The never-ending debate about the influence of film violence on the malleable minds of children recently took a new turn. The British paper
The Guardian reported this weekend about a case in a French small town where a "teenage boy described by teachers and neighbours as 'a little angel' ... confessed to a two-hour killing spree last year during which he waited calmly for each member of the family to return home before firing on them with his father's shotgun. In between the shootings he sat on the sofa and watched a video of the film
Shrek."
Of course the crazy juxtaposition between a homicidal troubled teen and cuddly ogre again asks the question, "are we really what we watch?" What strikes me, however, is how this Hollywood ogre connects to another one, the one named in the title of French novelist
Michel Tournier's
The Ogre. The 1970 Prix Goncourt-winning story about a lost youth who ends up training other lost youths in an Nazi school inspired Volker Schlondorff to make a (rather unsuccessful) film adaptation in 1997. In a review in
The Eye, Schlondorff repeats his response to people who questioned how he would depict the Nazis, "I said: 'As though they were the most exciting people in the world to be around, of course!' ...That really is the way it has to be done. Because, let's face it -- if no one had found the Nazis attractive, at least on some level, the Second World War would never have happened."
# posted by Peter Bowen @ 11/27/2005 08:35:00 PM
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