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Anything goes: moral bankruptcy of television and Hollywood
USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 1998 by Joe McNamara
Yet, Grieg also mentions, and partially endorses, Max Eastman's The Sense of Humor. Eastman sees humor as an instinct and claims that there is "a certain range of feelings which can be enjoyed playfully, just as certain wave-lengths can be perceived as light, and if you pass beyond this laugh spectrum at either end the humor disappears." He goes on to assert that "Aggression jokes derive their peculiar delightfulness from the fact that we have cruet impulses which we cannot unleash in serious life, cultural standards being here at variance with our instincts, and they sneak forth and take a drink of satisfaction when we play." Moreover, "Jests often liberate the surging wishes prisoned in us. They remove the lid of our culture, and let us be, in fun al least and for a second, animals."
Traditional cultural standards do supply the guidelines that make civilized life possible and safe, sometimes even despite our own instincts. However, when Eastman sees the function of comedy as some sort of relief valve which can "remove the lid of our culture" and allow us to be animals "in fun at least and for a second," he has put his finger on the dilemma. The second has been stretched into minutes, to half-hour shows, to entire years of television production, and, for some, to a way of life.
Humor as a basically harmless interchange between equals has given way to brutal vulgarizations with no end in sight. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition once explained to me, if a British barrister falls down once, it may be funny. Repeated falls, though, must contain increasingly bizarre elements to keep the audience "entertained." The same may be said for American humor and its attendant profanity and vulgarity, set on a deliberately downward course by writers, directors, executives, and actors. The real matter here is money, and some in the entertainment industry. driven by fear of failure, will do anything, even -- or perhaps especially -- to vulnerable children, to boost die bottom line.
Screenwriter John Gregory Dunne's lunch with a Hollywood producer took an odd turn when the producer pretended to grab a small animal from under the table and asked Dunne if he saw "the monster" and recognized it. Stunned, Dunne replied that he neither could see nor name the imaginary animal, and the producer exclaimed, "It's our money." Dunne describes the resultant six years, four contracts, and 27 drafts of one movie script in his book, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen. The script concerned the tortured life of TV newswoman Jessica Savitch, up to her drowning in the muck of the Delaware Canal. The finished version, six years later, "though it bore absolutely no resemblance to the raw material from which it had been wrenched, did what [the Disney studio] wanted it to do: It made money, thereby feeding the monster."
Apparently, Hollywood has little or no compunction about feeding kids to the monster. Michael and Diane Medved's book, Saving Childhood: How to Protect Your Children from the National Assault on Innocence, argues forcefully that youngsters need to be protected from the pessimism that dominates television and motion pictures. The Medveds acknowledge the inevitability of observational learning: "The deepest problem with this material isn't the possibility that children will imitate the behavior they see on screen, though we know that this sort of imitation does occur. The more universal threat involves the underlying message conveyed by these ugly, consistently dysfunctional images, encouraging self-pity and fear." Although they refer here to Hollywood's staccato drumbeat that things always will get worse, they base their conclusions on the notion that "prolonged exposure to the dysfunctional elements in our culture" will cause viewers to "lose faith, confidence and resistance ... to the plague of pessimism."
