1998 Film Response: Copycatting

After watching the video in class last Monday, I was shocked how many people mimicked stuff that they saw from movies or other media. It’s odd for me to see adults copying movies and trying to implement those crimes. I believe adults should know better to observe something that is not of norm in their society and try to imitate it. The only time I can understand one doing so is if they have some type of mental disorder. Two examples that stuck out to me the most were the two boys that tried to imitate the killing of “Scary Movie” and the one where the women gathered other women to imitate the robbery in the movie “Set It Off.” When the narrator was talking about the “Scary Movie” scenario, it was shocking to me how those young boys did such crimes on their friends and family. One killed stabbed their mother just to get money to buy the mask that the killer in the movie had (REALLY?). It’s really sad to see how these boys lives are revolving around a movie that’s suppose to be for entertainment, but it is used as a tool. In a sense, yeah they did imitate the movie, but they took it out of context (they weren’t acting, they were real). In the “Set It Off” scenario, it was bizarre to see how a one women was able to gather those women together to learn a robbery scene from a movie. They acted out the whole scene completely when they themselves robbed a bank. In this example, I’m not surprised that someone copied this because it worked for the characters in the movie. They tried to copycat it and they actually acted by what they saw. Even though I thought it was funny (ex. to be a banker and have heard the scene from somewhere), it’s still not right for someone to imitate someone to do commit a crime. Our society is more excepting of copycat acts that don’t deal with violence. Overall, the film was very informal about the acts of people that are influenced by movies. I believe that those things the people watched in the film have some impact on them, but I don’t believe the films are the overall cause of them going through with criminal acts. Like I said earlier, there has to be some possible underlying mental disorder. It’s okay to copycat something, but the acts shown in the film were way out of my norm.