Caught in the Crossfire of the Media-Violence Debate
by Daniel Batt
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

Revenge on the nerds

YET AMID THE BACKLASH against 'Hollywood violence' and the paragraphs of the pundits, there has also been a backlash against the 'nerds', 'geeks', 'dags', the less popular kids at school who find a power they don't normally have in mastery of violent computer games, a popularity they don't have off-line on the Internet and an angst (sometimes rage) they understand in films such as Heathers (where a trenchcoat-wearing Christian Slater kills the persecuting 'jocks' and cheerleaders) and Basketball Diaries (where a trenchcoat-wearing Leonardo diCaprio guns down teachers and student in a surreal dream sequence).

On the web site www.slashdot.org, subtitled "news for nerds, stuff that matters", the e-mail was overloaded by another perspective after the Denver shooting. Using only the correspondents' internet tags, the editor included a selection of quotes which exposed the dark underbelly of American school culture.

'Bandy' from New York City, a Quake freak, wrote that, after Colorado, "things got horrible. People were actually talking to me like I could come in and kill them. It wasn't like they were really afraid of me-they just seemed to think it was okay to hate me even more. People asked me if I had guns at home. This is a whole new level of exclusion, another excuse for the preppies of the universe to put down and isolate people like me."
One respondent named 'Jay' stood up in a class (the teacher wanted a discussion) and said he could never kill anyone or condone anyone who did kill anyone. "But", he said, "I could, on some level, understand these kids in Colorado, the killers. Because day after day, slight after slight, exclusion after exclusion, you can learn how to hate, and that hatred grows and takes you over sometimes, especially when you come to see that you're hated only because you're smart and different, or sometimes even because you are online a lot, which is still so uncool to many kids?"

After the class, 'Jay' was called to the principal's office and told that he had to agree to undergo five sessions of counselling or be expelled from school. "In other words," he wrote, "for speaking freely, and to cover their ass, I was not only branded a weird geek, but a potential killer. That will sure help deal with violence in America."

'Andrew' in Alaska wrote: "To be honest, I sympathised much more with the shooters than the shootees. I am them. They are me. This is not to say I will end the lives of my classmates in a hail of bullets, but that their former situation bears a striking resemblance to my own."

From 'Anika' in suburban Chicago: "I was stopped at the door of my high school because I was wearing a trenchcoat. I don't game, but I'm a geekchick, and I'm on the Web a lot. I was given a choice-go home and ditch the coat, or go to the principal. I refused to go home. I have never been a member of any group or trenchcoat mob . . . so why should they tell me what coat to wear? Two security guards took me into an office, called the school nurse, who was a female, and they ordered me to take my coat off. The nurse asked me to undress (privately) while the guards outside the door went through every inch of my coat. I wouldn't undress, and she didn't make me (I think she felt creepy about the whole thing). Then I was called into the principal's office and he asked me if I was a member of any hate group, or any online group, or if I had ever played Doom or Quake . . . I lost it then. I thought I was going to be brave and defiant, but I just fell apart. I cried and cried. I think I hated that worse than anything."

While such anecdotal comments only go so far in telling us anything about the causes of schoolyard massacres, they do reveal a level of humiliation and rage within high school culture. When I attended a ten year high school reunion a number of years ago, the rage among those who were picked on at those who did the picking on was as acute as while at high school. My experience, however, was in Australia and years before you could actually escape into computer games and the Internet. A number of picked-on kids at school committed suicide, whereas in the US they sometimes seem to take as many people down with them as possible.

There is a bizarre irony that Shane Warne was critisised for smoking and Rugby League players are chastised for "conduct unbecoming the game" because they are perceived as 'role models' (funny term that, in that it implies people might be influenced by what 'media figures' do), yet critisising (not calling for censorship, just critisising) 'role models' such as Marilyn Manson, Duke Nukem and Mikey Mallory (Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers) is seen as some sort of wowserish 'moral police force'.

When I was a teenager, copying my 'role models' such as Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix (sorry, I was retro even in the '80s), required simply taking drugs and listening to music. Today's role models don't just numb the pain, they seek revenge. They want society to know, and remember, that they have been somehow excluded.

While the media functions as 'therapy' for some, a type of virtual anger management tool, it does in a small percentage of cases (indeed those who act out are a very small fraction of those who watch) somehow spill over into the real world.

Daniel Batt Daniel Batt is the Editor of Zadok Perspectives. E-mail: editor@zadok.org.au