I just watched "The Spanish Prisoner," about a guy being swindled. There were scams within scams, like in "House of Games," and "The Game." When I got through, I had "trust nobody" printed on my eyeballs for the rest of the day. Some of my friends go through life that way. The story of how we got into war with Iraq suggests that Bush advisors needed a triple feature of paranoia movies and got instead -- "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."
When Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, a Mafia informant, saw "The Godfather," he said, "I left that movie stunned. I mean, I floated out of the theater. Maybe it was fiction, but for me, then, that was our life. It was incredible. I remember talking to a multitude of guys, made guys, who felt exactly the same way." Fictions bring attitudes into focus; they put theme music behind our lives.
The link between movies and the study of ethics is very tight. Ethics can't investigate actions one at a time; coherent thought about human conduct has to look at larger units, at attitudes and at states of character. And movies give us portable tools for evoking attitudes and experimenting with states of character. That's one link between ethics and movies. Another is that going to the movies is a morally important action, as listening to stories was from very early on: movies and stories are ways of bringing a chosen perspective to bear on the current situation. They are moral tools, ways of using the malleability of human perception and feeling. A great deal might be said about how to use such tools. No one is teaching people how to use these tools in their own lives, to take back the power over their own attitudes and stances. And so movies are used to manipulate the masses, and clever people stay away from them.
Posted by shea0017 at August 24, 2004 9:51 AM