"Going Loco Down in Adam Lanza."

Frontline recently ran a series of documentaries each as depressing as the next about the actively gun-having portion of these United States.

One of the documentaries was called Raising Adam Lanza. It was about the titular character, America's latest nascent lunatic gunman, this time from Newtown, Connecticut.

I say nothing of the matter contained therein. I want to speak here only about the title.

Is Raising Adam Lanza a pun on Raising Arizona, the title of a Coen brothers film starring a young Nicholas Cage?

I can't see how it was not a pun on that film's title.

It could be it was an unconscious pun, since punning on such a serious subject seems rather risqué  for PBS.

My wife naturally took issue with my remarks along this line. She said, "It's about how Adam Lanza was brought up. How he was raised."

"Yeah," I said. Gritting my teeth. "I see that. But the title is still a reference to the Coen brothers' film. The whole point of it is to recall the title of Raising Arizona, the movie starring Nicholas Cage. The rich pleasure and cranial amusement, that rare treat of recognition."

The format of the documentary was to follow around these two workmanlike journalists on the Hartford Courant who were never exactly blindingly dynamic in their work. They would show bull sessions where the office would have group conversations, bullpen hashing out. They would try to bungle randomly towards a solution or an explanation for this remarkable evil.

This was not Woodward and Bernstein. Unfortunately it more keenly recalled to this viewer nothing so much as those circle jerks on TMZ where "Harvey" brandishes his XXL coffee and the assembled  wisenheimers all lounge about the office and crow about the bathetic antics of the Hollywood C-List.