Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking soundbites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, ‘that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘The Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machinegun?”

The obscure 1995 Leonardo DiCaprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. Kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, “The NBC Nightly News” and other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them.

The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

Well, the difference is, Pixies wrote wild albums that challenged the imagination, that mixed science fiction with nautical themes, and The Smiths wrote complaint slips that nobody read. Morrissey’s influence is so crippling that it could even deteriorate the flower of modern creative thought. It’s like a pungent death shroud over the future and the past.

I think that’s extremely important, but I think it’s important to create all types of female characters, across the spectrum. I always say that what makes me sad is that women don’t even get the opportunity to be mediocre in the way that guys do. It’s like, every week these bad movies come out at the box office—let’s let women direct some of them! I’m not saying that’s going to make them great, I’m saying we need to be allowed to make good movies, bad movies, mediocre movies. We need to be able to create authentic flawed characters and totally crappy one-dimensional characters. I think we should be allowed to do it all, bad and good, just like guys. I don’t like the idea that women need to get in there and prove that we’re great at it. Because you know what? We’re not all gonna be great at it. We just need to be doing it, and get paid for doing it.

I wrote earlier that I like BLL because it helps me shed the burden of sophistication. What I meant by that was, with a BLL in hand, I am free to say out loud that I like the singer Adele. And that I think high-end cheese makes for a boring topic of conversation. And that I can see the problem everyone has with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (shameless sentimentality), and that I didn’t really like that book all that much, but that I got weepy during its last 50 pages anyway. And why is this important? I know some writers who I think are hemmed in by their sense of sophistication, by the fact that they know they shouldn’t like Adele, or Foer, or Bud Light Lime, and who, as a consequence, write in a frightened, soul-stunted way.