Motion Pictures: Screen Violence

Teen Violence and the Movies.

In the movies of the 1990s violence was more prevalent and more graphic than ever before, even as many educators and politicians—as well as some moviemakers—expressed concerns about the connection between violence on the screen and the increasing levels of violence on the streets and in schools. After the release of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), in which a pair of hedonistic sociopaths played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis go on a senseless killing spree, teenaged murderers around the world claimed to have been inspired by the movie. The staging of the shootings at Columbine High School in April 1999 was similar to those in The Basketball Diaries (1995), in which a trench-coat-clad young man with a machine gun attacks people who had mocked him. This sort of violence is different from that in the popular action movies of the 1980s, where heroes such as Rambo...

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