Columnist Bob Shemeligian: Turn off the tube, and put down that gun

Bob Shemeligian

Tuesday, Nov. 26, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

BEWARE: The holiday film releases and television specials are upon us.

The prospect of spending countless holiday hours in front of television sets is a year-end fate that awaits many people, especially schoolchildren on Christmas break.

My advice to all of you is simple: For every hour you spend in front of a television or movie screen, spend another hour with a book. It not only will improve your vocabulary, it could help preserve your sanity.

More and more, researchers are learning that television and movies are incredibly powerful media, capable of desensitizing youths to the horrors of violence and even of altering the thought processes of adults.

In other words, they're learning that life does indeed imitate art.

Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" spawned scores of copycat killings across the nation. Among them was the Oct. 30, 1994, slaying of two family members by Salt Lake City 17-year-old Nathan Martinez, who, after developing an obsession with the film, shaved his head and donned tinted glasses like those warn by Woody Harrelson's character.

In March 1995, Jonathan Schmitz of Pontiac, Mich., shot and killed Scott Amedure, three days after Amedure revealed his gay crush on Schmitz during "The Jenny Jones Show."

Schmitz had been led to believe he was going to meet the woman of his dreams on the show.

"Did you notice that Schmitz solves his problem with Amedure as a cartoon character would?" asks Dale Melgaard, film studies professor at UNLV. "He simply blows him away as if there are no consequences for his actions."

Perhaps it's not Jenny Jones -- who's been described as the queen of ambush television -- who is solely responsible for setting up Schmitz.

Perhaps it was all those Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner cartoons Schmitz probably saw as a kid. In them the characters solve their problems by shooting, pummeling and blowing up adversaries.

Or maybe it was the modern-day cartoons Schmitz saw as an adult, the ones starring the likes of Seagal, Schwarzenegger and Stallone.

"They're cartoons in which real actors play animated characters," Melgaard said. "They all feed on our basic instinct -- desire for immortality. They show us how to defy death in a cartoonish way."

The operative words here are "show us."

That's because films show, but they don't inspire.

"It's passive entertainment, meaning it creates a world for you, and allows you to take a step back," Melgaard explained. "And because you didn't create that world, it's not yours and the consequences of it are a couple of steps removed from you."

This is why books are so different from films. They force us to use our imagination to create our own imaginary worlds.

And every parent knows that a child -- as well as the child in all of us -- is much more careful with things he creates.