It is impossible not to feel sympathetic pain for Anita Busch. I’m not sure why it was buried 12 paragraphs into a “Commentary” that is structured like a news story, but the real lede of the story is that Ms. Busch, a long-time veteran of the entertainment media who has been out of the game for about a decade, had a family member murdered in the Aurora, Colorado massacre at the Dark Knight Rises screening.

She goes on to mention and offer various insights into or quotations from the families of victims of Aurora, Newtown, Dr. King, and her father on his deathbed. All presented earnestly and thoughtfully.

None of this is okay in any way. None of this should be disregarded.

But none of it is a legitimate argument against Hollywood’s use of gun violence in films. There is a very real discussion to be had on the issue. But it needs more substantive arguments than the pain of the victims of horrible crimes (which includes the extended families of the dead and/or injured).

I say this as a member of a family that lost 4 children to a thoughtless crime that was probably not intended to end in death, but did. In our family’s case, it was an arson. The teenager who set the fire probably didn’t know there were young children in the house as he set the fire. But he was setting a fire to someone’s home. This was 50 years ago now. And while my mother still cannot abide lawyers—as lawyers helped this murderer walk with a minimal juvenile—I cannot blame the profession, any more than I can rage against lawnmowers or the gasoline that fuels them which were used to set the family house aflame.

It was a hate crime… against Jews in Baltimore at the time. But I don’t live in fear or hate of non-Jews.

And when I look at Newtown or Aurora or the many, many, oh-so-many crimes of gun violence perpetrated in America in the last number of years, I do not see a clear correlation to the violence in movies or television.

In 1963, Westerns were all the rage, at the movies and on TV. Gun violence. Plenty of what we now know to be hateful perspective on Native Americans. But that racial hate did not kill my (potential) siblings. And we didn’t have the regular cycle of mass killings that have become shockingly normal, even expected, in America today.

Anita quotes Dr. King, who was murdered in April of 1968. There were no CG massacres or videogames in 1968. The #1 movie in America the month before Dr. King’s murder was Stay Away, Joe. You’ve probably never heard of it because Elvis Presley was in brownface, playing a Navajo named Joe Lightcloud. Burgess Meredith plays his grandfather, who lives in a teepee. The film is a comedy, but racist enough that you have probably never heard of it. Shortly before that film topped the box office, Planet of The Apes was a box office sensation. Can anyone seriously blame the racial undertones of that film for the assassination of Dr. King?

Violence in America is a very tricky issue. This is nothing new. As a nation, we live in denial about our history of the land grabs and massacres that came with the growth of the country. Overall, we’re still not very comfortable taking responsibility for slavery. And as a nation that often gets involved in major military conflicts, we often shy away from defending the vulnerable in other nations as they suffer clear and murderous oppression. But we love a good first-person shooter. And the body count in PG-13 movies can go awfully high, so long as the deaths never seem too real, as in “no blood means it’s okay for kids to see it.” I feel this is exactly wrong.

In Anita’s first 11 paragraphs, she wrestles with Harvey Weinstein’s recent comments on violence, which are fine, but also stakes out a position that is much easier for him to take than most people realize.

Harvey distinguished, on his appearance with Piers Morgan, between a “crazy action movie just to blow up people and exploit people just for the sake of making it” and a movie like Lone Survivor, which is extremely violent, but is “a tribute to the United States Special Forces.”

That distinction is legitimate. That distinction is critically important. But the problem in this conversation is that the distinction is a matter of taste and perspective.

Anita and many others have brought up the issue of where the line is with Quentin Tarantino, not just regarding violence, but with racism and sexism and language as well. And if you ask Mr. Tarantino and he cares to answer, you will hear that the use of violence, race, sex, and language are tools to make a greater point… to not be violent, racist, sexist, or potty-mouthed. And in America, we have freedom of speech. Critics of Tarantino can claim that he is being facile and just having a great ol’ time wallowing in piggish behavior. But that does not make his work bannable or our personal truths inherently greater than his.

Getting back to the specifics of Harvey Weinstein’s choices as a producer and distributor… Even before Harvey and Bob Weinstein started The Weinstein Company in 2005, they had split the company into Miramax and Dimension. Bob ran/runs Dimension and the division name came with the brothers when they split with Disney. In the 8 years of TWC (using Box Office Mojo as a source), only 16 titles have been released by Dimension to 77 from The Weinstein Company. And aside from the Dimension division, the only films that films that can really be argued to be in the “lazy violence” category at TWC are Quentin Tarantino’s.

Look at 2013’s Weinstein Company line-up; Quartet, Escape From Planet Earth, The Sapphires, Kon-Tiki, Unfinished Song, Fruitvale Station, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, The Grandmaster, Populaire, Salinger, Haute Cuisine, Philomena, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

Aside from the butt-kicker from one of film’s great artists, Wong Kar-Wai, is there anything there that grandma wouldn’t be fine seeing?

Did Anita or anyone else hear Harvey say that he was going to make Bob shut down Dimension, which is pretty much all-genre, all the time? (Let’s not even get into whether Harvey could make Bob change course.) Sin City 2 is coming to a theater near you pretty soon and could imaginably become a Top 5 all-time grosser for TWC/Dimension. Until you see the brothers dump it off to any of the 6 major studios that would take it on (assuming it can be R-rated) in a instant, don’t think for a second that Dimension, which has been a key part of the financials of the Weinsteins for more than a decade, is going away.

Furthermore… I have history with Anita Busch’s crusade against movie violence, from back when she attempted to use the then-power of The Hollywood Reporter to take down Fight Club, both because she was personally offended by the film AND because she didn’t really understand it. I am not going to get too far into the details of that history, as it did end in a laughable threat by Anita and THR to sue me and TNT cable and TNT parent Time-Warner. What Anita clearly learned from that experience was to mark commentary as commentary and not to try to pass opinion off as news. I am happy for that, even though this new commentary buries itself in what seems like news for 11 paragraphs before getting very personal very fast.

Fight Club, you might remember, was not a movie of gun violence. But it was very violent. And the whole point was that glamorized violence—in this case, young beauty Brad Pitt fighting and charming and deadly dangerous – was as bad a choice as living in a homogenized Ikea universe where the only danger is picking the wrong end table. But you would have to see past the violence to understand the film. This is much easier in Fruitvale Station, in which a flawed hero is killed for no good reason at all. But that doesn’t make the anti-violence message of Fight Club any less clear. And I would argue that Fight Club is a much more impactful film in regards to young men and how they see power outside of the issue of America’s racial issues.

The same kind of issue has caused a clamor around Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street… and really, around most of Scorsese’s films at the time of their release. Where is the line between glamorizing bad behavior and showing it so that it can be understood?

I was just going to write about “the tipping point” on the issue of too much violence in films, but then I realized just how many there have been. In my personal history, it was the original Total Recall, which was on the edge of an NC-17. The film was really the first to use modern guns to kill massive numbers of “people” without much, if any, regard for the weight of death. People counted the dead bodies in that film like people are counting the use of the word “fuck” in The Wolf of Wall Street. (I consider that count, personally, to be an act of art hate in the case of Wolf, attempting to devalue a piece of art by reducing it to numerical details.)

It’s taken a long time, but people have finally come to understand that Paul Verhoeven is one of the great satirist-filmmakers. RoboCop is overtly a comedy. So is Starship Troopers. And how else is there to see Showgirls? Basic Instinct is the closest thing to a straight action drama, though time has made it more obvious that the Sharon Stone leg-spread was more about the boys in the room than about the flash. But when Verhoeven returned to his roots, he made Black Book, which is about the most serious holy of holies, the Jewish Holocaust… and it’s hilarious. I still start any conversation about the film by recalling the name it was dubbed with at Toronto… Showgirls’ List.

But, BOY, did people work hard not to get the joke with Verhoeven. He was so good at creating beautiful havoc that some audiences missed its purpose.

Sam Peckinpah found “the tipping point” repeatedly, whether in shootouts or in questioning how Susan George felt about being raped in Straw Dogs.

George Romero found ” the tipping point” in Night of The Living Dead with zombies that now seem tame compared to those in any given episode of “The Walking Dead.”

Just a few weeks ago, in an incredible speech, Harry Belafonte talked about seeing a Tarzan movie as a 5-year-old and the shadow of how blacks were portrayed in Birth of a Nation and how he finally found pride in being of African descent in 12 Years A Slave, a movie includes realistic images of lynching, whipping, rape, kidnapping, general dehumanization, and lightly-taken murder. How you feel about the artistry of 12 Years is your business. But to suggest that these elements be taken off the palette of an artist like Steve McQueen to express a story or that you or I get to decide just who gets to use elements like these in their “art” is outrageous.

Personally, I have no time or use for the kinds of films that are referred to throughout Anita Busch’s editorial on movie violence… no more than the many unnamed executive sdo (whether they or their company’s invest in them or not). Stupid movies that lazily through in violence just to try to be more commercial. If there was a movie I could erase from my memory, it would be Miramax/Dimension’s Wolf Creek. Not unlike Hostel 2, it felt like the ugliness was there to turn someone on, perhaps just by turning others off. I saw and see no point to the existence of those films. But I would fight to the end to keep them from being banned in any way.

But then I see The Raid, directed by a serious young artist, and I choose to embrace that experience (as did Sony Classics, hardly a violence schlock house, twice). I love the Japanese film Battle Royale, which is grotesque, but has many profound things to say about violence, as we watch violence throughout. I only wish the American knock-off (that claim disputed by its author) was nearly as brave about lingering in the ugliness of the murder of children by children. One of the best American films of 2013 was This Is The End, which was literally end of the world violent, and also profane, sexist, homophobic, and even a little racist, all very, very smartly turning the meaning of the acts witnessed on their heads. (It was also very, very, very funny.)

I am the father of a 4-year-old. He just recently started his superhero phase. (We’ll find out eventually whether it lasts for decades or not… but that’s another issue.) He spends hours jumping, kicking, punching, shooting webs, flying, exploding in fire, hulking out, slicing things with his claws, etc. His mother is not a fan of this activity. Sometimes, usually when I am being punched by surprise, I am not in love with it either. An elementary school we recently toured told us that kids who talk to them in interviews about superheroes are not likely to be admitted. When I mentioned this to a number of educators, their response was, “Avoid that school.” Why? Because superhero play is not only a known phase, but a critical tool for boys in separating from their mothers.

There are moments when my child points a loaded finger or someone else’s toy gun. Yet I have no fear of my child going out and killing someone intentionally. Why? Because even though he has access to violence in the culture, he is being raised by two non-violent people. He may be watching too much “Spiderman Unlimited,” but he is not watching “True Detective” with us. We do not have guns in our home and we do not teach him that violence is an answer to problems, by our words or our deeds. Also, he is not mentally ill. And if, God forbid, he were ever to become mentally ill, we would support him in treatment and certainly do everything we could to great a safe environment for him and everyone around him.

I personally feel that weapons have a very limited place in private homes, particularly in urban areas. I understand the idea of self-protection and if I lived in an isolated place, I would seriously consider it. But I have lived in big cities most of my life, often traveling through “bad neighborhoods” and have no patience with the idea that aside from very specific cases of protection, that anyone needs to be carrying a concealed weapon anywhere in my town. I would feel less safe in any place in Los Angeles knowing that anyone around me was carrying a handgun.

I believe that this country would be more safe with a lot fewer guns.

However, I still believe that the #1 cause of gun violence is the absenteeism of family, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, etc. People need to pay attention to others, care for others, consider others.

Second for me is the easy access and proliferation of firearms in the country. You could take every gun away and bad things would still happen. For that matter, someone can be surrounded by interested people who simply can’t know what is going on in someone mentally-ill mind.

But the cop who killed Oscar Grant III didn’t pull the trigger because he saw too many violent movies. The mass murderer in Aurora couldn’t have done what he did without being able to get cheap, serious weapons without a background check. The mass murderer in Newtown was known to be mentally disturbed, seems to have had a specific problem with the school, and many of the weapons he used were his mother’s, serious guns right there in the house… and he also added more over the internet.

It sure would be comforting if we could blame movies and television and videogames and a culture of violence for these heinous acts. But we would only be lying to ourselves as we picked the lowest possible hanging fruit. That doesn’t mean that studios and other film funders should not consider what they choose to make more carefully. Early word on a very violent sequel coming out next month is that it is much more sexually violent than the first film… and maybe that will sell some tickets. Disgusting.

Stanley Kubrick made one of the greatest films in the history of the medium, released in the United States on February 2, 1972. A Clockwork Orange. It should have been rated X because it is a film for adults. It is a film of great importance. It is loaded with quite graphic sex and violence. It also speaks quite memorably to efforts to correct abusers of sex and violence.

Just months after the film’s release in the UK, there were 3 incidents in which violent crimes were connected to A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick asked Warner Bros to take the film out of distribution in the UK and it was not legally seen again in that country for 30 years… when it played on television.

For me, Kubrick was the greatest filmmaker ever. And I think he made a mistake with this choice. But I also think the choice was personal, not societal. He didn’t want his art or his family to be connected to ugliness. And in just a few months, multiple idiots/ill people had done just that. So he clamped down. I think he took away something profoundly insightful and actually helpful as a preventative against violence from his second home nation.

Art reflects society. And people in society can choose to make art a part of their lives in terrible ways, whether it is The Bible or “The Catcher in The Rye,” or A Clockwork Orange. But I will choose to read the Bible (and the holy books of other religions) with my son and we will discuss it. He will read “The Catcher in the Rye” and we will discuss it. And when he is a teenager, I will show him A Clockwork Orange… and Apocalypse Now and The Godfather and Reservoir Dogs and Carnal Knowledge and The Bridge Over The River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia and Scarface and No Country For Old Men and so many other films, loving and profane. And we will discuss them.

And if he is of healthy mind, you and I and the world will be safe of him. And he will have greater insight to be more kind and more thoughtful and a better part of his community for having experienced great art that speaks to the darkness of humanity.

And if he is not of healthy mind, no movie or television show will make him more or less dangerous to me or to you or yours. And if that horror comes to his life and that of his family, I hope that I or others who love this individual with help to keep him and everyone in the wide world around him safe from that illness.

But barring the sad case of mental illness, I fear no movie’s impact on my son… nor Salinger… nor The Brothers Grimm… nor The Bible… nor The Koran… nor Elmer Fudd. We grow by telling the story. If we do not tell the stories, that is when I start to fear for us all.

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