Assassination at the movies.

Today we have to write a summary about news connected to our future career. I wanted to write about politics and economy, specifically the eurocrysis, but there weren’t long news, so I’ll talk about something related to a sociological and psychological analysis about assassination at the movies. It comes up from the book “Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981” by Michael Newton.

The article talks about how the culture of assassination not only responds to political motivations or meanings. The first case is about a man called John Hinckley, who tried to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981. He was very close to the president, who felt an “extremely unbelievable pain”, but didn’t notice he was being attacked. The peculiarity of this attempt of assassination is that Hinckley didn’t try to kill Reagan because of its political beliefs or because he hated the president, but because he adored a movie character: Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. In order to play the character completely, he had to approach to Jodie Foster, whom played a prostitute on the film: by attacking Reagan, he could impress Foster. The hypothesis of the auto is that Hickley tried to fill his lack of confidence, style and social skills by adopting the personality of Bickle.

This is only one of the cases-related-to-movies that the book is about. As I already said the book tries to be a sociological and psychological analysis of how the assassination culture in films is assimilated by people with mental disorders.

This is the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/04/assassination-movies-michael-newton?INTCMP=SRCH