In her bad cop role, Attorney General Janet Reno recently addressed Congress and was much more direct. She said that if the entertainment industry doesn't clean up its act, government will.
Earlier this year Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, testified before the Senate hearings on movie and TV violence. Afterwards he said he felt like the man who thought he was sober but, after being told how drunk he was, decided he better lay down for a spell just to be on the safe side. Prudent though he is, Valenti's critics want him to do more than sleep it off they believe a 12-step program with closely monitored follow-ups is more in order. An angry, fearful public needs scapegoats for troubling violent crime statistics and movies, by their prominence and ubiquity, are an easy target.
It isn't the first time the industry has faced the specter of censorship. Twenty-five years ago, Americans were sickened by political assassinations, urban rioting, and a general rise in violent crime (not to mention the war in Southeast Asia.) At the same time, the Supreme
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Court was allowing states to determine what constituted pornography and filmmakers were straining to break away from the Production Code's constraints on sexuality and violence. The potential backlash prompted newly appointed M.P.A.A. head Jack Valenti to keep the censors at bay by devising a movie rating system that placated all but the most rabid moralizers.
Once again Valenti and the entertainment industry are scrambling to keep the censors from the cutting room door. This time, however, an ascendant middle class conservatism, in league with radical feminists and the religious right (the strangest of political bedfellows), could usher in government censorship of the movies to rival the notorious Production or "Hays" Code of an earlier era. Don't think it can't happen here. Government censorship of movies is commonplace in every other liberal democracy on the planet. In Britain, for instance, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange cannot legally be shown anywhere. Indeed, Great Britain seems on the verge of mass hysteria over the issue of juvenile violence. The recent case of two ten-year-old boys who abducted and killed a two-year-old in Liverpool prompted a nation-wide call for censorship of home videos, (The BBC, government owned, has always been subject to censorship) even though there was no evidence that the crime was somehow an imitation of what they had seen in the media.
"I didn't intend to have the audience react with the feeling 'Yes, do it!' Let's go out and kill. The idea was to create a violent catharsis, so that they'd find themselves saying, 'Yes, kill," and then afterwards realize, 'My God, no'—like some strange California therapy session." |
America seems primed for just such a conflagration of mass hysteria. And the Clinton Administration, along with the religious right and the new enemies of free speech-radical feminists- are providing the kindling. Attorney General Reno, whom some say lost any moral credibility on the subject when she authorized the Waco slaughter, told Larry King recently that violence on TV and in the movies is a "contributing factor to violence in society," as if it were an immutable fact. Adding to the farce is the spectacle of a Congress which took six years to pass the tamest of gun-control measures (The Brady Bill, by which 22 states weren't even affected), making rumblings now of censoring violence in the entertainment industry. Guns don't kill people, it would seem, movies with guns in them do. And there's more. Andrea Dworkin and other radical feminists are calling for government censorship of violence in movies because they believe much of it is directed against women, and thus promotes abuse of women in general. So much for the First Amendment under the protection of which pioneering feminists won their epochal battles. Free speech for me, but not for thee.
For his part, to again keep would-be government censors placated, Valenti says that he intends to initiate meetings between moviemakers and studios to better "sensitize" everyone on the issue and to persuade them to eschew violence if it is not integral to the storyline. Sounds sensible enough on paper, but how would it work it practice? Of course you could eliminate a few dozen kills in a Schwarzenegger movie and not change the storyline one little girly muscle, but what about the movies of, say, Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese? Their films do not titillate with violence so much as they are cinematic meditations on violence itself. (Which is not to say that their movies are amoral. All of DePalma's movies, for instance, as Pauline Kael has pointed out, have a little lifelesson to teach.) "In my films," DePalma once said, "I think I try for a stylized expressionism that imparts a sort of grotesque beauty.
That stylized "grotesque beauty" is especially evident in DePalma's signature scenes, those scenes that leave you gasping for breath, enthralled and repelled at the same time. In Carrie it was the prom scene; in Dressed to Kill, the straight razor glinting in the elevator scene; in Scarface it was-oh, god, remember?-the chainsaw scene; in Casualties Of War it was well, the whole damn terrifying movie; in Blow Out it was the fireworks scene (the most macabre, heart-breaking ending to a movie since Deborah Kerr fell back, frame left, in Jack Clayton's The Innocents); in The Untouchables it was De Niro's Hillerich & Bradsby demonstration of the Baltimore Chop; and most recently in Carlito's Way, it's the straight razor in the pool room from hell scene. In most other directors' hands these scenes would often be unconscionable exercises in sadism and gratuitous violence. But with DePalma it's never as simple as that Take away the violence and you take away his art.
Yet despite the fact that DePalma is without doubt a serious artist, a certain disquiet remains. Referring to Eisenstein's theory of montage, DePalma once said, "film 'is' violence." Without knowing the full context, isn't there a whiff of social irresponsibility in such a statement? When artists aestheticize violence to the point that DePalma and Scorsese do, shouldn't they be aware of possible social ramifications? More to the point, because their medium is a form of mass entertainment, shouldn't they take into account what influence their movies are having on impressionable 16year-olds in darkened theaters? DePalma has been quoted as saying that he doesn't go to "scary" movies at all, and certainly not to his own movies. What is he afaid of?
Maybe DePalma had heard his buddy Scorsese (to whom DePalma introduced both Paul Schrader and Robert De Niro) talk about his experience once when he happened to catch a showing of Taxi Driver at a midtown New York City theater: "When I made it the ending where De Niro (as Travis Bickel) goes on a killing spree, I didn't intend to have the audience react with the feeling 'Yes, do id' Let's go out and kill. The idea was to create a violent catharsis, so that they'd find themselves saying, 'Yes, kill,' and then afterwards realize, 'My God, no'-like some strange California therapy session. That was the instinct I went with, but it's scary to hear what happens with the audience." Yet shaken as he may have been, Scorsese nevertheless went on to make Goodfellas-perhaps the most harrowingly violent movie of them all.
For decades, Frederic Werthan's books on the subject of violence in art-Show Of Violence, Dark Legend, Sign of Cain, etc-have made a strong case that artists like Scorsese and DePalma have a moral duty to censor themselves. A cultured, erudite man, as well as an experienced clinician in human pathology, Werthan insists that artists' claim that their work is just a mirror of society and not the shaper of it is pure nonsense. We know, he says, that children certainly imitate what they see, and so do immature adults. Commenting on violence in art historically, Werthan says that the violence in Greek plays was never on stage; and that, although Shakespeare presented 52 deaths on stage and 64 of they were subordinate to the plots. Even where violence is copious, for example in The Iliad, Werthan claims that it is always in service to the plot. In good literature, Werthan says, "violence is an aberration."
Although Werthan makes a persuasive case for discounting the therapeutic value of violence in art (for example, that it releases a would-be criminal's violent impulses, and therefore prevents crime) and other what he believes are liberal mare's-nests, he is not persuasive when he suggests that artists in the past focused less on violence in their art than the modems do, nor that it is unnecessary or incidental to art.
In The Iliad, for instance, the first and many still believe the greatest work of Western literature, there are innumerable passages of quite detailed graphic violence. From crushed skulls to spears through the eyes, the prevalence of blood and mutilation in The Iliad makes DePalma and Scorsese movies look tame. It is true that Homer conveys the utter waste and tragedy of the Achean and Trojan deaths; nevertheless, the violent passages are as explicit as they are deeply fascinating and even beautiful. In no way can one say that the violence in The Iliad is somehow an "aberration." Was the graphic depiction necessary? Maybe, maybe not, but because no one succeeded in censoring Homer we are able to debate the point today.
Similarly, there's little doubt that if he had had cinematic techniques available to him, Shakespeare would have made full use of them in depicting the violence in his plays. (He says as much in the opening lines of Henry V.) And it seems more than plausible that a 17th century London audience who routinely witnessed the execution and mutilation of criminals in public squares would not have objected.
Clearly, violence has always been integral to the meaning of certain artistic expression. It resides not at the periphery, but at the center of what that art is about. Violence has always been present in film, from The Great Train Robbery to Carlito's Way. Should moviemakers temper their portrayals in an effort to reshape our culture? Perhaps- as long as the individual artist is free to make that assessment. Perhaps that is not the moviemaker's task at all. The fact remains that violent impulses will always lie latent in every human heart, and denying that denies art itself. Because real art speaks the truth, and sometimes it has to draw blood to do it. MM