VA Tech Media Coverage: Stop! Hammer Time

The following item is absolutely the most ridiculous hypothesis yet about the Virginia Tech massacre. Next to this one, that is. Courtesy of Drudge (displayed above the logo next to Sanjaya) and the New York Times blog:

An Image's Ties to a Dark Movie | 8:07 PM ET

A self-shot photo of Mr. Cho, above, and a still from the Web site of the movie 'Oldboy.' (Photos: NBC News, top; Tartan Films)The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

The poses in the two images are similar, and the plot of the movie, "Oldboy," seems dark enough to merit at least some further study.

The lead character in Old Boy is Asian, which is weird and freaky because Old Boy is an Asian film and there are rarely any Asians in Asian movies. And... the character appears to be grasping a hammer in the movie.

I suppose without any evidence to justify pointing the blame stick at Marilyn Manson or Grand Theft Auto, it was only matter of time before someone somewhere constructed a vague and overreaching Grassy-Knoll-Badge-Man correlation between the massacre and a movie (or rock band or video game).

Let's continue with some "further study," Drudge and NYT. Maybe Mr. Cho was influenced by the dark movie Sling Blade:

Or what about this:

Here we go:

Break out the flashing siren light for this one, Drudge:

And...

They're all holding hammers, so maybe it's their fault, too. Or maybe it was an ordinary Google image search.

All evening on cable news, so-called experts have occasionally tried to draw a parallel between the Cho photos and video games. Naturally, without any specific examples in the materials sent to NBC, they have no actual evidence. So now it's looking like an Asian action movie is next in the queue. To be fair, Keith Olbermann and Joe Scarborough each focused a segment on the real issue with Mr. Cho: untreated mental illness.

For the rest of the cable news bunch, a discussion about the complexities of mental illness is just too damn hard and it burns the eyes to read "schizophrenia" on a teleprompter.