At The Core, A Big Misunderstanding
`I’m not against violence; I’m against gratuitous violence,” veteran screenwriter Sy Gomberg told his Hollywood colleagues at a conference in Santa Monica, Calif. “Violence where there is no remorse. … Violence that is made to look like fun, filmed in slow motion, lighted beautifully and adorned with glib lines and uncaring heroes.”
It used to be that concern over media images divided rather neatly along ideological lines. Conservatives worried about sex; liberals bemoaned violence. But in the days since the Supreme Court gave us all a First Amendment right to sell sex and violence, marketers have gotten so good at both that the line separating the two camps has blurred.
No longer is violence a tool in the hands of heroes to stop villains. No longer do films tell boys, like the old Kenny Rogers song, “Sometimes you got to fight when you’re a man.” Instead, violence itself has become pornographic, just as sex in X-rated flicks - ripped from any but the flimsiest narrative context, just a sensation to be experienced, savored for its own sake. And since, with violence as with sex, familiarity breeds boredom, the dosage must be constantly raised to give the ever-more-jaded viewer the same explosive high. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, heaven knows, everything blows up.
In Florida, courts are trying to figure out what to do with a new state law that fines video arcade owners who let anyone under 18 enter a room containing violent video games. In White Plains, N.Y., the city council is considering banning all video arcades because they fear the courts won’t allow them to regulate the content of video games. “It is an infringement of speech,” Linda Berns, executive director of the Westchester chapter of the NYCLU, told the Journal News. “We realize their aim is worthy but that is a free-speech right just like hate speech.”
Oh, really? We’ve heard this argument repeated so often that we don’t often recognize how peculiar it is. Mortal Kombat is a form of speech? Is Monopoly also a form of speech? If commercial games are forms of speech, absolutely protected from regulation, what about other forms of recreation?
Do we have a First Amendment right to ride bicycles or motorcycles without helmets? If Marlboro stamped the American flag around the edges of its cigarettes, would lighting up become a protected form of speech? Don’t laugh - courts have ruled naked dancing is speech. Why isn’t shooting up heroin, at least if you do it on stage and sell tickets?
Why is it, in other words, that First Amendment jurisprudence has reached the point that today’s courts have trouble distinguishing speech from a product?
The answer lies in the subtle conceptual transformation of the First Amendment. The vital right of free speech has been construed as the right to “self-expression.”
Free speech should be an absolute right in a democracy because if we are to govern ourselves, we need to be free to make arguments to each other about what needs to be done.
Self-expression, however, is a very different matter. Unlike speech, self-expression essentially is self-referential, not communicative; it is about whatever you want to do to make visible your own inner state. Self-expression certainly need not contain any appeal to reason.
It blurs the line between thought and emotion, between speech and action. Self-expression, unlike free speech, is an end in itself, a self-contained universe, not a means to an end.
“I wouldn’t know how to respond to a code or a consensus as to what’s responsible and what isn’t acceptable,” writer/director Brian (”Payback”) Helgeland responded to Gomberg, according to USA Today. “That is only for me to answer in my own mind.”
Eric Harris couldn’t have said it any better.