JSB: It Shall Not Pass

A few years ago I went to see the movie Red Dragon, the third installment in the Hannibal Lecter series starring Anthony Hopkins. Why did I go? I still ask myself that question.

Mainly, because I love Hopkins. And his Lecter in Silence of the Lambs is one of the all time great performances. Maybe I thought this would be another.

Big mistake. The movie was little more than a gore fest in fancy clothes. I should have known better.

But that is not why I relate this incident. Something even more disturbing than the movie itself unfolded in front of me.

Before the movie started I noticed a 6 year old girl. She waltzed into the theater with her parents, tub of popcorn in hand, chirpy voice yakking excitedly. When she took a seat ahead of mine, I almost leaned over to the parents to shout What are you thinking? But the father had a shaved head and tattoos, and I try to avoid dustups with such citizens.

Well, two hours of mayhem ensued. People stabbed, set on fire, tortured. Your average day at the office for serial killers. Every now and then I'd lean over and see the little girl with her eyes fixed to the screen. But when the bad guy (Ralph Fiennes) bites off the tongue of a screaming reporter, then stands up, mouth bloody, and spits out the offending organ, I knew beyond a doubt that real damage had been done.

How times have changed for movie going families. I remember going to the drive-in with my parents in the early 1960s. Back then, about the worst thing you'd see onscreen was Godzilla stomping through screaming crowds in Tokyo, or Frankie Avalon pretending to surf. On occasion my mom put her hand over my eyes to keep me from seeing something she deemed too scary.

Now we have kids watching slashers, rapists and cannibals because, presumably, Mommy can't be bothered with finding a baby-sitter, or Daddy is so clueless he doesn't see the difference between Disney and disemboweling.

After the movie, I waited outside the theater. I wanted to take a look at the happy trio as they emerged from this uplifting bloodbath. I wanted to glare at them, in fact. The little girl was being carried by the father. She was frozen. Her face was pale, her eyes wide. She looked like she was in shock.

I wept inside for what had just been done to her. What is being done to all of us. And I did not pay to see another R rated film after that.

Until recently, when I paid $8 (matinee price yet!) to sit through Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.

I like early Scorsese. When I was a film major in college, we had him come up and I got to spend some time with him. This was early in his career and he was the hot up-and-coming director (Mean Streets; Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore). Nice guy, too. I remember asking him if he liked Capra movies. “I love Capra,” he said.

Capra being one of my two favorite directors of all time (along with Hitchcock), I felt Scorsese was an immediate compadre.

He has made a couple of terrific films: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and After Hours are my two favorites. His so called masterpieces I’m not a fan of: Raging Bull and Goodfellas. These are both well made technically and the acting is great, but they were a little too steeped in unredeemed violence. By that I mean the violence existed for pretty much for its own sake. Yes, the films were about violent people, but I never felt Scorsese overlaid these portraits with some sort of robust moral vision.

With The Departed, that problem has come home to roost. This is a nihilistic film, the very kind of art John Gardner decried in his book On Moral Fiction. Gardner says the moral artist renders a vision of life as it ought to be. As opposed to the kind of art we have too much of these day, art that stares into the abyss, because it is fashionable, and never gets out.

Sadly, that's the kind of stuff we keep getting. The Departed is overlong, violent without purpose, and its use of street language so overripe as to be parody. Jack Nicholson’s in it doing…Jack Nicholson. That riff has gotten old, except in comedies (like Something’s Gotta Give, where self-parody is a virtue).

Also sadly, most critics have raved about The Departed. One notable exception is the terrific Armond White. You can read his review here.

The critical kudos disturb me. We are losing the ability to distinguish moral art from amoral or immoral art. Listen to this line from a major critic reviewing The Departed:
“The violence sickens, but the film seduces.”

Honestly, can you think of a more idiotic sentiment? Something that is sick “seduces”?

I wasn’t seduced. I did not like any of the characters (by the last third there is a smattering of sympathy for Leonardo DiCaprio, but by then it’s too late) and the vileness of many of the scenes just wore me down.

And, as if Screwtape himself were setting the reels in the control room, preceding the film was a long commercial for yet another installment in the American Pie franchise. It has this original premise about a bunch of hormone laced college guys in sweaty pursuit of busty blondes.

Haven't seen that one before, have we?

Oh, and if such fare is not your cup o noodles, you can always go see Saw III. It's the third in a series about a serial killer who tortures his victims before killing them in ever more grotesque ways. But since the victims are themselves "bad people," gee, it's not so heinous. As one reviewer put it, the movie "gives us that rare cinematic serial killer who may be more humane than most of his victims."

(Hey, I found it. A more idiotic sentiment than the one above. That didn't take long).

Our society is hacking and wheezing in an agony of slow death. And in no small part because so many of our artists are sticking with the immoral, staying in the abyss. Without the clarity of moral vision, souls are suffering real, demonstrable harm. I still wonder what's happened to that poor girl forced to see Red Dragon.

Writers, write moral fiction. I don't mean preachy or "moralizing." I don't mean sermons between book covers or screeds posing as stories.

I mean real, full blooded fiction with characters who jump off the page, but are vindicated by the moral vision of you, the artist. I mean fiction that shows, as Flannery O'Connor put it, "grace being offered." Or fiction that, in the words of my buddy Barbara Nicolosi, "makes the soul homesick for heaven."

You don't do this with on the nose jeremiads, like Ayn Rand. But you can do it in many other ways. Gardner himself wrote literary fiction of this type (read Grendel and weep). But so does Stephen King. Read Desperation and see Satan battle God.

Write moral fiction. Don't compromise. Don't let down your guard. In some way, in whatever we write, let us turn to what is pouring out of the abyss and, like Gandalf to the Balrog, shout, "You shall not pass!"

James Scott Bell's website is http://www.jamesscottbell.com/