The Mumpsimus

  Years ago, when I inherited a gun shop and sold the inventory, I had to send a pistol through the mail. I brought all the necessary paperwork to the post office, the clerk was helpful, and then we got to the question they ask about every package: does this box contain anything dangerous? "That's an interesting question," I said. "On the one hand, it's a gun. On the other ... there's no ammo in there. So it's just a hunk of metal and plastic, no more or less dangerous than any other hunk of metal and plastic." In the context of being mailed from one licensed gun dealer to another, that package was not, in fact, dangerous. Were someone to open the package and put ammunition into the gun, then it would become a deadly weapon. As mass shootings continue to bring attention to certain types of gun violence in the U.S., I find myself remembering this conversation. I find myself thinking about the idea of safety.  Because I have written quite a bit over t...

From now on, whenever someone argues that their story or tv episode or movie or whatever absolutely couldn't possibly work without a graphic rape scene, I will think of  episode 5 of the third series of the BBC show Shetland . The episode includes the kidnapping and rape of a regular series character. But we don't even see the kidnapping, only the moments leading up to it and then other characters' growing concern over the disappearance. She reappears, walking barefoot to a Glasgow police station, and at first there is relief: She's safe and she doesn't seem harmed. And then she tells the series' main character, DI Perez, that evidence will need to be collected. The rest of the episode and much of the final episode pay careful attention to her and her colleagues' work to come to grips with the event. The drama plays out through dialogue and restrained, thoughtful acting. I tend to watch murder shows with dinner. I'm quite used to munching away amid...

When the suspect in the  attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina was identified, the authorities circulated a photograph of him wearing a jacket adorned with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and post- UDI   Rhodesia . The symbolism isn't subtle. Like the confederate flag that flies over the South Carolina capitol, these are flags of explicitly white supremacist governments. Rhodesia plays a particular role within right-wing American militia culture, linking anti-communism and white supremacy. The downfall of white Rhodesia has its own sort of lost cause mythic power not just for avowed white supremacists, but for the paramilitarist wing of gun culture generally.

Ferguson, Missouri. Nov. 24, 2014. (Photo by Adrees Latif/Reuters) from "Power" by Audre Lorde: I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reason thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic trying to make power out of hatred and destruction trying to heal my dying son with kisses only the sun will bleach his bones quicker. (photo by Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

At the Daily Beast , Cliff Schechter has a piece titled "How the NRA Enables Massacres" , which, despite some hyperbolic language, is worth reading for the general information, as is his piece on a visit to the recent NRA convention . Schechter isn't reporting anything new, and the pieces are superficial compared to some earlier writings on all this, but it's always worth reminding ourselves that gun massacres in the US are part of a culture that has been carefully manufactured, protected, nurtured, enflamed. I've written a lot about guns and gun culture here over the past few years. Writing those posts from scratch now, I would change occasional wording in some of them, clarify a few points, etc. (the hazards of writing on the fly), but you could take almost anything I've written previously and apply it to the latest massacre . The place of hegemonic masculinity in this type of event is especially clear this time, but it's been present before a...

Some notes for the above video essay: 1. My viewing of Zero Dark Thirty  and my ideas about it were and are influenced by ideas I first encountered in writings by  Ignatiy Vishnevetsky , Glenn Kenny , Steven Shaviro , and Nicholas Rombes . Their interpretations are not mine, and they should not be blamed for my failures, but I certainly owe them gratitude for whatever insights I have benefited from. 2. I worked on this video over a period of months, trying simply to gather a few of the motifs and visual patterns in the film (monitors, windows, surfaces, light/dark). It evolved to be something more impressionistic than that, but that was the initial concept.

I have a new video essay and a new text essay up at Press Play looking at Clint Eastwood's movies, called "The Ends of Violence: The Conclusions of Clint Eastwood" . The text essay also contains links to two previous video essays I made on Eastwood, "Outlaw: Josey Wales" and "Vigilante Man: Eastwood and Gran Torino " .

I really didn't intend to write anything more about Django Unchained , at least not before viewing it again, but I found Jelani Cobb's essay at The New Yorker's Culture Desk blog annoying, and I know from experience that there's just no getting rid of an annoyance until I write about it. So here we go... Cobb's essay is well-written and thoughtful, which is more than can be said for many attacks on Django Unchained , but it is fundamentally flawed for reasons Cobb pooh-poohs as aestheticizing or art-for-art-saking or just callous and insensitive: it's not a movie about actual history as Cobb defines it, but a movie (partly) about the representation of history in movies. The film’s defenders are quick to point out that “Django” is not about history. But that’s almost like arguing that fiction is not reality—it isn’t, but the entire appeal of the former is its capacity to shed light on how we understand the latter. This statement is infuriating in its r...

Yesterday's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was the sixteenth mass shooting in the U.S. in 2012. Looking back on my post about "Utopia and the Gun Culture" from January 2011, when Jared Loughner killed and wounded various people in Arizona, I find it still represents my feelings generally. A lot of people have died since then, killed by men with guns. I've already  updated that post once before, and I could have done so many more times. Focusing on guns is not enough. Nothing in isolation is. In addition to calls for better gun control, there have been calls for better mental health services. Certainly, we need better mental health policies, and we need to stop using prisons as our de facto mental institutions, but that's at best vaguely relevant here. Plenty of mass killers wouldn't be caught by even the most intrusive psych nets, and potential killers that were would not necessarily find any treatment helpful. Depending on the scope and ...

My post from last year on "Utopia and the Gun Culture" has gotten some attention in the wake of the horrifying shootings in Aurora, Colorado . Most of what I have to say about guns, I said there. Here, I'll mainly link to a few recent writngs of interest and add a bit of comment at the end. First, if you're curious to know more about the labyrinthine federal and state laws regarding firearms, the ATF has guides to federal (PDF) and state laws . (For a general overview, there's Wikipedia: federal , state .) Here's a perfect example of useless utopian thinking: "A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths" . Such articles are a waste of time. For more on the deep issues and why utopian thinking is a waste of time, see Timothy Burke's post  "Don't Bring Policy to a Culture Fight" . For a good exploration/demonstration of the difficulties of drawing any useful conclusions from statistics about gun...

Here's a new video essay I created, mixing elements of Jean Vigo's Zero de Conduit (1933) with Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation (1995), plus some words from Robin Wood and an anonymous reviewer of Vigo. Please note that the theatrical version of Doom Generation was rated R for "strong vicious violence, graphic sexuality, pervasive strong language and some drug use", and I used the unrated version, so if you have a weak stomach for graphic representations of violence, are aghast at the sight of naked bodies, and/or don't like the English language at its most crude and vulgar, you really, really, really shouldn't watch this.

A black boy was shot dead in Florida. His killer is known, but the police refused to arrest him. The police said they had no probable cause to arrest the killer, who claimed self-defense. The killer was a Neighborhood Watch volunteer. He saw a black boy walking in the rain. He called 911. The dispatcher told him not to follow the boy. But he did. He approached him. They wrestled. Witnesses called 911. Trayvon Martin was armed with a bag of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea. A black boy was shot dead in Florida. His killer walks free. More information: The Trayvon Martin Killing, Explained (by Adam Weinstein, Mother Jones ) What Everyone Should Know About Trayvon Martin (by Jud Legum, ThinkProgress) Coverage at The Atlantic . See in particular the posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates Re-Nigging on the Promises: #Justice4Trayvon (The Crunk Feminist Collective) UPDATE : U.S. Department of Justice, FBI and FDLE to probe Trayvon Martin killing Visit msnbc.com for ...

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes fro...

A post by Timmi Duchamp first brought to my attention a now-infamous article in the New York Times , "Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town" , which reports on a gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl by 18 men of varying ages -- from early teens to 27. Timmi described the article as being chiefly concerned with the rapists rather than their victim, and I must admit that at first, being in a particularly optimistic and naive mood or something, I thought, "No, there's got to be some mistake -- the Times  wouldn't let something like that through, would they?" They would. They did. It's a nauseating article. Timmi nails it, and so do Mary Elizabeth Williams in a Salon piece, "New York Times's Sloppy, Slanted Child Rape Story" , and Mac McClelland at Mother Jones with "The New York Times' Rape-Friendly Reporting" . Perhaps the most vivid proof that James C. McKinley, Jr's reporting for the Times  for this story is rotten come...