| Christian Slater is to blame for gun violence, especially in schools in America. He's been in the films Heathers, Pump Up The Volume, and more recently, Very Bad Things. Let's get to it: he's evil, inconsistent as an actor (see Broken Arrow and Hard Rain), and urges young movie-goers to realize their violent tendencies. Let's start with Heathers. Slater wears a trenchcoat, kills three students, and tries to blow up the school (unsuccessfully) before killing himself. Hello! TrenchCoat Club! How could the media miss this most obvious evidence that Slater himself inspired this club at Columbine High School! His most memorable line in Heathers is: "The extreme always seems to make an impression!" He speaks such after pretending (nudge nudge wink wink) to shoot two jocks in the high school cafeteria! Hello! Calling Tom Brokaw! This is part two of Columbine High. Later he does kill the two jocks; in all, the body count includes two football players, two of four Heathers, and maybe three or four other characters not important to the storyline. And speaking German too! He asks Winona Ryder if she took German or French class. When she says French, he says the bullets are "Ich luge" bullets, which stands for "I lie" in German. The media certainly didn't want to go around with this little journalistic gem. Heathers really is a great film! Tension, suspense, humor, and Shannon Doherty foreshadowing her Beverly Hills 90210 bitchiness. And the dialogue: "I love my dead gay son!" and "I don't patronize bunny rabbits!" If you don't believe me, you can check out the info at The Heathers Page. Next, Slater starred in the less iconoclastic but equally great Pump Up The Volume. Again set in a school full of cliques and factions, he pulls the students together with an illegal, free-wheeling, ultra-hip radio program. After he fails to convince a student that suicide is not an answer to his problems, Slater goes on the run from the FCC and the school administration. With a solid take on the everyday problems found in schools and how kids are just a younger version of adults and adult society, these two films allowed Slater to launch an otherwise dubious career. (Just like Tom Hanks.) The release of Broken Arrow sent his fans over the edge, thus creating a climate in which teens everywhere feel compelled to spit hot lead and clean classrooms with gun-show bargains in order to take control of their lives. In Broken Arrow, Slater displays such vane machismo and horrible hamming (worse than Travolta's hamming), that even the well-balanced audience members felt like shooting someone just to distract themselves from his crappy non-acting. Unfortuantely, in Arrow, we also see the undesirable effects of his long-term unemployment: those extra pounds around his mid-section, puffing him up like a marshmallow in the microwave. No wonder he's become such a hot- head! Finally we have Very Bad Things. In this film, although no guns are used, Slater kills a hooker and a security guard and justifies this with "at-all-cost" logic to keep himself and his friends out of jail. His acting seems more natural, yet he makes up for it in his ultra-violent role. Whereas Pulp Fiction never actually showed someone being shot (all wounds were implied, never shown as they occurred), VBT has corpses falling from towel hooks on the wall and being chain-sawed and wrapped for convenient re-location and burial. Just what teen-agers and uptight paranoid schizos need to see while farting in their Fruit Of The Looms and listening to KMFDM. But wait! Some would say that Christian Slater is not to blame, that movies don't affect kids or adults to imitate fictitious characters. Let's eliminate some of the usual suspects in this never-ending debate. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. This is the unofficial slogan of the NRA, the National Rifle Association. Here's a group of outstanding people who understand and exercise the Amendments to the Constitution. Why, on Sundays, you wouldn't believe the percentage of NRA members who make it to church in spite of drinking Friday night and all day Saturday. This is a club whose members are concerned about society and the fate of humanity. They would never ever harm another person. Not unless that other person knocked up their daughter. Or was stealing their car. Or their money. Or bumped into them at the bar uptown. Then you damn well better watch out, because you'll see some people killing people. Most likely with guns. And we can't blame the military, nor their demented step-cousins, the militia groups. These are the groups who quietly maintain they have every right to own semi-automatic weapons— to hunt Bambi with. Bambi, of course, being a woodland creature blessed with some quickness on its four graceful legs, has nothing to shoot back with. And few things besides space shuttles and fighter planes can out-run a bullet. Yet these groups are mostly harmless, spending their days making deer snausages and cutting each other's balls off in testosterone- addled fits of mis-directed one-upmanship. They don't actually kill anyone until the IRS shows up with fifteen years worth of tax forms. Nor is it psychopaths shaved off from society in its ever-more-cut-throat attempts to neatly divide the nation into haves and have-nots. These are normal people pushed aside by those panicked assholes who mistakenly believe that everyone else's money, and lives, exist to be controlled by someone quicker, smarter, and somehow more "moral." But not by those who actually make a living, keep to themselves, and never break the law. Psychos are regular joes and janes pushed away from the trough and afraid of becoming bacon strips. Psychos are just as likely to cannabalize the people causing them problems as they are to shoot them, and most are too heavily sedated to quit watching the Teletubbies special on the Home Shopping Network to actually load their double-barrels and play Gunsmoke. So if it isn't the NRA, the Caulfields hiding in their compounds, or the feeble- minded killing people with guns, it must be those who have time to sit at home watching movies. Specifically, Christian Slater movies. This explains why Christian Slater is to blame for gun violence in America. God bless guns, family, country music, wrestling, and TNN roller derby. Good night, y'all! |