Violence, Newson claimed that "The Suzanne Capper case is another example of very explicit imitation of video and the use of video and that was Child's Play 3." Sir Ivan Lawrence, the chairman, had to remind her that both the police and the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) had ruled out any such connection. It shows how widespread the moral panic was that even a senior academic was swept up in it.

Natural Born Killers

Directed by Oliver Stone and based on an original script by Quentin Tarantino, Natural Born Killers (1994) is the story of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), two lovers who become media celebrities as a result of being serial killers. It was intended as a satire on media coverage of violent crime. Almost from the moment of its release, it was accused of inspiring "copycat" murders. In March 1995, Sarah Edmondson and her boyfriend Benjamin James Darras shot dead cotton-mill manager William Savage, shortly after seeing Natural Born Killers: they subsequently shot convenience store cashier Patsy Byers, but she survived. Savage had been a friend of John Grisham, the renowned crime fiction author, who had publicly denounced Stone as irresponsible over the film, and claimed that filmmakers should be held accountable when their work incited violent acts. Byers subsequently sued Stone and Time Warner, the film's distributor: advised by Grisham, she made a claim of product liability, stating that the defendants "knew, or should have known that the film would cause or inspire people . . . to commit crimes such as the shooting of Patsy Ann Byers". Grisham wrote an article, "Unnatural Killers", in the April 1996 issue of the magazine Oxford American, asserting that "The last hope of imposing some sense on Hollywood will come through another great American tradition, the lawsuit. A case can be made that there exists a direct causal link between Natural Born Killers and the death of Bill Savage. It will take one large verdict against the likes of Oliver Stone, and then the party will be over". However, the lawsuit was eventually dismissed.

Due to Grisham's involvement, the Savage/Byers case remains the most high-profile crime allegedly inspired by Natural Born Killers, but is far from the only one. Another case supposedly linked to the film was the Heath High school shooting in West Paducah, Kentucky, on 1st December 1997, when 14-year-old student Michael Carneal shot dead three fellow pupils and wounded five more. The victims' parents lodged a lawsuit against Time Warner and several other film companies, alleging that films, including Natural Born Killers, had encouraged Carneal's actions. However, this suit too failed. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, perpetrators of the notorious Columbine High School massacre, were fans of Natural Born Killers, using the initials NBK as their code. In 2006, 23-year-old Jeremy Allan Steinke and his 12-year-old girlfriend Jasmine Richardson shot dead Richardson's parents, Marc and Debra, and her eight-year-old brother Jacob, in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. Steinkel had allegedly watched Natural Born Killers the night before the murders, and had told friends that he was "going Natural Born Killer on her [Richardson's] family". He also told an undercover police officer, "You ever watch the movie Natural Born Killers? . . . I think that's the best love story of all time". Barry Loukaitis, the 14-year-old who shot dead three people at the Frontier Middle School in Moses Lake, Washington state in 1996, had rented Natural Born Killers several times and frequently quoted it to friends. Kimveer Gill, who shot dead one person and injured another 19 at Dawson College in Montreal in 2006 before turning the gun on himself, listed Natural Born Killers as one of his favourite films on his blog. However, in none of these cases has a causal link been proven. There is a possible link in the Columbine case: however, it seems likely that this was at best one of many factors that motivated the killers, and it would be stretching it to claim that without Natural Born Killers, the shooting would never have occurred. In the Richardson case, again there is a potential link: however, the murder was motivated primarily by the opposition of Richardson's parents to the killers' relationship, due to the age disparity. Thus, again, it is hard to claim that but for the film, there would have been no murder. In the other cases, any link seems even more tenuous: that an individual happens to be a fan of Natural Born Killers does not in itself prove that this motivated them to commit murder. In Britain, the film's cinema release was delayed over alleged links to 10 copycat murders in the United States and France: however, it was eventually released. The BBFC had found that only two of the alleged copycat murderers had seen the film: of those two, one had a record of violent crime, and the other had repeatedly expressed his intention to commit the murder before watching Natural Born Killers. The most that can be said in all the above cases is that Natural Born Killers may have been one of several motivating factors.

Conclusion

As can be seen, there is so often a hasty rush to judgement over a film's alleged link to violence, creating an unjustified and unnecessary moral panic. In the case of Natural Born Killers, there is a possible link to certain murder cases, but nowhere can it be claimed to be the sole factor: no lawsuit against the filmmakers has ever stood up in court. The controversy over Child's Play 3 meanwhile, turned out to be no more than mass hysteria. These examples should act as a cautionary tale over any attempt to blame Blue Story for the brawl outside the Birmingham cinema. Careful analysis of the evidence will, in the end, always be more fruitful and more enlightening than knee-jerk reactions.