It could probably have been the music of most other otherwise forgettable composers of light theater music so it being von Suppé is unimportant as is the music, itself. As are the cartoons and crap movies which are a commercial product though their persistence in the collective memory of so many millions of people means something. The movies and cartoons had that effect, information from them persists in the memories of those who watched them, though that information probably doesn't have much of an effect on how people see themselves and imagine themselves. Not all information taken in so casually has the same, innocuous, effect.
The Woody Allan movie Play It Again Sam is light entertainment, too, but less light and its theme deals with the movies' stronger effects in reality. The movie has a theme of how the Woody Allan character, "Allan" is influenced by his idea of admirable manliness, formed by watching Humphrey Bogart movies, and it has a decidedly mixed result in his relationships. I used to think Woody Allen movies were totally imaginary though his own life proved that wasn't necessarily the case. some of them are horrifically biographical.
I've often pointed out the double-game played by the entertainment media, that, when it is in their interest, defending the negative content, violence, violent sex, encouraging inequality, encouraging addiction, they claim that their product is entirely innocuous, that they have no effect on the behavior of those who watch movies, TV shows, play video games.
But the same people who claim their product has no effect on how people act make a lot of money by selling advertising time, product placement and other opportunities of putting other information in the very same movies and TV shows and media because they and the companies paying them know that their opportunistic claims of media having no effect is a convenient lie. Buying is a real life action, in real life, advertising has a very real life effect in motivating that action which is all important to business and to show business. Their lie which is backed up with pseudo-social-science, probably by those with credentials in the pay of the media industry or which is also conducted by people whose ideological preference is in line with that load of bullshit. Science, alleviated by convention from moral consideration, is very often for sale, it is one of the more lucrative possibilities in prostitution. Especially in the social sciences.
One influence of Humphrey Bogart in the movies that is more generally admitted, even by some social science, is that he was one of many, many Hollywood stars who were part of product placement whenever he lit up a cigarette, especially when he and Lauren Bacall sexily lit up together.
The tobacco industry's product placement campaign started about as soon as the commercial industry started and it continues right down till now. It wasn't only within the movies, themselves, though that is why there is so much smoking in the movies, the shared interest between the movie idustry and the tobacco industry had its most explicit expression in ads like this one:
I think that Bogart wasn't primarily associated with cigars but with cigarettes gives this ad even more evidentiary value in showing what a huge lie the claim that the movies don't have a strong effect on peoples' behavior is known by those who say it to be a lie. If they didn't have a high level of confidence that what people see in the movies will cause them to become addicted to their addictive products, they wouldn't spend so much money on that effort. They knew from well before the first movie was made that tobacco was addictive. Their campaign to produce addicts was as intentional as that of the Sacklers to create opioid addicts, even knowing something of the effect on the death rate that would have.
Yet the law, the Supreme Court, lower courts, the lawyers of the civil liberties industry (where they get their money would probably tell a very similar tale) and the quasi-journalistic flacks writing for everything from the right-wing tabloid sewer of journalism to the allegedly higher venues like the Village Voice repeat and repeat the lie that what people see and take in as entertainment is innocuous for purposes of responsibility to the world at large.
This is a long introduction to another excerpt from Harold R. Johnson's book, Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (And Yours) about the responsibility that entertainment media has, but which they refuse to accept, for either getting people to choose to drink or to not drink. After a paragraph in which he outlines the practice among traditional hunter-gatherer communities to send out scouts to see where the band should go next, he says:
Today's society is much the same. We are constantly moving - we are advancing, becoming. Yet, many of our leaders don't seem to be leading. It seems that the politician looks at the polls and figures out in which direction the people are headed, and then runs out front and pretends to be leading.
I'm going to break in here and again to point out that a lot of where the people are going - where politicians are forced to go - is influenced by the same mass media discussed above.
I have no doubt that the real reason the United States can't address the mass shooting plague is the selling of violence and paranoia, the mythic West - Johnson addresses the impact of such racist mythology about First People in North America as one of the major components of alcoholism among his People - the Jim Crow conception of racism, hatred of Arabs, antisemtism, etc.
I would bet that in just about every case the almost always men who murder have been motivated in part by what they saw in movies, on TV shows, in video games. I would bet that a lot of the cops who murder Black People watch C.O.P.S. or other shows like that, I'll bet more than a few of them found Dirty Harry to be an inspiration. The effect that that same diet of Hollywood violence and racism and regional resentment has on the general population is certainly there.
And it probably accounts for a huge part of the descent into neo-fascism in the United States and abroad, perhaps more so than peoples' daily lives that might present them with the problems they're frustrated with and their reasons to vote for fascist strong men. It's no accident that Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are media creations. It would be interesting to see how many of those who become fascist strong men who rise to power came from the media, entertainment, the pro-wrestling equivalent of hate-talk radio and TV.
The thinkers have stopped talking to the people.[*] The thinkers in this society are the scientists and the academics. They tend to talk only to themselves, and have even created complex language that only they understand. The jargon created by each separate field of study has become so extreme that even a scientist or academic from a related field often cannot understand what is being said.
Breaking in again, what better example of that is there than the legal profession, in which the legal scholars and the elite members of high courts babble in language designed to not be understood by the lay public and which is often little more than an excuse for the highest reaches of that on Supreme Courts to produce injustice on behalf of the wealthy, on behalf of industrial and commercial interests, for those ideological positions that serve the interests of billionaires and millionaires, media corporations being a particularly good way to make a lot of money. And, then, in a program of intellectual incestuous inbreeding, take the language they come up with to serve the "personhood" of corporations, the "free speech" rights of those corporate persons they invented, the "equal rights" of money (in which dollars have already been magically turned into "speech") and other such legal slight of hand to give those very things as excuses for giving more freedom to plunder and harm in the language of such "civil liberty". All without any sense of responsibility for the consequences of their rulings. It's no wonder that politicians who, unlike the judges and "justices" have to be elected are cowards instead of leaders of people gulled and corrupted by that media relieved of any and all responsibility.
There was a time when even conservative Republicans voted for gun control - and courts, ever increasingly, have overturned such efforts at leading us to a less homicidal world, using the first two amendments of the Constitution. If such responsible Republicans run for office, they are turned, by the media and gun industry propaganda - often through the same media, into non-politicians through losing elections, they don't even win primaries. That effect has turned the Republicans from a conservative party into a fascist party. It was the media freed by the "First Amendment" crowd that got them replaced by pathologically irresponsible fascists, many of those in Congress and running the country the creations of that same media. Donald Trump is all you need as an example of that.
The scouts today are the artists. We go out in our imagination and imagine the future and bring it back for the poeple in our books and our songs and our art. For example, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. In it, he predicted Big Brother and constant government surveillance. His predictions have come to pass in many ways. Look at the Edward Snowden affair and the recent Harper government's attempt to spy o its citizens, or the closed circuit TV networks set up in major cities like London and Chicago, which keep a close eye on us, watching. Big Brothers of all sorts are definitely out there. But yet, we do not live in the world that the character O'Brien describes as the "picture of the future" in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever."
The reason we do not live in the world Orwell predicted is because he predicted it. Every time the government infringes upon our privacy, we reference Big Brother and demand that the government stop because we know, thanks to Orwell and our artists, where that type of surveillance will lead.
I read that and, especially, the quote from Orwell and it's clear to me, what he was imagining is personified by Trump, by Putin, by Duterte, by so many of the rising class of neo-fascists brought to us through the mass media. What Orwell described is Trump's gangster-political MO. And it is supported by FOX and other mass media which is ever more corrupting the minds of people to prepare them to accept Trumps. I disagree with Harold Johnson about how close we have gotten to Orwell only to agree with his larger point in this, the responsibility of those in the media, artists, in both avoiding the catastrophic future which the media of the past century has created.
Today, we seem to be short of good scouts. Many of the artists don't seem to realize their role: to protect us, to go out as a scout to warn us what is coming. If the artists imagine only violence and sex, we cannot complain if we live in a very violent and pornographic society. If, in all our stories, in our movies and television shows, we always imagine alcohol as a central part of our social structure, we cannot complain if everyone around us is drunk. This is what we have imagined for the people. These are the stories we've given them to live with.
* How can an academic-intellectual culture that has rejected the reality of moral responsibility, of morality, drowning in the universal acid of materialistic-scientism be expected to care about The People, to feel any sense of moral obligation to The People and their welfare or well being or everything up to and including the whole biosphere?
What we are seeing is a direct consequence of the secular regime imagined by the 18th and 19th century materialists, including those who wrote the Constitution of the United States. One of the unacknowledged consequences of inventing science as an area of thought freed of moral consideration is that scientism, materialism, will always tend to ever increasing amorality in which only personal enrichment and empowerment are meaningful. That exemption from morality given to scientists and materialistic philosphical clap trap was only ever safe the extent to which it was not the dominant force in societies and cultures. Mary Shelley may have been on to something, whoever it was who first imagined the Faust story definitely was. As was the author of Genesis 2:4-3:24
I'd like to know where an intellectual, artistic culture which buys into the amorality of scientistic materialism is to find that moral responsibility. Where a general culture which has been taught and instructed in that amoral scientistic materialism is supposed to find those things necessary to avoid turning into Orwell's nightmare future. See Also: Jack Levine's statement on modernism on the masthead of this page.
"I would bet that in just about every case the almost always men who murder have been motivated in part by what they saw in movies, on TV shows, in video games. I would bet that a lot of the cops who murder Black People watch C.O.P.S. or other shows like that, I'll bet more than a few of them found Dirty Harry to be an inspiration. The effect that that same diet of Hollywood violence and racism and regional resentment has on the general population is certainly there."
ReplyDeleteYour intuitions are often empty and isolated.
To show how incredibly ignorant, racist and ridiculous you are, not once in your entire hand-wringing, crocodile-tear infested blubbering did you bring up hip-hop culture, with its glamorization of violence, excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol, or vain flaunting of wealth as a means of conveying your worth as a human being. Why? Hmmm, oh right, no white people to blame.
You're hung up on a movie made in the 1910s but have never mentioned the canonization of Tupac Shakur and Christopher "Notorious BIG" Wallace as maybe contributing to the problems of today. My brother worked as a paramedic on the West Side of Chicago. He treated children just in their teens who'd been stabbed and shot. People with half their face blown off. Overdoses. Children terrified to leave their houses and scared of him because he was white.
He didn't once think of 'Birth of a Nation' or 'Cops.'
And the only time faux-liberal Christians like yourself, neither hot nor cold, ever gave a damn about what he saw was when a white person was the perpetrator. Then those victims became causes for concern.
"Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless."
Trump? Right, what about Jack Phillips, the baker who explained that he didn't feel comfortable designing a cake for a gay couple because it was counter to his beliefs? Oh, yeah, they went and found some good-intentioned activist group and tried to destroy the man's livelihood by taking him to court. Find another baker and just get on with your wedding? No, of course not, they (and you - you clearly supported their actions) wanted to see him suffer! Because the law can be used as a sword as well as a shield!
You won't post this, I know, because you're a fucking hypocrite coward who can't answer my point that evil is evil, and not confined to any skin color, social status, sexual orientation or intention.
Trump is what you asked for, and it is only too bad the rest of us have to get him as well.
How many times do I have to advise you to search my archive? Here's something I wrote on Wednesday, June 20, 2018.
DeleteIn the case of some of the racists in the aspiring fascist regime of Donald Trump those outside of the group of concern to them and their supporters, some ill-defined group of white people, use can be made of those outsiders to prey on the racism of so many white people. The American media, other than the briefest of periods in the late 1960s and early 1970s,* has explicitly fed that racism, though at times presenting it as regional resentment and envy. The few and brief positive appearances of people of color, Black People, Latinos, People belonging to Indigenous nationalities, Asians in the media have been more than swamped by the racism flowing out of TVs and movie screens, hate-talk radio and to some extent even pop music. The promotion of evil characters of color has been so pervasive in the commercial media that it was the staple of what were supposed to be some kind of step forward, in blackspoitation movies**, in gangsta crap, and other such self-consuming mentalities promoted to Black People. I would certainly include boxing and football, in which mostly people of color do violence to each other for the entertainment of largely white audiences for the enrichment of mostly white owners. Those are our gladiatorial games in this re-run of the decadence of old Rome.
I think it's something similar to what was so well said by the late John Singleton in Boyz 'n the Hood
Furious Styles : Why is it that there is a gun shop on almost every corner in this community?
The Old Man : Why?
Furious Styles : I'll tell you why. For the same reason that there is a liquor store on almost every corner in the black community. Why? They want us to kill ourselves.
I can't remember when the first time I said that about "gangsta" rap and some who did the same thing in hip-hop, though hardly all hip-hop poet-musicians fall into that category. I believe it was Jesse Jackson who suggested that "gangsta" rap was promoted by white promoters for exactly that purpose.
You seem to be doing something like what was done to Black People with no connection, at all, with Louis Farrakhan, that they condemn him no matter how irrelevant the context. You claim that unless,in every case I "balance" such content with an exaggerated view condemning Black people, pretending that if I don't set up a false equivalence, that it negates what I said. Well, I won't play that racist game.