Getting Reel: A Social Science Perspective on Film By Michael D. ...

My presumption in modifying Socrates to say that the unexamined film was not worth watching, is to suggest that having watched virtually any film becomes valuable when it is also an exercise in the difficult task of knowing good from evil. My sharp criticism of most popular film criticism is that it tends to confine its interests to whether the film was entertaining and whether it was technically well done. The explicit and implicit ideas of the film should also be fodder for thought.

I ordinarily start my own film classes with a consideration of John Milton’s “Areopagitica.” I still consider it to be the definitive Christian perspective on censorship. Milton argues against censorship for adults (although he would undoubtedly be shocked by what is now available).

Milton says that, “good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil.” The task is to sort out the good from the evil. Milton admires the person who takes on the task and makes the distinctions. He says, “He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.” For Milton anyone who shrinks from the quest is faint hearted. He says, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.” My take on this is that “good” film study is a heroic, and even Christian quest.

This does not, however, mean that a steady diet of analyzing films that exploit sex and violence is likely to be healthy. I am always disturbed when students tell me they “loved” A Clockwork Orange and saw it repeatedly. I think that it is a most important film, a film that, among other things, warns us about desensitization to violence. I can only bear to re-watch this film after a few years have passed. The film itself is a study on how popular culture contributes to the social mayhem. The American Psychological Association offers research that a steady diet of television and movies that exploit sex and violence are desensitizing and do influence the amount of sexual and other violent crimes.