One of the main messages Plugged In emphasizes is the possibility that our entertainment choices influence us. The movies, TV, music and video games we consume engage our imagination and help shape our worldview, molding how we see reality, what we think is right and wrong, good and bad, normal and unacceptable.
Because I’m Plugged In’s main music guy, I often deliver variations on that theme in my album and track reviews. Especially when it comes to young performers who’ve started out squeaky clean and drifted in more worldly directions, I’ll note that their messages have the potential to influence young fans in really unhealthy ways.
We deliver different variations of that idea a lot around here. With music, we might talk about how an impressionable young fan thinks it’s OK to imitate his or her idol’s problematic choices when it comes to sex. With TV, video games and movies, we’ve just as frequently parsed the potential connection between violent imagery and becoming desensitized to violence in the real world.
Those observations regularly prompt letters, emails and Facebook responses. “Everyone knows the difference between fantasy and reality,” someone might say. “I’d never go out and do what I saw in a TV,” someone else might argue. “It’s just a movie. Come on!” we might hear.
It’s certainly true that the vast majority of us don’t go on murderous shooting rampages after playing violent video games or sitting through a particularly gruesome TV show or movie. The influence that most of us experience is subtler than that. But for a few unstable souls out there, entertainment can be a catalyst for imitating what they’ve seen or heard in that “fantasy” world, with tragic consequences.
That’s apparently what happened with 23-year-old Damon Perry. He told police that after binge-watching AMC’s The Walking Dead (while binge-drinking at the same time), he “saw” his friend Christopher Paquin morph into a zombie. So Perry allegedly beat him to death with his hands and feet, an electric guitar, a microwave and knives. Moses Marquez, spokesman for the Grants, N.M., police department told The Daily Beast, “It was one of the absolute worst [crime scenes] I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been with the department for 15 years.”
Grants police don’t believe Perry is mentally ill. He just got too drunk and watched too much TV about killing zombies. “He seems remorseful,” Marquez said. “He’s had the time to sober up and realize what has happened, and he has expressed remorse.”
It’s impossible to say, of course, what would have happened had Perry decided not to binge-watch a fantastically violent show at the same time he got inebriated. But I don’t think it’s a reach to suggest that he wouldn’t have believed his friend was turning into a zombie and killed him in response.
Cases like this, while mercifully few, powerfully illustrate the reality that what we watch, what we listen to, and what we play can influence us. And with a very few media consumers out there, the wrong entertainment at the wrong time might just be the spark that ignites a real-world tragedy. Which is why Plugged In will keep talking about it … even if most of us don’t believe something like that could happen to us or anyone we know.
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