Brecht, McLuhan and movie violence

 

I’ve been working my way through the many episodes of How to Get Away with Murder on Netflix. It’s one of those productions that explores the dark, seamy side of the American policing, courts, and big money. I could criticize a few choices made in the writing, but somehow it drew me in like a fire, or a car crash, so horrifying that you can hardly look away.

The main plot involves a professor in an American law school who picks half a dozen students in her class to work with her in her law practice as a kind of work experience. She’s a cracker-jack defense attorney, but it turns out that her successes in the courtroom depend heavily on a strategy of win at any cost. Typically, the defense of a client begins with denial, then lying, then tampering with witnesses, then shifting the focus onto someone else and, finally, manipulating the jury with a convincing oration. As the plot develops, these tactics rub off on the students and it’s their progressive downfall that the plot follows.

How to Get Away with Murder raises some thought-provoking questions. If in a society, winning at all costs includes calculated deception, bribery and threat, how long does it take until the number that can be trusted dwindles to none? We all know how being lied to on trivial matters leads to mistrust on even weightier things. We also know that dishonesty, deception and its cousins are universal temptations because we all want to be bathed in the best light. But when the courts, law enforcement, governments and wealth are full of people who legitimize such strategies almost as a habit, what happens eventually to justice?

I’m following that up with a series called Start Up, which shares many of the characteristics of How to Get Away with Murder: internet hacking, copious gratuitous sex, graphic murder, and corruption in the halls of power and law enforcement. Assuming makers of film series respond to demand, I find the series troubling—assuming, of course—that this type of content is actually what's drawing the largest audiences.

I don’t want to be prudish, curmudgeonly. Like you, I’ve been too many times around the block for that. I occasionally ponder the meaning of passages like Matthew 15:11 (ESV) “… it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Is Jesus talking about eating and vomiting here? Are the person defiling and the one defiled the same person? Do we gradually become defilers by too much watching, reading material spewed out by defilers in love with money? “You are what you eat” also comes to mind, but I can’t find that passage in my Bible. I’m trying to remember, is that other saying, “Life reflects art” or is it “art reflects life?”

Bertold Brecht is quoted thus: “We have art in order not to die of the truth. Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.” I hesitate to call How to Get Away with Murder and Start Up art, but that we have these series to prevent us “dying of the truth” connotes  what? That art makes us recognize that our world could be a lot worse than it is? But here I’m wandering into the complex world of human psychology.

Marshall McLuhan coined the expression, “The medium is the message.” “McLuhan argued that modern electronic communications (including radio, television, films, and computers) would have far-reaching sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical consequences, to the point of actually altering the ways in which we experience the world.” 

Persons watching action movies and series like I’ve mentioned and doing little reading will come to understand the world differently from the person who gets her/his/their information from books and newspapers. The persons in the “Freedom Convoy” currently happening in Ottawa may have been influenced in the direction they’ve taken by getting their news from computers, social networks and Fox TV News, as opposed to the daily papers.

Which media have shaped those people protesting the protests? I wonder.

As regards the depiction of gratuitous—and generally adulterous or fornicative—sex at least once in every episode and generally contributing little or nothing to the plot, well, I don’t understand it except as porno-candy.

I was about 12, I think, when our country school took us all to a real movie in a real theatre in Rosthern. It was King Solomon’s Mines (1950 version) and I was already edgy when Stewart Granger pulled out a revolver and stuck it into the belly of a bad, fat man … and I ran out of the theatre. In an episode of Start Up, a corrupt cop kills his female partner with the cover of a toilet tank and sits down watching as the puddle of blood grows around her battered head.

I’ve said before that we all believe in censorship, we just draw our lines in the sand at different places. These lines change positions with time, but I hope against hope that the images of violence so freely depicted these days don’t so dominate the minds of impressionable youth that they end up finding them normative. 

I sometimes think we’re already seeing that happening.

Why did you--Brecht, McLuhan--die while we still needed you?