Violence for Fun & Profit
Larner, Jeremy
I wonder how we incorporate the images we receive through the media. Do we take them as fact, believe what we see? Or if not, how do we use what we don't literally believe? The question is raised...
...One answer for this viewer is the BBC serial, The Singing Detective, written by Dennis Potter...
...For in this revised version of the Philadelphia story, there is no movement for change working in Mississippi—only a battle between the Ku Klux Klan and the FBI...
...But he's worse: going much too far, he accepts no praise, love or success, compulsively digging to destroy every belief or excuse he or anyone else might offer for happiness in a world as hopelessly corrupt as he can't help seeing and proving it is...
...Though the civil rights movement did not eradicate all the consequences of slavery and racism, it changed the position of black people in American society...
...The prison terms were light and the triumph of justice minimal—yet what went on in the South that summer was part of a nonviolent movement, led by brave and assertive Southern blacks, that within a few years succeeded in integrating schools and public facilities, registering black voters and electing black officials, enforcing old laws and enacting new ones...
...Why is history revised this way...
...Now, in Mississippi Burning, the overplay of vigilante violence falsifies the history of the struggle in the South...
...This is a lot to think about—and too much to describe and reconstruct here...
...Violence, as Rap Brown once said, is as American as cherry pie...
...He escapes by exploding into brilliant dancing, transforming mobs from thugs into chorus-boys, with himself as the outsider-turnedleader who dances through a thousand tough-guy poses and choreographed motions of jabbing, kicking, and slashing...
...As with West, there is no purgation...
...270 • DISSENT...
...In the Spring 1965 Dissent, I described how Malcolm X taunted teenage black civil rights workers from McComb, Mississippi, then visiting New York...
...One movie that transcends nothing is Talk Radio, to me the bravest, most controlled and disturbing of Oliver Stone's films, but for most reviewers, too tough a pill to swallow...
...Despite or because of his own efforts, he too is a star, a marketable commodity, about to move into a national hookup, whose increasing notoriety creates in himself feelings of self-disgust and powerlessness...
...The subject is the torment of the human soul, the pain with which consciousness seeks to redeem itself...
...they rightly do not like to see their counterparts portrayed as trembling on the sidelines—and many of the younger ones can't imagine not firing back...
...There is a sensibility at work tuned in to the desperation and vulgarity of the lonely American night caller...
...Hit me," he says—he wants everyone to be heard, and he thinks then he will have nothing to fear...
...his real life in the hospital, where death and pain and therapy and a nasty wife intrude...
...The focus of the story is not the battle to achieve rights, but a fatuous running argument between a priggish FBI chief (Willem Dafoe) who wants to stick to the letter of the law, and a down-home ex-sheriff agent (Gene Hackman) who wants to fight fire with fire...
...Never mind that there were no black agents in the field at the time . . . or that in real life it was reward money that got the crucial testimony...
...I tell you what you are," says the radio host...
...The episodes intertwine his memories of a wrenching childhood during World War II...
...And he's right: He is powerless to modify the voices he evokes from the night around him, or the commercial powers that seek to exploit his substanceless fame...
...Violence indeed is not the subject of The Singing Detective, neither latent nor overt...
...The secret glory of such movies is the violence itself: the thrill of genial Gene Hackman suddenly grabbing the redneck murderer's balls...
...The question is raised in new forms by recent cultural products...
...The difference is that he is somehow lovable...
...his fevered hallucinations of a dance of death going on around him...
...Through most of the six-hour story he cannot move or write...
...The odor of violence is the commercial additive used to sell our politicians, our foreign policy, our media heroes, and our culture products...
...The irony of the movie is that Dallas radio listeners love our hero, or love to hate him...
...They had given up their manhood, he said, by the way they responded to violence...
...And when there is violence, the violence is stupid and awful, from the careless word to the wounded child to the idiotic murders of politics and fiction...
...I wonder, too, what millions of teens and subteens dream about when they see the highly creative videos of Michael Jackson...
...That subject may not make big box-office, or send celebrities to the edge of the cardboard cliff where they stand above us, but let us trust it is a subject that will not die...
...While urban violence and anomie grow more extreme, politicians moralize and Michael Jackson creates the excitement of imaginary challenges and escapes...
...In his videos he is in constant danger—from bullies, gangsters or fans...
...The movies and videos I have discussed here evoke a world of false extremes and violent glamour that is hard to feel at home in...
...Maybe my hypothetical young viewer would gather that a kind of war was fought in the South, where the bad guys lit torches, the good guys grabbed groins, and the black people hid...
...In 1964 near Philadelphia, Mississippi, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, three young civil rights workers, two whites and a black, canvassing in behalf of "Freedom Summer," were killed by sheriff's deputies, abetted by the sheriff himself...
...Some of the killers were convicted, not of murder in state courts, but of obstructing civil rights in federal courts...
...and a detective story he writes in his head, where the betrayal and fear that have overwhelmed his life are—just barely—transformed into a scary, creepy, mock-sentimental thriller...
...Because Hollywood believes not enough people, both here and abroad, will pay to see a movie about suffering and politics, but the upright cop/brash cop fighting buddies formula can be sold in any bottle...
...I have to, I have no choice...
...From a tower in Dallas, he summons loose Nazis, rapists, and drug heads out from under the rocks and gives them no quarter...
...the colorful blossoms of 268 • DISSENT Culture Notes fire as one Negro church or house is torched every five minutes throughout the picture...
...Where can one find some kind of human story-telling that does not involve physical or spiritual maiming...
...Hackman, an always endearing tough guy, has the winning twinkle in his eye and the better part...
...Even his choice of filming sacrifices the sight of Jackson's marvelous footwork for the stylized gesture or the atmosphere of the almost-out-of-control mob...
...So I wonder what a young person seeing this movie thinks about the civil rights movement—say, a young black person, perhaps from a neighborhood where drug runners do drive-by killings with NRA-sanctioned automatic weapons...
...Never mind that J. Edgar Hoover was more interested in proving Martin Luther King a communist than in enforcing civil rights law—that FBI agents stood around making notes while demonstrators were brutalized in Birmingham, Selma, and elsewhere—that the Kennedys consistently sent federal marshals instead of the FBI to protect possible victims at key moments: no, in the film history, it's the FBI defending the rights of American citizens, while blacks pray, sing and run...
...The writer (named Philip Marlow) is a man who, like the talk-show host, pulls no punches in cutting down hypocrisy...
...The hero (and apparently main writer) of Talk Radio, is Eric Bogosian, playing a demented late-night radio host who can't hang up, can't stop talking, can't keep from trying to argue the haters and criminals of the world into submission...
...There is an embarrassment of rich imagination...
...And through what cultural medium in our country would a young person learn the principles, the methods—or the courage—of Martin Luther King and all those who put their lives on the line for freedom...
...He gets to sweet-talk a deputy's wife, grab a bad guy by the testicles, and send out for a special black agent who threatens to cut off the mayor's scrotum...
...There is room amid bitter struggles and suffering for touches of kindness and fellow-feeling, the occasional notion that there but for the grace of God go I, memories of warmth and fleeting decency among the nightmares...
...ParadoxiSPRING • 1989 • 269 Culture Notes cally, the hero of the story is another hateful man, a failed detective writer in the hospital with a maddening disease...
...But the movie itself has an ear that hears more than the voice of its star...
...His life, his wit, and his spirit are large...
...This is a jarring picture, like one of the toughest monologues of Lenny Bruce, uncompromisingly and brilliantly filmed and acted, offering the viewer no palliatives, nothing like the "letter to Grandma" voice-over which partly vitiated Stone's Platoon...
...The argument had a telling effect psychologically, though it proved to have no political application in this country—any more than Malcolm X was about to lead a guerrilla war in Mississippi...
...A public man is diminished unless he can establish that he won't back off from violence—a message that Michael Dukakis, for one, failed to get across...
...The talk-show host is a Christ-figure, like Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts: He soaks up the hatred around him, and is crucified for it...
...He's wrong about that, too...
...There is the irony of true sentiment that can only be expressed in mocking tirades and sentimental song...
...But he makes his point in an environment of constant menace—perhaps the same inner landscape his viewers, too, hope to transcend...
...Much that Bogosian says about life and thought in America is too unremittingly cruel to be true, yet he's a softy at heart...
...In Mississippi Burning, the skills of director Alan Parker and production designers Philip Harrison and Geoffrey Kirkland—who deftly recreate the shabby, homey feel of a run-down Southern small town—go to the service of one more movie where might makes right...
...Here is a slender young man with a beautiful high-pitched voice and a face that is reputed to have been whitened and feminized...
...Jackson sings, dances, and mugs his way through, because—on screen, at least—he's a magic person...
...Jackson's physical being seems to me an emblem of every sort of adolescent vulnerability...
...One leaves the theatre satisfied by the emotional logic but unstrung by the content...
...No wonder Mississippi Burning draws anger from black audiences...
...Of course racial crimes and discrimination continued, giving rise to the argument that black people would be better served by a violent movement...
...Violence is not fun, revenge is not glorious, death is not a special effect...
...I am grateful for its success on public television, which brought about a repeat showing this year...
...One can add to that the exposure of the star, who both portrays and becomes a target for the violence of his audience...
...We have to wonder about the outer environment from which this fantasy draws its power...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
