Photo : Albert L. Ortega ( Getty Images )

Politics make us dumber. Arguments are crafted not out of logic, but out of timeliness and necessity. Fox News, for example, saw people excited about a new Halloween movie, so the goblins trawling its news room asked: “How can we use this to own the libs?” And so we end up with this: an article about how protagonist Laurie Strode uses a gun in the fictional world of the film, and how that’s hypocritical because the woman who plays her, Jamie Lee Curtis, would like to see stricter gun laws in the real world.

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“At one point, she shoots him as he’s standing in front of a window,” it reads. “But Curtis’s on-screen actions stand in contrast to her real-life persona as an advocate for gun control — one of several Hollywood actors who use firearms in their films while preaching against them away from the set.”

The article seems to assert its point by pointing out how Curtis holds a handgun on the poster for the 1990 movie Blue Steel, in which she plays a police officer who carries a gun as part of her job. Of course, Curtis’s tweets, which call for gun reform and not, like, the abolishment of all firearms as a thing that should ever exist, do not also apply to her character in the film, who is trying to evade a supernatural masked murderer who has met Busta Rhymes and has been trying to kill her for 40 years.



On Twitter, Fox News’ story has lead to a series of spiraling debates about the differences between fictional characters and the people who portray in the real world, some of which are truly fucking maddening and others of which are cool and funny. Here are some of those:




Halloween, a movie that stars a guy who simply must be in favor of stabbing people with a large knife, opens on October 19.



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