Movies - The Revenge Generation (Part 2), 7-31-2010

 [Continued from Movies - The Revenge Generation (Part 1), 7-31-2010. sch 2/24/23]

By now, we expect the cops to kill rather than arrest. Lawful arrest seems a trivial matter left to the sissies. Forgotten after all the Dirty Harry movies is one called Serpico.

Do most of us recognize these movies as mindless entertainments? I hope so. I know I sit under a very dark cloud doe to my criminal charges – some think I do not know the difference between reality and fantasy.  What I worry about is that we not want a movie to present us with moral issues, making us think. Our intellectual laziness begets a moral laziness. Nor can I exempt myself from this problem. I remember seeing the movie Q & A with a friend, and while I thought it an excellent movie, I told him I wanted a movie where I could relax from all the grime of a law practice. What has been the effect of revenge-themed stories on those who think such punitive actions good policy, regardless of morality?

Movies and television have the ability to teach us many things. I do not think they do well teaching us that constitutional rights are our laws, not mere legal technicalities. We should be queasy about a population that thinks in black and white terms, if they think at all. Not that television lacks any capacity for intelligence and/or morality. I offer Saving Grace and Rescue Me as examples of shows dealing with moral issues seriously and entertainingly. Burn Notice is a vigilante show without killings. Battlestar Galatica was a most morally complex series.

I do not want to sound like a naif. American society allowed its police a wide latitude even in the Hayes Code period. Look at the ends of the real-life John Dillinger, Pretty Boyd Floyd, and the Barrow gang. Indiana lynched the last Black man north of the Ohio River in the mid-Thirties. (And then watch Fury with Spencer Tracy.) Let us not forget for how much longer lynchings happened in the South.

No, what I want to write about here are expectations. As a people, we once expected more of ourselves, we aspired to more, and those expectations and aspirations included moral issues. I know it may seem strange, a moral leper, as I would be so keen on moral issues. Morality was not far from my mind in the past year – I meant to offend it and give myself no home in this world. How else would I know I am a moral leper? 

When we conflate justice into revenge, we may be doing what is most human. The Greeks moved from the Furies to law – read The Orestesia for more on this. You see the same change occurring between the Old and New Testaments. Revenge changes into something more nuanced and less simplistically human, the law as justice. Are we anymore disordered a society than Jacobean England with its plays like The Duchess of Malfi?

Unlike earlier times, we are no longer a reading society. Books present complex ideas better than film or television. We are also seeing the end of newspapers. We have no counterbalance to film and television for presenting complex moral issues.

And why do we need such a counterbalance? Morality underlies politics. If we cannot reason about moral issues, we cannot reason about political issues. Our form of government requires a citizenry capable of reasoning on political issues. When the majority loses its ability to reason about complex issues, we lose our form of government.

So where do you stand? Ready to think hard, or do you want everything political and moral divided into black and white?

sch

[I grumbled and griped at my younger self for this bit of polemic. Points and the reasoning up them feel a bit wooly now. I wrote thinking this was the time to get things off my chest, expel what had bothered me and my silence that also troubled me, as I would not have another chance. Unfortunately, I did survive unto this day. I would not change any of my opinions but one: revenge is a natural reaction for human beings; an irrational hitting back at what hurts one. I would add more, as time seems to have made my argument about the dangers of simplistic thinking. But I will end here, thanking you for reading myh wild ride of words. sch 2/24/23.]