Two days after 17 people were gunned down in a Florida high school, moviegoers flocked en masse to see “Black Panther,” now expected to have the fifth largest opening weekend of all time. The film is nothing short of an achievement, earning enthusiastic praise from fans and critics alike.
But the timing is difficult to ignore. Not because one event directly had anything to do with the other, but because our partisan conversation about gun violence is occurring against the backdrop of an entertainment culture saturated in gun violence.
Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips persuasively argued that “Black Panther’s” take on guns is a different one, observing “the crucial action sequences aren’t designed to make us drool over the latest automatic weaponry.” That’s fair, but like most blockbuster action flicks, gun violence is not absent from “Black Panther.”
In the painful aftermaths of mass shootings, our debate over how best to address gun violence increasingly pits advocates of gun control legislation against those who would prefer to deal with the issue through mental health legislation, with each side compelling lawmakers to focus their energies in one of those two areas. But does either side believe the only effective solutions to mass shootings lie in congressional action, or should we also dedicate some effort to exploring whether cultural forces influence gun violence?
It is striking that many people celebrating “Black Panther” are simultaneously expressing understandable disgust with gun violence — not because their position is entirely unreasonable, not because they don’t have great reasons for promoting the film, and not because their politics are insincere, but because it is hard not to acknowledge that gun violence is entertaining us at the same time we’re mourning its victims.
“A fetishization of guns and violence is also a real American cultural phenomenon, perhaps especially among alienated, isolated young men,” Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times on Saturday. “And for them and for others (including the N.R.A. these days), the guns-and-citizenship ideal can curdle into a crude myself-alone libertarianism for an age of polarization and mistrust.”
Guns abound in our pop culture. We create fictional worlds filled with gun violence, and search for answers as bodies stack up in our inner cities, or crazed gunmen go on rampages in classrooms.
As someone with great appreciation for the Second Amendment, and who is generally opposed to liberal gun control legislation, it seems helpful to consider whether reevaluating our approach to fictional gun use might be healthy. Would “Black Panther’s” champions in Hollywood and media, people who support gun control, prefer the film to have been scrubbed of guns? I wouldn’t, and I’m not sure they would, but I’m also not a proponent of most gun control proposals.
None of this is to say the prevalence of firearms in movies and television is directly causing mass shootings (though as we look more broadly at gun violence, that may be an easier argument to make). It’s just to say perhaps we should pause and question whether our conversation about how to address gun violence needs some dimension beyond the legislative arena into the cultural one.
