Saturday, May 21, 2005
RESPONSIBILITY AND CULTURE WARS
Flipping through the paper this morning I noticed the picture of Ellen DeGeneres and Portia De Rossi at the Emmys, posed in a lovers embrace. DeGeneres won an Emmy for her talk show, something I didn’t know she had until this morning. With TV, I’m out of touch. The mind numbing commercials that always look like a carney pitchman selling sex; the sit-coms that turn once-respected human role models—like your best friend for instance—into buffoons to poke fun at; and the inevitable sports liturgies, reached the end of my endurance about ten years ago. I’ll do my own thinking instead of buying theirs, thank you anyway. One of the consequences of that is that it screws up my ability to make small talk. Losing the TV habit offers wonderful bonus hours in the day—hours I can spend doing other things, like blogging for instance. By comparison, TV is a poor bargain.
In the current issue of Culture Wars (May 2005) E. Michael Jones takes on Hollywood, arguing that the philosophy of the wide screen is to avoid consequences. He makes an example of The Aviator, Martin Scorcese’s version of the life of Howard Hughes, which leaves out the critical detail that Hughes had syphllis, making of the story a jumbled set of unrelated events, all for the purpose of avoiding acknowledgement of the obvious—extramarital sex brings consequences.
In American culture we don’t like consequences. Since we can’t make them go away, we redefine them instead. We would rather bankrupt our health care system in the face of AIDS than point to the fact that it results from homosexual sex. We would rather redefine the family than admit that divorce destroys it. We would rather see organized crime as an inexplicable phenomenon, than admit that gambling brings it on, especially when gambling promises to reduce our tax bill. We would rather farm the kiddies out to whoever is available 8 to 5 than admit that mothering is important enough for someone to do it. We would rather honor our Hollywood idols than recognize that refusing to would change the film and TV landscape. Responsibility is an unpopular concept these days.
In summarizing his thoughts, Jones writes
The Legion of Decency Pledge was the teeth in the production code….The pledge is based on the premise of moral causality, the one premise which Hollywood goes out of its way to deny, even if it means wrecking perfectly good stories that could earn lots of money. As Larry Dickson has pointed out, an oath is the only thing that most people have. The only oath of any significance left in our culture is the marriage vow, which is undermined by Hollywood because Hollywood wants to weaken and control people by robbing their lives of moral significance. The pledge is the one thing Hollywood feared in the past, and it is something they can learn to fear again. The details still need to be worked out, but a pledge of total abstinence when it comes to television might be a good place to start.
I remember the Pledge very well. On Legion of Decency Sunday (no, they really didn’t call it that) everyone in church would stand up, raise their right hand, and repeat after Father. No, we didn’t always abide by it, but mostly we did. And mostly Hollywood produced something that wouldn’t violate it. Wonderful musicals like Oklahoma and docudramas like The Ten Commandments. Incredibly, we were entertained by singing and dancing and by Truth. It was light years apart from The Matrix.
Will such innocence ever return now that we’ve all seen sophistication? Probably not. Jones got it wrong. We have two vows to our credit—the marriage vow that we break on a regular basis, and the unspoken vow to glue our eyes to the tube and the silver screen that too many of us never ever break.
