Translated material
Werther and Reagan
The first attempt on the life of the US President took place on January 30, 1835. The painter Richard Lawrence shot President Andrew Jackson from a distance of two meters out of two pistols, but both guns gave an misfire. Lawrence turned out to be a madman: like a Gogol official, he imagined himself to be the English king Richard III, who was preventing Jackson from climbing the throne. It took only five minutes to recognize the accused by innocent due to insanity. He was put into a hospital for mentally ill, several times transferred from one hospital to another, until he died in 1861 in the Washington Psychiatric Clinic of St. Elizabeth.
The attempt on Reagan just two months after his took office was a shock for the country. She suddenly realized that no secret service was able to protect the first person, especially when she faces irrational motives. The motives of the attached were extremely unusual, akin to the motives of Lawrence.
The 26-year-old John Hinkley, who shot at Reagan, was in love with the then young movie star Jydie Foster, who played the role of a young prostitute Iris-Isi in the film by Martin Skorsizov. Hinkley imitated the hero of the picture in food, clothes and manners, once in a motel he called his name. The Scorsese film was released in 1976. Then Hinkley and decided to implement a plan of a cinema taxi driver who is preparing an attempt on a presidential candidate, but refuses this venture. John Hinkley longed for Herostratic Glory.
At the trial, the accusation submitted a video of the visit of the President of Carter in Ohio in 1980 - on a stop -frame in the crowd you can clearly distinguish Hinkley's face. In the same year, he learned from the press that Jodie Foster, who was then 19 years old, entered the University of Jail, and began to pester her phone calls. Foster began to hang up. Then Hinkley switched to letters.
The court recognized him mentally ill. A measure of restraint was the content of St. Elizabeth in the clinic - the very one where Lawrence was held. Hinkley is there to this day.
In the summer of 1981, Robert de Niro, who played the main role in the Taxist, came to the Moscow Film Festival, and I interviewed him. Hinkley de Niro refused to talk about the case.
The reaction of Jodie Foster to questions about Hinkley was even more acute. Her only commentary - an interview with the 1981 Esquire magazine, in which she claims that, with the news of the attempt on Reagan, it never occurred to her that the shooter was the same stalker (as they call too annoying celebrity fans in America), which gave her recognition of love.
Probably, for the first time, the question of the reverse negative impact of art on life arose in 1774, when Goethe’s novel “The Suffering of the Young Werther” was published. In imitation of Goethe’s hero, romantic boys throughout Europe began to take their lives. Lessing in a famous letter convinced Goethe to change the final of the novel for the happy, was going to write the “Best Werther” himself, and another German enlightener, Christoph-Friedrich Nikolai, even wrote. In his "Joy of the Young Werther", he brought the plot to the Happy End, marrying the failed suicide on Lotta.
“Werther effect” - suicide from imitation - studied and described in 1975 the California sociologist David Phillips. Murders committed from imitation by real or fictional idols are also not uncommon. Not to mention various kinds of fraud, first described in fiction and only then realized in real life. Are the authors "guilty"?
A strange question. But it cannot be that the authors do not ask him for themselves. Otherwise, they would not write didactic, moralizing novels.
Foster Hinkley sent his last message a few hours before the assassination attempt. Like the Getevsky Vertter, Hinkley in him says goodbye to his platonic lover, because he expects that when trying to kill Reagan he will be killed himself. The idea of the attempt in the letter is completely disclosed.