Time for a Cease-Fire Before the Hellfire

“By common estimate, approximately 60% of Hollywood films feature at least one firearm.”

--Entertainment Weekly

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It’s been a while since that April day in Littleton, Colo., and other acts of violence, other slayings such as those in Atlanta and the recent shootings in Granada Hills, have moved what happened at Columbine High out of the public eye. Congress, too, has other things on its mind--taxes, health care, whatever--and the powers in Hollywood may be forgiven for feeling, to use a particularly unfortunate phrase, like they’ve dodged a bullet.

The situation was different not long ago. On June 2, under the headline “H’Wood Under the Gun,” Daily Variety described investigations ordered by President Clinton: one by the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department to look into entertainment industry marketing practices as they relate to young people, the other by the Surgeon General to study the links between pretend violence and the real thing.

Not willing to wait for those ongoing inquiries, the House Republican leadership brought two anti-Hollywood measures to a vote. The first, proposed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), would have flat-out ended 1st Amendment protection for extremely violent or sexual material, while the second would have mandated a government-imposed rating system. Both lost, but they certainly got everyone’s attention for a while.

But it would be a mistake for Hollywood to think the issue of violence on film (and elsewhere) has gone away. It’s only a matter of time before the topic heats up again, and unless the industry can come up with a better response than it did in the aftermath of Columbine, there may well be hell to pay.

Even given that it’s difficult to focus on sensible rejoinders when you’re under attack, much of the Big Denial verbiage coming out of Hollywood has been feeble and disheartening. Because we live in a sound-bite culture, it’s tempting to think a comment like “In all the police records I’ve ever examined, I’ve never seen a 30-inch Sony listed as a murder weapon” (by “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf) is really saying something worthwhile, when in fact it’s glib sophistry of the most meretricious sort, matched only by the “guns don’t kill people, people do” argument of the gun lobby.

And it’s obviously also true that the entertainment industry is but one of several factors that made a tragedy like Columbine possible, including the easy accessibility of weapons, a weakening of the family and a national culture of violence with roots deep in our history.

Though people in the business like to treat the movies’ role in this American malaise as an open question at best, that’s not a particularly logical attitude or one that’s shared by the rest of America. For one thing, so much of the way we do business is based on the premise that exposure to visual stimuli is influential in all kinds of ways, from buying products to voting for candidates to, yes, deciding what movies to see on a Saturday night, that it serves no one to pretend that movie violence is a situation apart, mysteriously having no influence on anyone.

For another, as the New York Times headlined over a devastating but little-noticed piece by Lawrie Mifflin just after Littleton, “Many Researchers Say Link Is Already Clear on Media and Youth Violence.” While the article notes that “proving such links irrefutably is almost impossible,” a spokesman for the American Psychological Assn. says “the evidence is overwhelming. To argue against it is like arguing against gravity.”

Obviously, as David Walsh, the psychologist who runs the National Institute of Media and the Family, put it, “It’s not as direct as ‘Oh, they played “Doom” and then they went and got their guns.’ It’s a redefining of our repertoire of responses. If the norm is respect, an extreme response might be a punch in the nose. But if the norm is ‘in your face’ hostility, then the extreme is something more extreme.” To put it more plainly, as a Washington media lobbyist did, “A steady diet of violent content over time creates a culture that tells kids that violence is the accepted way we solve our problems.”

What the search for solutions to excessive societal violence lacks is balance, perspective, reason and honesty. In a sane world, given that the gun lobby, parents and the entertainment business all bear a share in the moral disintegration that Columbine represents, everyone would stand up and take partial blame. As it is, Big Deniers in each camp, like rowdy siblings unwilling to accept responsibility for a jointly created kitchen mess, engage in self-interested finger pointing, saying in effect, “It wasn’t me, Ma, it was him.”

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Though Hollywood is by nature resistant to facing reality, there are reasons why the Dream Factory is going to have to shoulder some responsibility or face serious consequences. If society, as is likely, forces someone to pay in order to feel better about itself, show business is the usual suspect. It’s not that the movies are more to blame--they’re clearly not--but that they are the most vulnerable. And unless the business wises up, the price is going to be stiffer than it has to be.

To begin with, parents, either unwilling to see themselves as partially at fault or unable to change their lives, are going to look to the government to do something to clean up a mess they feel more powerless against than, in truth, they probably are.

While weapon enthusiasts clearly have a part in all this, the gun lobby has shown the ability to influence elections, a talent that gives it a kind of protection in Washington it does not otherwise merit. While no one is likely to vote for or against a particular congressman because of an impassioned plea from MPAA President Jack Valenti or Disney Chairman Michael Eisner, the National Rifle Assn., though far from invulnerable, has a history of brandishing that kind of power.

Not only is the entertainment sector most vulnerable, its culpability is on people’s minds more than Hollywood realizes. Blinded by its own fiscal success, by the millions of dollars that enter theatrical box offices every week, the movie business thinks the people are on its side. The truth is, a lot of those patronizing theaters on a regular basis are either too young or too disinterested to vote. Among card-carrying adults, those who do vote and carry commensurate weight with Congress, the feeling against Hollywood is probably deeper than the industry wants to recognize.

Evidence of this feeling is everywhere. A recent Gallup Poll reported that 62% of adults said violence in popular entertainment was one of the major causes of violence among young people, while a CNN/USA Today Poll reported that 76% of those asked said television and movies were a negative influence on children and 81% thought stricter regulation of violence would be effective.

There’s further, albeit anecdotal, evidence of this attitude in my own correspondence. Year after year, no issue I have written about has consistently brought in more letters and phone calls than concerns about undue violence in films. Readers are troubled, they are frustrated, and they are angry at feeling powerless to control what the studios flood the culture with. If politicians give them a way to feel they’ve regained some power, no matter what the cost in theoretical civil liberties, they just might jump at it.

Politicians know this, and they act on it. Those Republican-sponsored measures may have lost in Congress, but more than a third of the House membership voted for them. And what did pass by a 355-68 vote was a particularly damning sense of the Congress’ resolution that proclaimed, among other things, that “no industry does more to glorify gun violence than some elements of the motion picture industry” before concluding that the entertainment industry “has been irresponsible in the development of its products and the marketing of those products to America’s youth.”

Yes, as industryites are forever saying, it’s unfair that entertainment in general and the movies in particular form such a big and inviting target. But just because Hollywood is an easy target, that doesn’t mean it has to act like one. The entertainment business should get real, stop its aggrieved innocence act, admit some fault and do something about it.

Before getting real can be done, some hard truths need to be accepted. No. 1, the 1st Amendment--despite being embraced with such avidity by assorted schlockmeisters (as well as many sincere civil libertarians) that Samuel Johnson’s line about patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel comes to mind--will not necessarily provide foolproof protection against an aroused citizenry.

Remember that this is the country that experimented with Prohibition, and that forced cigarette ads off television and billboards. Even if it’s true, as Joan Bertin of the National Coalition Against Censorship put it, that what’s happening now is “an old-fashioned morality campaign, just like the frothing at the mouth about comic books in the 1950s,” it’s wise not to forget that that frothing did serious and sustained damage to the comic book industry. A constitutional right to put ultra-violence on screen does not, for instance, necessarily include a constitutional right to advertise it in the media.

Also wise to discard is the idea that once an audience has gotten used to increased permissiveness, it can’t go back. Though the history of Western civilization shows just such a back-and-forth pendulum between prudery and excess, nothing that grand need be cited as an example. Just simply go back 60 years in time to a period of Hollywood history that film scholars call “pre-Code.”

For a four-year span between 1930 and 1934, after the advent of sound and before the aggressively moral Production Code began to be enforced, the studios made numerous films whose amorality, sexuality and all around candor were not equaled again until the 1960s.

Then, as now, Hollywood responded to noises of dissatisfaction (the problem was frank sexuality more than violence) by saying filmmakers were only giving the public what it wanted. It was an argument that didn’t do it much good when pressure coordinated by the Catholic Church, including serious threats of a boycott, resulted in the studios adhering to the letter of the restrictive Production Code as a means to head off what surely would have been more restrictive and confining local and even national censorship.

Given everything, if this were an ideal world, Hollywood would be able to police itself in a sensible way, agreeing of its own accord to limit the more hateful kinds of on-screen savagery for the good it would clearly do society not to have those images in our collective consciousness. This, because of the sizable profits to be made by depicting more and more explicit violence, is never going to happen.

Absent that, if Hollywood wants to avoid the nightmare of strictly imposed censorship, some kind of compromise is going to be necessary. That means that 1st Amendment absolutists, who often don’t see the contradiction in mocking 2nd Amendment zealots while taking the same position on the issue that’s closest to their hearts, are going to have to see that some form of self-regulation or reasonable control is essential.

A similar scenario resulted in the creation of the Motion Picture Assn. of America ratings system that is under such justified attack today. Though Valenti’s baby worked well for a number of years, any objective observer can tell you it’s not working anymore. If a degrading torture chamber of a film like “8MM” can get an R, if films as disparate in their suitability for teenagers as “Election” and “South Park” can both get Rs, that rating has come to cover such a multitude of sins as to be all but useless to parents. Not to mention that, repeated denials and misleading statistics notwithstanding, no one can watch today’s studio output in toto and not come away convinced that the MPAA is not as tough on violence as it should be.

As for those who continue to resist compromise, who refuse to meet the problem of violence on screen halfway, they must live with the knowledge that they are likely to bring on what they most fear and what no reasonable person wants: heavy government interference.

Though Russia’s passionate 19th and early 20th century revolutionaries tried to assassinate their share of tyrants, they reserved a special fury for compromisers who wanted to make things better by working within the system. The revolutionaries knew that a compromise that made things livable (though far from ideal) would forestall the violent upheaval they desperately wanted, just like compromise today in Hollywood would forestall the unwanted revolution of mandated government censorship.

The people who brought in the first Production Code understood that, as did Valenti once upon a time. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone in Hollywood understands it now. *