I had a discussion with a fellow researcher the other day about how movies and other media influence people, mostly in relation to the saw and hostel movies. See I think it is a cop-out if someone was to use a movie as a reason to kill/torture someone. Just another way to dodge responsibility for their own actions. The discussion lead to the acknowledgement that a persons mindset is a composite of many infuences. --- Anyway, how do you reckon you would go about making a person* into a monster? What would be your DVD playlist? etc. How would you go about it? Hypothetically. *Obviously no parent would actually volunteer their child for this, at least I hope not.
Well, having a parent willing to offer their child for this would be a big start. I think monsterhood is something that people choose, they just keep making the decision to take the wrong way until they can't see the right way anymore, I doubt enertainment would be enough to do it though, it takes many of those little private moments when you have the opportunity to be cruel and choose to enjoy it.
Hmm, yes, I kind of agree, it takes more than just the actual movies/books/music/video games to turn someone into a monster, it's the way they interpret, react, use these things that make a difference. I mean, The Catcher in the Rye has been well known for being a "killer's favourite" in several cases, but how many people read it every year and experience nothing more than an enjoyable / mind-numbingly-boring book, depending on their tastes. A lot of people read Mein Kampf every year, and I haven't heard of many that turned into monstrous dictators. Plenty of kids listen to Death Metal and/or play shoot-em-up gorey video games without deciding to turn up at school the next day with guns and explosives and shoot everyone in sight. Some people even manage to play role-playing games and remain relatively normal. I think it probably takes a certain degree of mental instability to get tipped one way or another by reasonable amounts of cultural material. I'm sure a "normal" individual could easily be brainwashed into becoming a heartless killer if you tortured them enough, but that's taking the whole thing to an extreme. On the other extreme, someone with a more serious mental problem would see "evil" in something perfectly benign to everyone else. I remember going to see my sister during one of her stays in the shrink-tank around the time they finally identified what we had known for a long time: that she was schizophrenic. We had bought her a plush Heffalump from the Winnie-the-poo movie as a gift, and she just sat there and stared, and finally said she couldn't take it because it was too phallic, because of the elephant's trunk. To me and everyone else, it was just a kiddie's toy, perfectly innocent, but to her it was something that carried a lot more, darker, meaning. So basically, I think it's more about feeding the "right" things to the "right" people that could turn someone into a "monster", know their weaknesses and hit them where it hurts, it has to be tailor-made to the individual.
There's aren't any movies that can turn a child, or anyone, into a monster - it takes a special kind of parenting, sometimes mixed with a special kind of genetic coding.
