Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter apologises for school shooting episode
Charlie Hunnam, right, stars in
Sons of Anarchy season six, which kicked off with a school shooting, inset.
In the final moments of the opening episode to the latest season of
Sons of Anarchy a young boy pulls an automatic rifle out of his backpack, walks into his school and the sound of shooting and screams erupts.
The camera doesn't follow the violence, rather it shows disturbing images from the boy's notebook, left on the ground, as the audience hears the deadly events.
My sympathies and my compassion go out to you if you have suffered loss.
The scene came at the end of an episode that had already shown multiple rapes of both a woman and a man, extreme physical violence, drug taking, shootings and a character being drowned in a bath full of urine.
The school shooting begins a story arc designed to demonstrate the impact of gun trafficking by the members of the
Sons of Anarchy motorcycle club.
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Coming nine months after the fatal Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newton, Connecticut, the final scene has nonetheless provoked outrage from some offended audience members.
One organisation, the Parents Television Council (PTC), has called for the government to intervene, citing the episode as an example of why the channel that produces and broadcasts it, the American cable network FX, should not be “forced” onto customers.
Cable companies in America group a number of channels together into “bundles” that consumers can purchase, rather than users paying for access to individual channels. Foxtel uses a similar packaging system in Australia, offering customers a choice of “channel packs”.
The PTC is an advocacy group that has a stated aim of working “with the entertainment industry to stem the flow of harmful and negative messages targeted to children” and pressing authorities to “enforce broadcast decency standards”.
“What FX chose to show – a scene of a young boy murdering innocent children in a school with a semi-automatic gun – is enough of a reason for consumers to have the choice not to underwrite such horrifically violent and disturbing material. Think about the parents who have been personally affected by real-life school shootings – even they were forced to contribute to FX on their cable bills,” said PTC President Tim Winter in a statement.
There was also anecdotal reports of some who had been affected by the Sandy Hook shooting being upset by the episode.
The Newton school superintendent John Reed sent an email to parents and staff members prior to the episode being aired to warn that the episode would feature the shooting.
"While you don't see the visual impact of this, you will hear the shots and cries from the victims," he wrote.
The show's creator Kurt Sutter has apologised to those who have been personally affected by tragedy but has taken umbridge to the PTC in a video message he recorded for his own YouTube channel.
WARNING: Some extreme language in the video below
“Obviously there is some blowback today,” Sutter said.
Prefacing his response with an awareness that it might sound callous, Sutter defended his actions as a storyteller as neither gratuitous nor arbitrary. He referenced Sandy Hook, Aurora and Columbine before expressing “my sympathies and my compassion go out to you if you have suffered loss”.
He then apologised if he had upset viewers.
He noted however that it “is a very small percentage of us” that have been personally involved in a school shooting, and explained his storyline as intentionally ripping the scab off the wound for the rest of society, in order to provoke real action.
With regards to the PTC he dismissed them as “f—king ridiculous” and “making noise”.
“I would imagine these are not evil people, but they're just not very intuitive or intelligent individuals. It's such a small and simple view of process. The fact that these people want to be monitoring what my children watch is terrifying.
“There is no awareness of what the bigger objective of that episode was ... [which is] a simplistic, dangerous view.”
“My sense is those people who are outraged do no watch the show.”
He also suggested the view is “perhaps influenced by certain religious groups and people with other agendas ... it's just scary, not just on a creative level but on a personal level”.
Read more:
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainm...ing-episode-20130913-2tpz8.html#ixzz2ep2Ha6sb
