Film Makers Are Missing Their Social Purpose

In an ideal society, the right of independent thought constitutes the other half of a respectful social contract, for each of us has the right to demand that the community in which we live maintains high standards, proper aims and intelligent goals. Goals bind its members to it, through an appreciation of the opportunities that a just society offers them.

In my humble opinion, contemporary America seems to be sadly drifting away from such a reality. As I see it, the United States is in genuine danger of becoming the lost land, at least of my youthful dreams, and in some cases, almost certainly yours. There is disillusionment wafting through the heady winds of the American dream, as more and more people come to feel that they’ve had the experience but somehow, somewhere, missed the meaning of it all. It’s as if there was a vision gap; prosperity has bred contentment--but not enough to overcome this sense of drift.

As my recommitment to that part of the social contract for which the individual must accept responsibility, I offer my own beliefs.

I was brought up on and by the movies. They formed, far and away, the most powerful cultural, social and ethical impact on my formative years. These were the movies of the 1950s and, for the most part, they were American movies. I was just one among millions of young people around the world who basked in the benign, positive and powerful aura of post-Marshall Plan, concerned and responsible America.

The day that first I came to this country in 1963 was, in many ways, the most exciting of my life. Part of me was coming home. That’s how powerful the effect of American cinema had been on me. Far more than any other influence--more than school, more even than home--my attitudes, dreams, preconceptions and preconditions for life had been irreversibly shaped more than 5,000 miles away in a place called Hollywood.

I labor over all this in order to explain exactly why it hurts me that today’s movies so frequently sell themselves short, unable or unwilling to step up to the creative and ethical standards that the audience is entitled to expect of them. The medium is too powerful and too important an influence on the way we live and the way we see ourselves to be left solely to the tyranny of the box office or reduced to the sum of the lowest common denominator of public taste. This “public taste” or appetite being conditioned by a diet frequently capable only of producing emotional malnutrition! Movies are powerful. Good or bad, they tinker around inside your brain. They steal up on you in the darkness of the cinema to form or confirm social attitudes. They can help to create a healthy, informed, concerned and inquisitive society or, in the alternative, a negative, apathetic, ignorant one.

To an almost alarming degree, our political and emotional responses rest for their health in the quality and integrity of the present and future generation of film and television creators. Given this fact, there are only two personal madnesses that film makers must guard against. One is the belief that they can do everything and the other is the belief that they can do nothing. The former is arrogant in the extreme. But the latter is plainly irresponsible and unacceptable.

I remain entirely convinced of the law of cause and effect. I also firmly suggest that the images of the film maker are responsible, frighteningly responsible, for the attitudes and behavior of the young and overly impressionable. And exactly in that regard, I ask when and where do we decide to join and become part of that circle? Or do we just stay outside, helplessly watching and claiming, spuriously, no responsibility?

Artists and those who work with them have a considerable moral responsibility to carefully select projects that attune themselves to the needs of their audience, projects that offer them a sense of values at the very least. For if our work has been good, our audience will leave the cinema with maybe a new set of notions that will leave them freer, and better able to cope with the world they live in.