Violent Fantasy: It's not the Hollywood Gore that's the problem - moral relativism at heart of problems with mass media

National Review, Oct 23, 2000 by Jonah Goldberg

Like presidential elections and the Olympics, political denunciations of Hollywood violence have become a bedrock quadrennial American tradition. At least every four years-sometimes more often, if there's a school shooting-movie-industry lobbyist Jack Valenti simultaneously sucks up to politicians and lectures them about the First Amendment. Liberal activists who denounce Joe Camel as a pied piper of social coercion swear that screen idols have no influence on human behavior. Television executives who make billions of dollars off the persuasive power of 30-second commercials declare that the 26- and 54-minute programs those ads punctuate have no net impact on their viewers.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that there are no new arguments since the last go-around, when Bob Dole denounced "nightmares of depravity" and the "mainstreaming of deviancy" in a slew of films he'd never seen. This season, a Federal Trade Commission report-released with precise political timing-details how the film industry targets very young audiences for mature films. While this gives the controversy a newsier feel, the report's details merely confirm what everybody knew: Hollywood makes its money from kids.

Of course, what really makes this year's repeat of history a farce is that this time it is the Democrats who are bemoaning the "coarsening of our culture." In years past, we could at least expect some ritualistic huffing and puffing about free speech from the Hollywood liberals; but this time around they know that their Al doesn't really mean it. "Go, go, go, Al! We need a little spanking!" cheered Bette Midler at a star-studded fundraiser recently, giving full expression to the gravity with which Hollywood views this "crisis."

Despite all of the posturing, nobody is addressing the real problem with Hollywood: It's not the violence at all, but the message of moral relativism. Violence has been a constant in world culture. You can draw a line starting from cave paintings, and trace it through all visual media up to this weekend's latest blockbuster. Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's plays, Japanese picture books, and Native American oral histories can hold their own with just about any Schwarzenegger film in terms of murder and gore. Talking about violence-even graphic violence-as something "new" is like talking about a disturbing rise in the use of percussion instruments in music.

The antiviolence handwringers contend that it is the graphic, realistic nature of modern depictions that does real damage. But if simple film violence were the problem, one would look for some correlation between crime rates and violent-movie distribution. Such correlations remain elusive.

A more realistic contention is that while movie violence is not bad in itself, it can be bad when presented in a morally harmful context. During the 1992-93 round of Hollywood-bashing, Sen. Paul Simon threatened the television networks with government "action" if they didn't clean themselves up; in response, the networks sponsored a UCLA study that concluded that "context is the key to the determination of whether or not the use of violence is appropriate." The problem for liberals, though, is that they don't think there are many contexts where violence is permissible-save, perhaps, in cautionary tales about Nazis, southern slaveowners, and military homophobes. The Left always despised Dirty Harry movies, for example, because the moral context of those films suggested that criminals were, in fact, criminals, and that a liberal do-gooder court system was allowing the bad guys to rule the streets.

In a 1992 article in Reason magazine, aptly entitled "Faster, Hollywood, Kill! Kill!" Tevi Troy suggested that the popularity of Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and other violent vigilante films was actually a healthy expression of public discontent with the crime wave of the 1960s and '70s. Watching Dirty Harry administer rough justice was a healthy release valve for frustrated Americans who did not, after all, take the law into their own hands upon leaving the theater. When Dirty Harry killed, he may have been defying the legal order-but he was still confirming the moral order. Troy's analysis is surely correct: Action heroes from Perseus to Captain Kirk have always taken the law into their own hands; they are men of action, with a well-defined sense of the moral right.

This was the central appeal of the films of John Wayne, who-from 1949 to 1974-was on the annual list of Top 10 biggest box-office movie stars for a record 25 years. Out of his well over 100 films, you can count on two hands the number that didn't depict him shooting, slugging, or ordering the shooting or slugging of someone. A whole generation of men wanted to imitate Wayne, seeing him as the definition of an authentic male. The Left criticized his films for glorifying war, because they didn't show the terrible consequences of battle; as a result, in many of the Left-influenced war films of the last 30 years, we have seen in much more graphic detail how unpleasant and messy killing can be.