Amitai Etzioni has an odd post about the supposedly pernicious effects of The Matrix on impressionable young minds. It of four fans of the movie (and presumably its atrocious sequel) who committed violent crimes and talked afterwards about their obsession with the film. One guy shot his parents to death with a 12-gauge shotgun. “[Josh] Cooke’s lawyer characterized his client as “obsessed” with the Matrix, and supported the appointment of a psychiatrist to determine whether Cooke was sane when he committed the murders.”

The post doesn’t have anything in the way of analysis, it just invites you to blame the film for the crimes. Important bits of information (e.g. “whether Cooke was sane”) don’t seem to me to get the kind of weight they deserve. It wasn’t as if the guy beat his victims to death with the the DVD case, either—there’s that shotgun he had.

I’m not sure what Etzioni’s point is. Does he think we ought to ban the film? (It’s a bit late.) Maybe sue the filmmakers? (I’m not sure that litigation is very communitarian. If it happens, count me in: the Wachowski brothers definitely owe me at least $4.50, because Reloaded was basically half a crap movie.) And more importantly, didn’t we have this whole debate in the 1970s already? It shouldn’t need pointing out that any cultural phenomenon as big as The Matrix is going to have enormously variegated effects. Some of the people who get involved are going to be the odd pork pie short of a picnic. But what are you going to do? When it comes to assessing the effects of blockbuster movies with cult followings, The Matrix is actually a pretty interesting case. It’s probably done more to get people reading analytic philosophy than any other film I can call to mind. (It’s spurred more paid-up philosophers to write papers about it, too.) This seems like a good thing, on the whole. The more teenagers who are routed towards papers by Colin McGinn or Dave Chalmers or Julia Driver and away from The Fountainhead or Ender’s Game the better, if you ask me.

So I really can’t find anything more in this post than a bit of tut-tutting. I suppose it’s that schoolmarmish streak, combined with having actually been raised in one o’ them real live vibrant communities—where everyone knows your business and has you pegged as soon as they hear your surname—that’s always made me a bit wary of the communitarians.