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Ethics Re: Violence for Writers et al.

ON WRITING - by G.L. Horton

As studies continue unveiling a causal relationship between violence and aggression in children and the violent content of the video and movies they are exposed to, the next question is-- what do we as artists do about it?

Easy to say, but very difficult to do: Don't publish it, produce it, perform it, direct it, buy tickets to it, or buy the products of sponsors who purvey it.

Speak up and remind others that mammals learn through imitation, and that children -- young ones of course, but a surprising number of older ones also-- do literally think that television and the rest of the public story-telling forums are run by a committee of adult authorities who have designed them to educate people about the way the world works and provide role models. In fact this has been drama's function in most times and places, for good or ill. The "entertainment" value was just a sugar coating for the lessons on how to be a ruthless warrior or a submissive servant or whatever: roles that had to be understood and accepted for the social order to function.

Yes, as artists our job is to tell truths, and to explore the dark side of our natures as well as love and altruism. But in a democracy, which truths ought to be communicated when, where, and to whom is a judgment we are obligated to make as citizens-- and screening our own children's exposure to soul numbing stories and images isn't enough. Those protected kids live in the same world as kids who are brutalized. And yes, I'd say that if one even suspects that one's work will glamorize evil and inspire impressionable youth to deeds of cruelty, then it is one's duty to give it up-- however lucrative or personally satisfying it might be.

I know that this is rigid and priggish, and a reversal of what I once believed: but I've come to suspect that the doctor's Hippocratic oath to "First, do no harm" ought to apply to all the arts and professions.

Thomas again: In the face of the mass media and the popular culture to which kids, and all of us are exposed, to self-censor our work in theatre seems a minute and impotent response.

Well, compared to what? Mass media and popular culture is art, produced by artists, isn't it? What's the essential difference between a beer ad and the iconography of a medieval cathedral? Between an action film and the battle scenes on the Parthenon? (quality aside)

For me, (an opinion I've expressed before in other settings and never a really popular one, but mine, none-the-less) the true subject matter of theatre is theatre.

My belief in this allows me to avoid inevitable paralysis which follows from imposing moral instruction on an art form.

More important, it allows the creators of the beer ad and the action film to avoid paralysis, too. Under this philosophy, the bad guys, the immoralists, will always win.

I know this may duck the problem of artist's responsibility. But who are we really to expect that we have enough control over the end product of our work that every audience member will "read" our work in the same way and get out of it what we intended.

We can't expect it. But we can work very hard to make it so. And what choice do we have? If we don't appoint ourself the makers of significance, where is significance to come from?

Today's paper had an article from the LA Times (datelined Seattle) saying that screenwriter Wm Mastrosimone is working with hs youth on antiviolence drama, to atone for his contributions to anesthetizing children to violence: "I am a person who has written violent movies... who makes a living in Hollywood." Mastrosimone was shocked into this stance after his 8th grade son came home from school and told him some kid had written death threats on the blackkboard.

It doesn't say whether he has quit "Sinatras".

I think that your response to the unsettling experience you described might be seen as the emblematic response of the modernist/post-modernist movement. If the contradictions and hidden agendas of inherited moral systems have been exposed, on what basis can the artist create? What can he or she affirm? Why, the activity itself, its tools and techniques. Some good practitioners use the tools scientifically, as pure exploration. Others-- the great majority of others-- use them to market everything from hamburgers to mass murder. It is the situation Yeats described: thebest lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.

The audience you were part of used theatre to celebrate its identity and cohesion, and it reminded you of a lynch mob, or one of Hitler's rallies, yes? I felt the same terrifying emotional swell at Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatre at the premiere of Mamet's "Oleanna", when the respectable middle aged males around me roared their approval of John beating the crap out of his student Carol. The "worst' are any of us, when in the grip of art's vast power to rouse our emotions and shape our perceptions

I don't suggest that anyone self-censor their artistic (or scientific) explorations. Only that they take responsibility for the way they loose the knowledge gained on the world we all share.

 

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