Cultural Crimes and Misdemeanors

As “the moral of the story” becomes passé in Hollywood
VC Reporter, 3/26/09

The scene comes to us from time immemorial; the clan gathered together, gently illuminated by flickering firelight, held in thrall by the shaman’s sacred tales of the great doings of gods and men – didactic yarns meant to carry the time-honored mores of the age, to calibrate the moral compass of the young, to laud the upright, to censure the transgressors of the moral code.

Flash forward ten thousand years and the scene is much the same, but for the presence of the popcorn, Junior Mints and other cinematic trappings. The flickering spell still holds the clan in thrall, and to largely the same purpose, yet all too often the latter-day shaman seems to have abdicated responsibility for the purposes of cogent social – if not moral -- instruction, accolade or censure.

A glossy new remake of Wes Craven’s despicable 1972 theatrical debut The Last House On the Left is in multiplexes this week, in the extension and perhaps the extenuation of a diabolical cinematic trend – where would-be art more resembles the abbatoir than the academy, and the overall effect of which plays less to cultural development than to cultural diaspora.

I’ve always loved cinema, and have never been conservative in those passions. I loved every minute of the last great era of cinematic excess – the 1970s – that coincided with my own coming of age; loved its marauding monsters, bare-bosomed heroines, its tales of madness and mayhem and hot-blooded hijinks. Thus it strikes me as odd and ironic that I might come off to some as a moral crusader when I say that I find myself increasingly repelled by an escalating amorality in Hollywood now neck-deep in a new era of excess.

The emerging trend not only in horror but cinema in general seems to lean toward amorality – which strikes me as immorality without the nuisance of conscience – as the filmmaker leaves such trifling notions as the morality of a given tale to the audience. Ours is a free society, indeed, but whether we have the emotional tools to handle that freedom is anything but a certainty, as we celebrate characters like Hannibal Lecter and his too-common ilk in cinematic sociopathy, whose predilection for slaughter is offered with the barest nod to any notion of a moral coda, justified by the presence of an almost imperceptible tongue in cheek. “Sorry if that went over your head,” the aggrieved filmmaker is likely to quip – “It was intended as satire.”

Hollywood justifies their slate as simply satisfying the demand of the audience, and there is undeniable truth in that undeniably cowardly excuse – our culture will absolutely sink as low as we will continue to tolerate, and to celebrate, with our attention and our money. But as our art reflects our tastes and our lives, regrettably, the knife cuts both ways, just as in Oscar Wilde’s tale, the picture of Dorian Grey became the unspeakable reflection of his true nature.

In its report entitled Strategic Development Of the Irish Film Industry, the members of the document’s review group noted, “A fundamental policy of every national community in the world is to master and secure a distinctive presence and to express their own cultural identities through film and television.” Such is true for virtually every nation except the United States, in which the only sustained cultural imperative seems to be that which is widely marketable. The unfortunate corollary of the notion is that anything that sells becomes, by default, culturally acceptable – and will remain so as long as we’re buying.

Thus as these films earn millions, each new iteration pushes the envelope a bit farther, saturating the national consciousness with the bloody footprint of such tales as Saw, Hostel, Funny Games, Vacancy, The Devil’s Rejects, Wolf Creek, et cetera, ad nauseum. Rather than slaking our dark appetites, the consumption of such fare actually seems to leave us hungry for more, as our culture becomes increasingly warped.

I realize that violence is in our nature; we are in one elementary facet “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson suggests – but we are likewise capable of reflection, discretion and evolution. Such was confirmed wisdom some 2,500 years ago, when among Buddhism’s Eightfold Path – a series of steps suggested to lead to a life of righteousness – was the dictate toward “right concentration,” which might otherwise be termed, in the contemporary idiom, Garbage In, Garbage Out. We can see anything we like, but we can ‘un-see’ none of it – once we consume it, in some small way it likewise consumes us.

Thus we might, upon consideration, avoid The Last House On the Left and its ilk, because whether such violent fare desensitizes us to violence, or increases our proclivity to it is beside the real point, which is simply that because we can do better, we should.