Natural Born Killers

Oliver Stone had it made. Great looking actors cast in yellows and oranges with acid induced flashback-type scenes of super-promiscuous archetypes on a killing spree across America. Or saving private Ryan (I don’t know who directed it. Who cares?), where handsome, wholesome, heterosexual, men risk their lives to save the life of an American icon: the last male child. Christ, there is Armageddon where America saves the world. And who is selling it to us? Hollywood. What are they selling?

Therein, to quote the bard, lies the rub.

Who stands to gain from this hyper-patriotic rhetoric vomited relentlessly from the great studios on the sunshine strip?

There is a famous (not that famous, of course, or you would have heard about it before) and controversial study commissioned by the U.S ministry of defense and undertaken by a General S.L.A Marshall. The General interviewed thousands of infantrymen who had been in battle. The results (contested, yes): only 15-20% of the soldiers actually shot to kill their enemy in battle. The other 80% either shot to miss (they aimed high for the most part) or did whatever they could to avoid shooting at the enemy. It seemed, according to this study, that we, as human beings, have an active aversion to killing.

This would not do.

The Department of defense changed its training methods. To start, it used human shaped targets instead of the traditional circles. In Korea kill rates were up to 55%. And by Vietnam (according to interviews) 95% of soldiers were shooting to kill. Or maybe they had just become better liars.

Think about the movies we watch. The Americans are the heroes. They villains are inhuman (in some way). The good guy always shoots to kill – that’s often how the movie ends. Good guys kill. Killing is important. Killing is good. Isn’t that what Hollywood is telling us?

Who are they telling that to? Soldiers. Not today’s soldiers, but tomorrow’s soldiers. Every summer Hollywood sells us a new line on killing. And then there are the video games where kids learn to kill over and over again.

Get them while they’re young, right, and in the next war we can get the kill rate up to 100%. Now that’s efficiency, and great marketing.