MOVIES

Motion pictures are one of the most pervasive contemporary technologies, and, since their invention, have been continuously engaged with ethical issues. From the beginning, movies have been accused of corrupting children and adults by communicating godless, overtly sexual, and perverted values. The result has been extensive attempts to control movie content. Even commentators who are against censorship have argued that, independent of any particular content, movies have a morally significant influence. Finally as a new technological medium, films have explored the ethical challenges of new technologies.

Background

In January 1894 inventor Thomas Edison filmed his assistant, Fred Ott, sneezing. Early proponents of the new medium soon began shooting the first fiction films, consisting of only a few scenes. The Great Train Robbery (1903) was a milestone, using montage and the point of view of the camera to excite and frighten the audience. By 1907 there were 1 million daily viewers of nickelodeons in the United States. In 1910 the nation had 10,000 movie theaters. Hull House reformer Jane Addams said that "what they [children] saw on the screen was directly and immediately transformed into action." Reverend Wilbur Crafts saw the early cinema as "offering trips to hell for a nickel" (Black 1994, pp. 6, 10). The Jazz Singer (1927) popularized the new technology of synchronized sound, allowing actors to speak and sing and writers to create more complex, morally nuanced, and provocative stories.

Later technological developments have not been quite as earthshaking as the addition of sound. Cinema-scope, a wide-screen color format introduced in 1953, brought audiences back to the movie theater by creating an experience television could not rival. 3-D films, another 1950s attempt to draw viewers from television, quickly became associated with schlock horror and science fiction efforts and was a mere technological detour rather than a lasting development. The huge-screen IMAX 3-D movies may represent a technological apex, but the use of digital video instead of film has been more significant in reducing costs of entry for small filmmakers in both the United States and abroad. The digitization of Hollywood films for distribution and projection also reduces costs and makes moviegoing more consistent, eliminating such memorable experiences as the scratchy print and film that breaks during the crucial scene.

Film has long served as a means of advancing scientific understanding, particularly by capturing events that occur too quickly or slowly for the human eye to see (a cheetah running or the growth of a flower), and by archiving scientific information. It has also popularized science to the masses, via such media as IMAX films shown in museums.

Censorship

Attempts to protect citizens by censoring the cinema began at the local level in the United States soon after the nationwide introduction of popular films; states and cities set up their own boards of censorship to determine what could be shown in local theaters. In Mutual Film Corp. v. Ohio Industrial Commission (1915), the Supreme Court denied First Amendment protection to movies, finding them to be "a business, pure and simple" and therefore not "part of the press" or "organs of public opinion" (Mutual Film Corp. v. Ohio Industrial Commission, p. 244).

In 1922 production companies launched a preemptive strike against increasingly pervasive state and local censorship by founding the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, headed by William Harrison Hays, former postmaster general and chairman of the Republican National Committee. That spring, more than 100 movie censorship bills had been introduced in the legislatures of thirty-seven states. Hays served as a buffer between the producers and public opinion. The studios wanted to police themselves so as to avoid more rigorous censorship from outside. The first Hays code prohibited profanity, nudity, drug trafficking, and white slavery, and urged good taste in presenting criminal behavior, sexual relations, and violence.

Compliance with the code was initially voluntary, and Hays frequently threatened public embarrassment as a means of persuading producers to follow his views. Soon enough, the owners of movie theaters would not show films without the seal of approval of the office, making the system mandatory for studios that hoped for national distribution. It was not until the 1950s that films, such as The Moon Is Blue (1953) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), began to be nationally distributed without the seal of the Hays office.

Early in the sound era, Hollywood moved to secure the rights to several popular but controversial novels by respected authors such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis, triggering an ethical debate as to whether movies are an art form, mirroring the world like novels, or have a special responsibility to function as "twentieth century morality plays" illustrating "proper behavior to the masses" (Black 1994, p. 39). The Hays office fought to prevent the studios from filming Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), released as a film of the same name in 1932, and Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931), filmed as The Story of Temple Drake (1933). Failing in these efforts, Hays's people successfully pushed the producers to tone the films down, delete controversial material, and add plot developments or commentary illustrating the negative consequences of antisocial behavior.

Until then movie censorship had been primarily a Protestant affair, but in 1930 the Catholic Church proposed its own movie code, which was adopted in large part by the Hays office (Walsh). The possibility of federal censorship of movies was looming. The Catholic-inspired revision of the code, taken literally, "forbade movies from ever questioning the veracity of contemporary moral and social standards" (Black 1994, p. 41). Producers including Jack Warner and Irving Thalberg rebelled. Movies, they said, are "one vast reflection of every image in the stream of contemporary life." As such, they should be able to present "any book, play or title which had gained wide attention" (Black 1994, p. 41). In 1934 the Hays office was once again reorganized, and code enforcement became much tougher.

The studios were often able to subvert the code by presenting glamorous gangsters and loose women, only to have them pay for their sins by dying at the end of the picture. The Nation magazine amusingly referred to this trend as "five reels of transgression, followed by one reel of retribution" (Black, p. 45). The Hayes office intervened in the making of popular gangster films such as Scarface (1932), ensuring that the protagonist would die cravenly, not bravely as he did the original script.

Propaganda

During the 1940s, Hollywood and the government entered into partnership for the first time. The Office of War Information asked all filmmakers to consider seven key questions regarding movies made during wartime. The first and most important was, Will this picture help win the war? (Basinger 1998). Hollywood responded enthusiastically with movies calculated to encourage and reinforce patriotic feelings, and engender contempt and hatred for the enemy—in effect, political advertising or propaganda.

An interesting feature of these movies is that they represent the first time Hollywood had both an opportunity and incentive to represent the diversity of American society. Most portrayed a squad or other military group "made up of a mixture of ethnic and geographic types, most commonly including an Italian, a Jew, a cynical complainer from Brooklyn, a sharpshooter from the mountains, a Midwesterner (nicknamed by his state, Iowa or Dakota), and a character who must be initiated in some way (a newcomer without battle experience) and/or who will provide a commentary on the action as it occurs (newspaperman, letter writer, author, or professor)" (Basinger 1998).

The Hays Office nevertheless continued to be an important force in Hollywood into the 1950s, a period during which congressional investigations into communism exerted significant influence over the content of American movies. The Hollywood Ten, directors and screenwriters who went to prison for refusing to name names, and many other writers, directors, and actors saw their careers ruined or, at best, put on hold for many years until the atmosphere changed. Many blacklisted writers continued to work under pen names or through fronts (Navasky 1991). Most Hollywood films stayed even more resolutely away from subject matter which could be construed as political; the 1950s was the era of the uncontroversial, extremely traditional, family-centered romance or comedy.

Hollywood, in a second, smaller collaboration with the government, also produced a number of overt propaganda films including I Married a Communist (1950), IWas a Communist for the FBI (1951), and My Son John (1952).

Ratings for Consumer Choice

One important development during the 1950s was the Supreme Court's reversal of the almost forty-year-old decision in Mutual Film Corp. v. Ohio Industrial Commission. In the case of Joseph Burstyn Corp. v. Williams (1952), the Court granted movies full First Amendment protection. Weakened by new legal protections against state and federal censorship and overwhelmed by the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, the Hays office was finally discontinued in 1966 and replaced by a new ratings system.

Under the new system, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) assigned an X, R, M or G to every movie. X meant the content of the film was highly sexual or violent; R indicated that the film should be restricted to viewers above a certain age; M advised that the film was appropriate only for mature audiences; and G signified that the film was approved for all audiences. Minors (under 17) could not attend X-rated films, and could only see R-rated ones if accompanied by an adult. In 2005 the revised rating system consists of NC-17 (over 17 years old only); R (under 17 years old only if accompanied by a parent or guardian); PG-13 (may not be appropriate for viewers under 13); PG (parental guidance suggested); and G (general audiences).

From the start, opponents contended that the ratings system was biased: Sexually explicit movies tended to get an X-rating, whereas extremely violent ones frequently received only an R, suggesting a cultural acceptance of violence and disapproval of sex. The ratings system has also been described as a mechanism of political control by the major studios that participate in it. "It's no coincidence that the films given Xs and NC-17s over the years have tended to come from independents, minorities, foreign filmmakers, and women—those outside the fold of the seven major studios who are members of the MPAA" (Keough 1999 Internet site).

Influence of the Medium

Since the demise of the Hays office, films have become far more explicit than they were, routinely showing nudity, simulated sex, and increasingly inventive forms of graphic violence (while earning nothing more restrictive than R ratings). F. Miguel Valenti notes that violence and sex sell tickets. An epigraph frequently quoted in film criticism, and usually attributed to Jean-Luc Godard, holds that all that is needed for a movie is a gun and a girl. The debate about whether movies promote violence, immoral or unsafe sexual behavior, or other undesirable acts continues. But some film industry representatives and many consumers deny that movies are a medium of moral expression.

In fact, all films communicate moral ideas, simply by telling stories: ideas about the propriety of certain kinds of social behavior, including sexual and romantic acts, truthfulness and lying, the acceptability of violence; and the mutual rights and responsibilities of various social groups, including wealthy and poor, or police and citizens. Revenge movies, including many Westerns, thrillers, and cop films, show that it is sometimes acceptable to take the law into one's own hands. Many films communicate the idea that those in law enforcement cannot fight crime effectively without disregarding the strictures of the U.S. Constitution.

Thrillers promote a jaundiced or even fearful view of the world. "[T]hey portray a world in which crime, deceit, avarice, intrigue and betrayal are the norm rather than the exception, a film noir world even grimmer than our grimmest perception of daily life" (Dickstein 1981, p. 49). These films may promote "mean world" syndrome, "the feeling instilled in viewers that they live in a dangerous environment" (Valenti 2000, p.
14). However the underlying moral structure renders these films entertaining to audiences. "It is the exposition of moral significance that keeps the audience watching, not the quantity and quality of pyrotechnics on the screen" (Hicks 1995, pp. 106–108).

Peter Bogdanovich, director of The Last Picture Show (1971), believes that movies have a profound influence on behavior: "The trouble with portraying any way of life on the screen is that there cannot fail to be an inherent glorification of it, no matter how seamy" (Valenti 2000, Introduction). By contrast, film critic Judith Crist believes that movies have too long a lead time to have much of an influence on American popular culture; because it takes three to five years to make one, "it simply can't be that movies set patterns. They reflect our society" (Thayer 1980, p. 49).

Films aimed at juvenile audiences are widely thought to have a special responsibility to communicate socially acceptable values. Analee R. Ward notes that writers and animators at The Walt Disney Company are aware of their role in forming children's values, but have blind spots. "The role of a female in The Lion King is largely that which is associated with love, either romantic or motherly" (Ward 2002, p. 127). She notes possible racism in the portrayal of the hyenas as jive-talking blacks, and homosexual stereotypes in the behavior and mannerisms of the villain, Scar.

Others argue that by giving in to self-censorship, filmmakers often make bland, uninteresting movies. Pediatrician Perri Klass observed that "[I]f children's entertainment is purged of the powerful, we risk homogeneity, predictability and boredom, and we deprive children of any real understanding of the cathartic and emotional potentials of narrative" (Ward 2002, p. 29). Carter Burwell, writing about adult movies, has similarly said that "[I]f people's buttons are pressed in completely predictable fashion, you're depriving them of the opportunities to have novel and perhaps enlightening experiences" (Valenti 2000, p. 36).

Some critics have noted that movies give a distorted view of historical events. Stephen Fjellman wrote, "What Disney does, perhaps, is kill the idea of history by presenting it as entertainment" (Ward 2002,
p. 117). Historian Mark Carnes said that films "make the past speak to us with ... complete crystal clarity, so that it speaks to our time. Of course, historians, when they go to the past, don't find that clarity. They find a muted voice in a different language echoing through vast expanse of time" (Public Broadcasting System 1995).

The most provocative criticism, however, is that independent of any particular content, motion pictures have distinctive social and cultural effects that call for ethical assessment. For instance, media analyst Marshall McLuhan's thesis that the medium is the message might suggest that because film deals with rich visuals and sounds disembedded from their full physical contexts, it cannot help but make any violence it depicts somewhat attractive. Moreover motion pictures would also seem to have a strong tendency to induce in those who sit in a dark room in front of a large screen the kind of dreamy rootlessness described in Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer (1961). Remarkably, however, there has been little scientific research on the psychological impact of movie watching—certainly nothing like the degree of empirical research devoted to the psychological influence of television.

Movies Examining Science and Technology

From the silent days to the era of huge screens and Dolby sound, films tell stories about new technologies, often in a fantasy or science fiction context. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) portrayed a world in which evil rulers used technology to manipulate workers, and in which a woman was impersonated by an evil robot doppelganger. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) examined the alienation caused by automation. These movies raised the central questions considered by later efforts: What happens when powerful technology evades human control, and what is human as opposed to other (Telotte 2001).

The apocalyptic genre (Shapiro 2002) which began in the 1950s with movies such as Godzilla (1954), Them (1954), and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) was based on the premise that there are some things man was not meant to know. Typically the threat in these movies was a mutant created by radiation from an atomic blast. The Alien films (originating in 1979) similarly show humans trying to manipulate forces (the rapacious aliens) that quickly evade their control, with deadly results. The Terminator series (originating in 1984) recapitulates a theme, first expressed in movies such as 2001 (1968), The Demon Seed (1977), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), Westworld (1973), and War Games (1983), in which computers become powerful enough to destroy humankind. More subtle thrillers such as Minority Report (2002) portray a future in which humans are punished for overreliance on technology, which never works exactly as planned (the pre-cogs' infallible view of the future can be manipulated).

For McLuhan the popularity of techno-horror and vampire movies reflects more than the simple dominance of science and technology in contemporary culture. Instead they are a collective unconscious articulation of the sense in electronic culture of feeling taken over by technology. "The Exorcist [1973] is an account of how it feels to live in the electric age, how it feels to be completely taken over by alien forces and hidden powers" (McLuhan 2004).

But perhaps it is Blade Runner (1982) that, though a flawed movie, asks the most interesting question: In a world of machines that can imitate human behavior, even to the point of being indistinguishable from people, how is human redefined? Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), on which the movie was based, answered that the irreducible difference is that humans feel compassion, and machines do not. This powerful idea was drowned out in the movie's pyrotechnics, which transformed it into a more clichéd Hollywood story about eliminating the other.

The fact that so many of these films, which use cutting edge technologies to create their special effects, take an antitechnology stance may be partly due to the requirements of storytelling. A screenplay involves a threat to the protagonist that must be overcome. Though there have always been some films in which a misunderstood hero champions an initially disregarded technology (1930s and 1940s films about inventors and medical innovators; Lorenzo's Oil (1992) is a more recent example), audiences prefer stories with more at stake. Technology provides weapons for really frightening villains, or it may actually play the role of the evil adversary. Susan Sontag says that science fiction films are "fundamentally about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art," but which involves an "extreme moral simplification" (Sontag 1986, pp. 213–215).

International Perspectives

The highly influential cinemas of other nations have faced similar ethical challenges. The French New Wave, which introduced a new kind of moral storytelling, set a youth ethic against the morality of an older generation portrayed as hidebound and hypocritical (Marie). New Wave films such as Breathless (1960) and The 400 Blows (1959) glorified rebels, outsiders, and gangsters. The New Wave continues to resound, almost fifty years later, in the films of contemporary American auteurs including Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.

Whereas the films of all nations struggle with some degree of government censorship, Soviet cinema developed in an environment in which dissent could mean exile, imprisonment, or even death. Soviet film artists nonetheless evaded censorship by telling stories set in past centuries, sometimes based on the unassailable works of pre-Soviet masters such as Tolstoy and Chekhov, or through movies, such as Solaris (1974), based on a novel that is so heavily coded that it escaped the criticism of simpleminded censors. During the upbeat socialism of the Brezhnev era, Soviet films enjoyed a new freedom to portray humans as "inwardly torn by doubt, failing to accomplish anything in life other than the destruction of that which [they] held dear" (Gillespie 2003, p. 18). In the early-twenty-first century, Russian filmmakers, deprived of their former political and social context, are struggling to create a new identity based on shared cultural values and the country's "awesome historical legacy" (Gillespie 2003, p. 122).

Unfamiliar to most Americans and Europeans, India has developed its own powerful cinematic tradition of leisurely told romance and suspense stories interspersed with musical numbers. Colloquially known as Bollywood, the Indian film industry produces 800 films per year, which are shown in 13,000 cinemas and average 11 million viewers daily nationwide. Vijay Mishra notes that Bollywood cinema knits together a widely dispersed Indian diaspora in Western Europe and North America. Expatriate Indians, who through hard work have joined the comfortable middle classes of their adopted countries, inhabit "the desired space of wealth and luxury that gets endorsed, in a displaced form, by Indian cinema itself" (Mishra, p. 236). Bollywood has been "crucial in bringing the 'homeland' into the diaspora ... creating a culture of imaginary solidarity" reaching across India's numerous ethnic groups (Mishra,
p. 237).

Conclusion

Movies are simultaneously a reflection of human life and a distraction from it. As such, they are intimately involved with ethics, drawing from and influencing people's views. It is unlikely that any extensive history of the events, mood, or ethics of any modern era will be written without reference to movies of that period.

JONATHAN WALLACE

SEE ALSO Entertainment;Information Ethics;Popular Culture;Science, Technology, and Literature;Special Effects;Technocomics;Violence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Dickstein, Morris. (1981). "The Morality of Thrillers." American Film July–August: 49–52, 67–69

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Hicks, Neill D. (1995). "'Fill Your Hand, You Son of a Bitch': The Underlying Morality of Action Adventure Films." Creative Screenwriting 2(4): 106–108.

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Mishra, Vijay. (2002). Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. New York: Routledge.

Mitchell, Charles P. (2001). A Guide to Apocalyptic Cinema. London: Greenwood Press.

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Navasky, Victor S. (1991). Naming Names. New York: Penguin Books.

Shapiro, Jerome F. (2002). Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film. London: Routledge.

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Telotte, J. P. (2001). The Science Fiction Film. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Thayer, Lee, ed. (1980). Ethics, Morality and the Media: Reflections on American Culture. New York: Hastings House.

Valenti, F. Miguel. (2000). More Than a Movie: Ethics in Entertainment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Walsh, Frank. (1996). Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ward, Analee R. (2002). Mouse Morality: The Rhetoric of Disney Animated Film. Austin: University of Texas Press.

INTERNET RESOURCES

Basinger, Jeanine. (1998). "Translating War: The Combat Film Genre and Saving Private Ryan." American Historical Association. Available from http://www.theaha.org/Perspectives/issues/1998/9810/9810FIL.CFM. Published in Perspectives Online: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, October 1998.

Motion Picture Association of America. "Voluntary Movie Rating System." Available from http://www.mpaa.org/movieratings/.

"The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930." Artsreformation.com. Available from http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html.

Public Broadcasting System. (1995). "Interview with David Gergen and Mark Carnes, December 26, 1995." Public Broadcasting System. Available from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/carnes_12-26.html.

"Red Scare Filmography." The All Powers Project. http://www.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/AllPowers/film.html.