Best regards, mg
3. Is / Was This Film Good For Me?
I’m not looking for a facile answer here. Some disturbing films may have been very thought provoking. Sometimes a film that probably has no truly social redeeming value may have escapist value. A Simple Plan is a disturbing film, but to my mind provides a telling parable about what Hannah Arendt calls the "banality of evil." Looked at that way, it becomes a thought provoking film. On the other hand, as a college student I looked forward to the probability of a James Bond film coming out during Fall Semester finals. That is pure escapism.
I don’t think we need to resolve the conflict about entertainment that has been around at least since the time of Plato and Aristotle. Plato thought that a "good" story should have social worth. Aristotle was more tolerant of the story that merely entertained. This book and course emphasize looking for the worth in given films, but hopes never to lose sight of the expectation that film provide a variety of ways of engrossing and entertaining their audience.
My presumption in modifying Socrates to say that the unexamined film was not worth watching, is to suggest that having watched virtually any film becomes valuable when it is also an exercise in the difficult task of knowing good from evil. My sharp criticism of most popular film criticism is that it tends to confine its interests to whether the film was entertaining and whether it was technically well done. The explicit and implicit ideas of the film should also be fodder for thought.
I ordinarily start my film classes with a consideration of John Milton’s Areopagitica. I still consider it to be the definitive Christian perspective on censorship. Milton argues against censorship for adults (although he would undoubtedly be shocked by what is now available).
Milton says that, "good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil." The task is to sort out the good from the evil. Milton admires the person who takes on the task and makes the distinctions. He says, "He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian." For Milton anyone who shrinks from the quest is faint hearted. He says, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary." My take on this is that "good" film study is a heroic, and even Christian quest.
This does not, however, mean that a steady diet of analyzing films that exploit sex and violence is likely to be healthy. I am always disturbed when students tell me they loved A Clockwork Orange and saw it repeatedly. I think that it is a most important film, a film that, among other things, warns us about desensitization to violence. I can only bear to re-watch this film after a few years have passed. The film itself is a study on how popular culture contributes to the social mayhem. The American Psychological Association offers conclusive research that a steady diet of television and movies that exploit sex and violence are desensitizing and do influence the amount of sexual and other violent crimes.
The Biblical admonition is to be as innocent as a lamb and as sly as a snake. Those protected from real and reel world realities tend to leave themselves defenseless against those realities. But those who have been inured to the true consequences of "evil" have undoubtedly missed the meaning of life.
I’ll sometimes indulge myself in a mindless film, but I try not to kid myself. I want my overall choice of films-to-see to represent who I am, including the occasional film to remind me of the joys of pure entertainment, and the occasional film outside my comfort level to keep my ability to sort the good from the bad finely honed.