- What does it mean to be a Good Guy? If you were alive
during the 50's and 60's, you probably remember a time in American culture
when our Good Guys had names like Unitas, Armstrong, Namath and Hope. These
were bona fide, clean cut, never cursing, never smoking, never talking-back
to their mamas Good Guys who always said and did the right thing -- at
least in public. The most popular Hollywood actors of the time were Brando,
Wood, Newman, Hepburn, Stewart, and Dean. These actors portrayed characters
who, while deeply flawed and morally conflicted, never failed to make the
most ethical and socially conscious choices when their mettles were tested.
The most popular television shows were My Three Sons, Leave It To Beaver,
and the Mary Tyler Moore show. These prototypical sitcoms portrayed American
families as perpetually ebullient and harmonious, and American couples
as near-androgynous. On I Love Lucy, husband and wife Rick and Lucy slept
in separate beds.
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- Of course, this Rockwell-esque depiction of blissful,
homogenized, nearly all-white Americana was destined to be exposed for
what it was - a myth. Even the most staunch conservatives may feel a bit
queasy upon reviewing the Dick Van Dyke show. But the end of the 20th century
saw the pendulum of popular culture take a dramatic swing in the opposite
direction. No longer is a Good Guy, in real-life or in fiction, expected
to adhere to puritanical morality, or even the most basic laws of a civilized
society.
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- Hollywood may have set this trend, beginning in the mid
1960's with such films as Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid. These were the first big-studio movies whose protagonists were anti-social
figures who prospered mightily by breaking the law. Major film stars Warren
Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Robert Redford, and Paul Newman protrayed real-life
thieves and murderers as affable anti-heroes who, despite ultimately paying
for their crimes with their lives, had a great time before meeting their
comeuppance. The only "admirable" or likable characters in these
films were criminals, while enforcers of the Law were portrayed as brainless,
heartless automatons.
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- These films at least had the redeeming value of saying
to the viewer, "What goes around comes around. If you choose a life
of crime, you may one day be canonized in a major motion picture...but
you'll still be dead." But in 1971, director Stanley Kubrick may have
irrevocably changed the course of film history with his Oscar-winning A
Clockwork Orange. Kubrick faithfully adapted the film from the legendary
Anthony Burgess novel of the same title. It is a tale set in the relatively
nearly future somewhere in England, and is told from the perspective of
one of the most insidiously evil figures ever to appear in fiction.
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- The story is narrated by a young punk named Alex who
heads a gang of equally depraved savages. Kubrick depicts these young men
merrily and without remorse committing rape, beatings, maim, theft, and
eventually murder, all to a soundtrack of some of the most beautiful music
ever composed (including Beethoven and Mozart.) We listen rapt as Alex
(portrayed with searing intensity by Malcom McDowell) speaks Burgess' enigmatic
yet strikingly beautiful and poetic prose in a soothing and nearly hypnotic
voice.
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- After crushing a woman to death with the stone sculpture
of a giant phallus (and didn't many a film critic go ga-ga over that metaphor),
Alex is sent to jail, where he volunteers for a rehabilitation program
that is touted by the country's politicians. He is forced to view, with
his eyes peeled open by steel foreceps, the type of "ultra-violence"
that he has happily indulged in. While vieiwng these scenes, he is injected
with nausea-inducing chemicals, which later causes him to become ill upon
engaging in brutality.
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- Alex is then release from jail a changed man, no longer
able to fend for himself in the barbaric underworld in which he once thrived.
He coincidentally encounters the man whose wife he murdered, and is nearly
killed himself. He then finds himself in a hospital, where he becomes the
center of a media frenzy, as civil rights activists protest the therapy
that altered his personality. He is given total immunity for his crimes,
and is either surgically or chemically transformed to his prior self. The
final scene of the movie depicts Alex engaged in violent sex in the center
of a large, cheering audience. Kubrick fades to black, Alex cooly utters
"I was cured, alright," and "Singing in the Rain" plays
merrily as credits role.
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- American film critics almost universally praised Kubrick
for his neo-punk, subversive surrealism, and Oscar agreed, as Kubrick walked
away with the Academy Award for best director. But did the "intellectual
elite" of Hollywood really see Clockwork in an accurate light?
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- On the Fox News channel on December 24th, 1999, Dr. Richard
Brown, a professor of cinema studies, had this to say about A Clockwork
Orange: "Upon reviewing this film, I'm reminded of just how uncomfortable
it made me. It's not just the brutality; it's the fact that there's nothing
in the film that says, "Isn't this terrible?" In fact, what Kubrick
says is, "Well this is fine! This is fun!" Malcolm McDowell's
voice in the narration is warm and whimsical, but in fact, what we see
is some of the most sadistic, brutal images ever put on the screen."
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- Indeed, perhaps more troubling than the ever-increasing
abundance of violence and obscenity in popular media is the ATTITUDE promoted
by the "artists" of our time. No longer do we see a clear demarcation
between right and wrong in our films, tv shows, music, and books. The underlying
theme to most American entertainment is "screw everyone on planet
Earth except for me." This was the prevalent attitude among some of
the most critically acclaimed filmmakers of the 90's, most notably Oscar-winner
Quentin Tarantino. In all of Tarantino's films (including Pulp Fiction,
Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers), the protagonists -- bank robbers,
serial murderers, and professional hit men -- are remarkably witty, urbane,
and attractive criminals. Of course, in real life, pathologically violent
criminals rarely possess any of these "admirable" qualities,
which makes Tarantino's films remarkably disingenuous...but don't tell
that to Roger Ebert or Richard Roeper.
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- This utterly destructive, anti-social attitude is also
perpetuated by the cultural plague called Reality Television. With the
enormous success of shows like Survivor and The Bachelor, every network
is constantly on the look-out for the latest reality craze to hurl at their
viewers. With no actors or writers to pay and low production costs, these
shows will almost always turn a profit for their respective networks. You
may ask, if voyeuristic Americans find joy in viewing the triumphs and
failures of the average joe, and these shows artistically are no worse
than most formulaic sitcoms, where is the harm in that?
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- Unfortunately, the increasing trend in reality programming
seems to be humiliation as entertainment. On FOX's American Idol (currently
the highest rated television show in the US), judge Simon Cowell provides
the show's "laughs" by verbally disembowelling young singers
and dancers who mistakenly believe they have talent. Cowell's viciously
acerbic remarks are considered more of a viewer attraction than any genuine
talent we see in Idol's performers. Another FOX show, Joe Millionaire,
tricked its female participants into believing they had a shot at "winning"
millions of dollars by marrying a rich guy (the joke was, he was completely
broke!)
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- But even more disturbingly, some new reality shows not
only push and cross the bounds of good taste, but actually physically endanger
their unwitting, non-consenting participants. On the Sci-Fi channel's Scare
Tactics, individuals are set up by their "friends" for extraordinarily
ghoulish and realistic pranks. The majority of these victims are actually
led to believe that their lives are in danger. In one episode, a group
of friends in a car pick up a mysterious hitchhiker, only to see him turn
violent and attack the driver with a knife. Not surprisingly, the "mark"
in the back seat, believing that his friend is being murdered, pummels
the poor actor with a knife into submission. Another Scare Tactic prank
went even more terribly wrong, and has resulted in litigation. A Los Angeles
woman named Kara Blanc sued the cable channel for "severe emotional
damage and injuries incurred as a result," after a prank in which
Blanc ran naked through a desert canyon, believing she was being chased
by aliens who had murdered her friends. (Link: http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,11298,00.html
)
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- Predictably, some moronic and highly impressionable people
have tried to imitate the antics seen on Scare Tactics in real life. In
Ohio in October of 2003, a young woman set up her "best friend"
to be kidnapped by two men and dragged into a field at gunpoint. The men
proceeded to "murder" their female accomplice, then held a gun
to the victim's head...and began counting down. After reaching "one,"
they yelled out, "Happy Halloween! You're on Scared Tactics!"
Not surprisingly, neither the victim nor Ohio authorities were amused by
this horrific prank, and the perpetrators, if convicted, will face one
to five years behind bars. (Link: <http://www.onnnews.com/story.php?record=27472>
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- >From where has this collective sadism in the US arisen?
To answer this question, we must ask ourselves: Does our entertainment
reflect our values, or do our values reflect our entertainment? Film critic
Michael Medved addresses this in his book Hollywood Vs. America: "I
worry over the impact of media messages not only on my children but on
myself, and on all the rest of us. No matter how sophisticated we believe
that we are, or how determined our best efforts to counteract their influence,
the positions of the popular culture seep into our very souls. A well-known
slogan of the 1960's declared, with a resonable accuracy, 'War is unhealthy
for children and other living thing.' Today, one might similarly observe,
'The popular culture is unhealthy for children and other living things.'"
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- Of course, no one wants to return to the homogenized,
black and white era of entertainment, because it was intellectually dishonest,
and many painful truths were suppressed and ignored, when they should have
been examined in the light of day. Maybe JUST ONCE, we should have seen
Ricky Ricardo beat Lucy up, because it was happening every day to millions
of women across America (including the real Lucy.) However, this new era
of entertainment, with its never-ending theme of "no one matters but
me," is even more disingenuous, as it does not accurately deal with
consequences. The way we treat each other matters, and taking pleasure
in the suffering of others - or sadism - is a form of mental illness.
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- The key tenet not only of every major religion but of
any successful system of law is some variation of the Golden Rule, or "Due
unto others as you would have them due unto you." The Hollywood elitists
- the Tarantinos, the Cowells, the Murdochs, and the Eisners - who promote
a paradigm contrary this should accurately be labeled what they are - sadists.
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