Individuals Getting Influenced By Films To Perform Crime

There is a number of different gang culture films that might have a negative effect on individuals and may trigger them to perform in a certain way that is violent. The main films that may portray that picture are Life & Lyrics, Love and Basketball, Bullet Boy, Dubplate Drama, Kidulthood and most recently Adulthood.
I have recently went to watch Adulthood myself and the themes that the film contained was too violent to be a 15 certificate. To my surprise after the film ended an argument broke out between 2 groups of people, to an extent copying behaviour of the actors in Adulthood.
Kidulthood was raw, gritty and disturbingly honest. From the less than Catholic attitudes towards sex to the unavoidable
presence and influence of drugs, the film did not pause for a moment in its illustrations of street violence and a general
disregard for morals or empathy.
Another film that contains similar influencial story line is 'Bullet Boy'. Bullet Boy is located in a ‘real place’, an area of North East London sometimes reffered to as a 'Murder Mile' because of the relatively high incidence of fatal attacks, many involving guns.
The most recent film that i have watched that was based on gun and knife crime was Channel 4 Fallout(Disarming Britain Season). The film contained numerous powerful themes which in my eyes did not encourage crime but presented it in a bad light. A member of the cast was asked if he believed that films such as these is the result of why people carry weapons, is it because they feel if they don't they will not look big within the society or their area. He replied "People carry them for protection, in case something bad is going to happen to them. You have to carry them if other people do," says Paul, who lives on a nearby estate in North End Road, Hammersmith. "I know people who walk around with guns." Therefore this statement shows that the individual believes that people carry weapons because everyone is doing so nowadays for protection.
An incident of bad behaviour on public transport in the film is one scene the Henry Compton boys found particularly funny.
Teens in a large group are playing their music loudly on the bus and the policeman, Joe, grabs the phone and throws it out the window. Is this scenario familiar to them? "Yeah I play my music on the bus because I want to," says Paul. "I would just turn it up louder if someone asked me to turn it down. Maybe if a woman with a sleeping baby asked me to I might. But why shouldn’t I play my music on a bus?". This statement shows that in a way individuals do not get influenced to a high extent by films for the reason that they are already doing what is done in films such as Fallout-it is nothing new to them. It could be argued that Street Crime films portray the life of real people with some exaggerated extent. Some individual argue that it is not the Media to blame for peoples bad behavior nowadays. Others agree that they have a right to play their music loudly. Anyone trying to exert some authority by telling them off is likely to make them rebel even more. After watching Fallout a number of teen were asked about their views. The response was "I don’t know, but the film made me absolutely terrified, because it was based on stuff that happens" says 14-year-old Oleksei Yedama. "Everyone knows things like this go on every day in London and nothing is done to make it safer." This shows that to a certain extent individuals are made more aware and horrified by the violent events going on in London.

A few years back when I watched Kidulthood , a street crime film directed and based on the urban setting of England.
Teenagers nowadays are becoming more atomized individuals with more autonomous influence and control over themselves, therefore they are less likely to respond influences of Film. In fact, this movie depicts teenagers from different colours and classes, growing up in radically different styles of families with only one aspect in common: the parents simply do not know what is going on. The feeling one can simply get from watching the interaction between family members, is that although it doesn’t seem dysfunctional on the surface; there is this feeling of disconnection and discontent. Many of them are no doubt the product of working class families, with parents simply too busy and/or naïve to understand what their children are up to; who they are hanging out with; what they are doing and ultimately how they are influenced by the corrupt and violent mainstream culture that's spoon feeding them.