'HEAT' CASE STUDY

Read this extract from The Sunday Times Editorial of 17th March 1996, just after the Dunblane Massacre.

"I went to see a film called Heat at my local cinema on Thursday night because it had been eagerly recommended by several friends. It is a homage to violence. Almost every scene is dominated by guns - lots of them, and very big ones. All problems are resolved by their use. The criminals have military assault rifles, the police are dressed like soldiers in combat gear.

The air is thick with the sound of bullets tearing through flesh and bones; blood and brains spurt everywhere. The criminal whose band of robbers shoot half the Los Angeles force is made out to be a man to admire as much as the detective chasing him. They shake hands at the end. Where is the moral message in that?

Heat is typical of films on offer in cinemas up and down the land. The best creative brains in Hollywood - Heat stars Al Pacino and Robert De Niro - churn out such big budget garbage every week. They espouse a culture of violence in which life is cheap and disposable, with random, casual murder the order of the day and victory going to whoever has the biggest gun. It is a world in which civility, rational discourse and the peaceful resolution of differences have no place.

I do not argue that Heat and films like it inevitably lead to Dunblane. There is no evidence that Thomas Hamilton supped on video nasties then went off to kill 16 children and their teacher. The jury is still out on any direct link between screen violence and real violence.

However, far too much of what passes for popular entertainment pollutes our society and creates a new tolerance in which what was thought to be beyond the pale becomes acceptable. Young minds are particularly vulnerable. It has been calculated that the average American child sees 8000 killings and 10000 other acts of violence on films and television by the age of 12. It is an appalling video kindergarten in which to rear our children; those who say it has no detrimental effect whatsover on them have more faith in the human ability to be untainted by evil than I.

Repeated exposure to screen violence, which is escalating in brutality with every new batch of films released, creates a climate in which violence is validated and in which the real consequences of violence are desensitised. It demeans us all by devaluing life; more seriously, it risks destabilizing those already tottering on instability.

The violence on British television is less graphic than in the cinema though the Hollywood 'splatter movies' shown at night on satellite television are a disgrace that no self-respecting adults should watch, much less let their children near. But there is a new coarseness about British television that sneers at standards and revels in slovenly speech and yob behaviour. It contributes to the brutalisation of a society in which headmasters are stabbed to death at school gates and old women are tortured and killed in their homes for the small change in their purse.

The power of the media to debase would be less if the forces for good in our society were stronger. But the media have been spewing out their poison at a time when the traditional institutions and values of society, notably the nuclear family, have been disintegrating."

Trace the arguments. How do they reveal:

a) fear
b) moral panic
c) class prejudice

How does the writer (Andrew Neil) use research to back up his ideas?

Watch the film Heat (1995). Discuss to what extent you agree with his view of the film.

Write an article expressing an alternative view of the film.