Basketball Diaries
"Culture is the complex whole which includes all habits acquired by man as a member of society," said Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture. I can think of no movie that proves that more than Director Scott Kalvert's 1995 film, The Basketball Diaries. Based on the autobiography of rocker and former heroin addict Jimmy Caroll, the movie describes in horrific detail how the author passed in a few short months from being a Catholic high school basketball star to being a strung-out heroin addict who fantasizes about walking into school and blowing students and teachers away with a shot gun. The Basketball Diaries contains incredibly dark and vulgar imagery, which could possibly lead an impressionable youth into moral and value modification and dangerous decision-making skills. Teen violence, particularly in schools, and drug usage became widespread across the news in the 1990's. The Basketball Diaries seems to be an indication if not contributor to this statistic. People weren't fully aware of the growth rate of teen violence until we had teen idol Leonardo DiCaprio in a long, black trench coat surrealistically blowing away classmates in The Basketball Diaries, and two students in black trench coats walking into their school and kill
Too stoned to perform the simplest of plays, their intoxication is blatantly evident. Young people do have a capacity for violence, and for some, drugs are all it takes for that capacity to turn into violent behavior. Defiant, Jimmy, Mickey and Pedro quit school. Torn inside and grieving over the loss, Jimmy wonders about death and how far he can push the envelope and cheat the inevitable. It didn't portray drugs as something fun to do at a party, but instead as something that takes over your life and destroys it. Neutron, who has slowly backed away from his friends, realizes they are no longer about having fun; life has become a reckless attempt at getting high. ing twelve fellow students and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves. The Basketball Diaries shows how teenagers are not prepared for death, and how some respond with drugs and violence as a result. Should blame fall on what some call America's culture of violence; morbid computer games, music about death and drugs, and movies about kids who solve their problems with cruel mind games and murder?The Basketball Diaries has many themes, one being man's primitive nature to be evil. Two real, living boys, steeped in graphic fantasy movies, including The Basketball Diaries, killed thirteen people and then themselves in a seemingly motiveless display of violence, the consequences of which the boys may not have understood. The sequence in the movie, which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold seemed to replicate in the corridors of Columbine High, has been replayed on the news many times. Jimmy's obsession with drugs begins when his best friend Bobby dies of leukemia. It may partially be the answer to why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold assaulted Columbine High School in a frenzy of homemade bombs and guns. Pursued by the police, conned by drug dealers and worked-over by thieves, they find themselves trapped in a world of violence and drug abuse.
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