Those who study culture — or think about public policy in relation to it — often wrestle with the classic post hoc dilemma: did a work or movement in popular culture influence events in real life, or did it simply reflect the zeitgeist?
Were, say, ‘video nasties’ responsible for an uptick in violence and sadism in a generation of British youth? The Daily Mail seemed to think so, although today their hysterical headlines appear faintly ridiculous.
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Were the two broken boys who committed the Columbine shootings in Colorado shaped by The Matrix? Or did they simply recognise in that film a stylish myth in which to dress their murder/suicide pact?
Spike Lee poses the question for us in this summer’s BlacKkKlansman, in which a black activist (played by Harry Belafonte) recounts a 1916 Waco, Texas lynching purportedly influenced by frequent theatre showings of 1915’s loathsome The Birth of a Nation.
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