How to make Hollywood accountable

Take a lesson from the anti-tobacco lobby, says Gerry Bowler.

GERRY BOWLER
CW Culture Critic
Special to CW Life

Beginning in 1994 a group of American lawyers shifted strategies in their war against tobacco companies. Instead of suing on behalf of individuals who claimed to have become diseased through a life-time of smoking (a tactic that seldom found favour with juries), these lawyers launched suits to regain the money society had spent in increased health-care costs due to tobacco sales.

The result was a series of multi-billion dollar victories and important limits on the cigarette industry such as bans on outdoor advertising, cartoon characters like Joe Camel and “product placement” in movies. With this example before them, those interested in social change soon found other fat targets and lawsuits were rapidly filed against hand-gun manufacturers, health management organizations and drug companies.

In each case it was claimed that these corporations had damaged society as a whole with their products and reparations were in order.

A modest proposal

Using this logic, I modestly propose a new round of litigation, aimed this time at cultural polluters. It is now generally recognized that the entertainment industry affects people’s behaviour for the worse: that the violence, sleazy lifestyles, materialism, moral relativity and debased language portrayed in movies, popular music and television are copied by many of those who watch and listen.

In previous decades the greed and nostalgie de la boue of the media was controlled by self-censorship and production codes, but the decline of the studio system and a series of liberal court decisions allowed a flood of violent and tawdry works into the marketplace. Attempts to legislate against such dreck have proven no match for lawyers waving the Charter of Rights and arguing for the individual’s right to poison himself.

But entertainment moguls may find they have no magic shield against the social-harm argument. Just as city governments have sued weapons makers to recover the cost of treating gun-shot wounds, we may now envisage taking Hollywood to court for glorifying the use of violence and encouraging

its spread.

How pleasant it would be to see directors such as Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorcese in the dock trying to defend the ultra-violence they have profited from in movies such as Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs and GoodFellas. While their movies have raked in tens of millions of dollars the social cost of the thuggery they glorify goes well beyond medical-care expenditures, lost incomes and policing wages.

What price can be put on the thousands of lives lost yearly to weapons wielded by impressionable young people?

Sex as commodity

But violence is not the only social ill peddled by the entertainment industry: there are heavy consequences in their ceaseless consumerization of sexuality. Sex in advertising, sex in the soaps, sex in the movies, sex in popular music and rock videos—is it any wonder that youth has incorporated sex into their lifestyles at an increasingly early age?

Because Hollywood and record companies have pushed casual, extra-marital sex for years there should be no trouble in convincing a jury that a little pay-back to society is in order. How many billions of dollars would it take to recompense the taxpayer for the cost of treating sexually-transmitted diseases, providing abortions or child-care for fruit of the inevitable pregnancies or repairing damage to the families broken by adultery?

Since the greatest indicator of poverty is single parenthood we may also expect those celebrities who model the begetting of children outside of wedlock to bear some of the cost of this choice when it is imitated by the less privileged. Unmarried Hollywood starlets who boast of their pregnancies on The Tonight Show, NBA stars who have left a trail of bastard children from coast to coast or a Canadian prime minister (recently-deceased) who fathered an illegitimate child at age 70, might have been asked to shoulder some social responsibility for their actions.

Christian complaint

Christians who for years have suffered a social stigma from being associated with a religion that has been constantly maligned in popular entertainment might also wish to sue movie-makers. As well as the millions of dollars it would take to assuage our hurt feelings we could also ask the courts to demand that the portrayal of believers and their clergy be made more sympathetic in future film productions.

Instead of seeing ourselves portrayed as crazed serial killers (as in Seven or Cape Fear), narrow-minded bigots (The Church Lady, Footloose, Edward Scissorhands) or deluded fools (The Rapture, The Last Temptation of Christ), we will demand a return to the making of movies such as Going My Way, How Green Was My Valley or Ben-Hur.

Just as strip-mining companies are obliged to return the terrain they have ravaged to the state it was in before their pollution, it is not unfair to ask those who poison our culture to undo some of the damage they have wrought on a gullible public.

Gerry Bowler is a Winnipeg-based writer and historian. Contact him by email: gerrybowler@home.com