Doing Violence to the Future of Movies in L.A.

As a high school teacher in the L.A. Unified School District teaching English and cinema classes, I can answer the question of whether there is a link between media violence and children’s behavior with an emphatic “yes” (“Soul Searching on Violence by the Industry,” May 18).

In general, my students’ level of taste in movies is appalling, as they have been swept along in an ever-descending spiral of violence, sex and greed.

Given the meager resources placed at my disposal to teach cinema (no textbooks, VCR, film projector or films, for that matter), I called the studios to inquire about educational outreach programs or donateable materials. I received the audible shrugging of shoulders.

It would be in the studios’ interest to engage constructively and positively in educating our children, and they can start by ceasing cynical exploitation of children’s minds. Few students have any awareness, much less appreciation, of any film before 1980. Garbo, Gable, Flynn, Davis, Welles and Wilder are as dead and dusty as Ramses the Great to them.

Despite all this, there is hope. In showing Chaplin’s “City Lights,” in prehistoric black-and-white silence, I studied the faces of my students. As the camera closed in on the Little Tramp’s face, a picture of terrified shyness mixed with an equally terrible need to be accepted by the once blind flower girl, I saw tears well up in the eyes of even my most hardened gangbangers. Afterward, they pressed me with questions about other Chaplin films and where they might get them.

Hollywood thinks the health of its bottom line lies in finding ever more explicit ways to shock and stun an already benumbed audience. What it fails to realize is that the real shock lies in the other direction, toward truth, honest emotion and the search for our now lost innocence.

KEVIN C. GLYNN

Glendale