by Mary Whitehouse CBE
First
published by Bloomsbury in 1996 in the book Screen Violence edited by
Karl French
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t was the late Sir Hugh
Greene, then Director General of the BBC, who described television as 'the
most powerful medium ever to affect the thinking and behaviour of people'. And one is bound to ask: 'If this is true of television, how can
anyone doubt it is not also true of film?', especially as film forms the
foundation of so much of what we see on our television sets, not least after
the 9pm watershed.
The watershed has itself
been established in order, so we are told, to protect the young from unsuitable
material. Not, of course, that it does,
because we now live in a society in which well over 50 per cent of children
have TV sets in their own bedrooms and are adept at switching them on long
after Mum has kissed them goodnight, switched off the light, and gone downstairs
- probably to watch the very films she did not wish the children to see!
There is a long history of
concern about the effect of film upon the young. Way back in 1950 the Home Office published a Report entitled 'Children
and the Cinema'. As I browsed through
it again I came across the following, to my mind, very quotable quote: 'The
harmful moral effects attributed to "bad" films are commonly centred
on the exhibition and glorification of crime, violence and sexual licence, the
latter none the less deplorable because it is often coated with a thin layer of
conventional morality…that many films do contain sequences that are brutal,
anti-social or licentious is undeniable.
Some of these sequences will pass over the heads of the youngest
children and it may be that only a few films err seriously in these ways, but
these few must, on the grounds of ordinary human experience, be accounted bad
influences on the minds of those who see them.
We have no doubts at all about such films. We think they are bad and we should like to see them banned
altogether to children' - and that was best part of fifty years ago!
If that is true of the
cinema how can anyone deny its truth when applied to television - not to
mention video?
Concern grew as evidence
of the use of violence in film multiplied as internationally respected
psychologists and social scientists like Leonard Berkowitz, writing in Scientific American in 1964, concluded
that 'film media violence is potentially dangerous…(it has) increased the
chance that an angry person, and possibly other people as well, will attack
someone else'.
The problem persisted and
in 1975 Dr Michael Rothenburg appealed for 'an organised cry from the medical
profession' against violence on television and its effects on children. Working as a child psychiatrist in Seattle's
Children's Orthopaedic Hospital and medical Centre he stated that '50 studies
involving 10,000 children and adolescents from every conceivable background all
showed that viewing violence produces increased aggressive behaviour in the
young' and went on to call for 'immediate remedial action'.
How far did this get us?
The truth is - nowhere at all.
In 1994 the Independent Television Commission criticised Channel 4's Brookside for violence culminating in
the use of a kitchen knife as a murder weapon during its omnibus edition - at
5.05pm on a Saturday afternoon!
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find now that I have a very real problem and it's this - in order
to illustrate one's argument one has, as it were, to multiply the crime! Take the film Nightmare on Elm Street, shown not only in the cinema but also -
where else - on Channel 4 TV (17.10.94).
Here follows an assessment of some of the violence it contains:
Girl
attacked by satanic force in bedroom.
Her body flung round room and hoisted to ceiling. Her chest slashed. Blood-soaked body flung onto bed, walls splashed with blood. Young girl pursued by maniac with knife-blade
fingers in dream. Girl in bath with
legs wide apart. Hand with knife-blade
fingers appears out of water between her legs.
Girl then pulled under water by satanic force. Youth attacked in prison cell by satanic force and hanged by bed
sheet. Fountain of blood hitting
ceiling in torrents. Girl throws petrol
on man and then sets light to him.
And then, of course, there
was the film A Clockwork Orange, without
an assessment of which no study of violence would be complete. After watching the film sixteen-year-old
Richard Palmer hit a tramp over the head with two lemonade bottles until they
smashed, beat him with slabs of crazy paving and when the old man staggered
away battered him with two bricks and beat him with a stick. Then he left him, cycled home, and went
calmly into his own home.
During his trial the
prosecuting counsel told the Court that if robbery had been the motive it was
only for 1/2p, the change the tramp had in his pockets after someone in the
fish shop queue had given him 15p to buy his supper. But, he added, 'the conclusion that the film has some terrible
influence on what is happening is inescapable'. And the psychiatrist who examined the boy said 'the real
explanation is truly macabre and frightening.
It seems as though momentarily the devil had been planted in the boy's
subconscious. In my submission, it is
the irresistible conclusion that whatever was planted there followed the
violence of A Clockwork Orange which
perpetrates violence in its ugliest form.
This is the only possible explanation for what this boy did'.
Palmer's defence counsel,
Roger Gray, said there was no evidence whatsoever that the boy was suffering
from any mental disease. He was not
drunk, neither had he taken drugs - 'what possible explanation can there be for
this savagery other than the film? The lawyer spoke of yet another 'callous
comparison'. He said that, in the book,
the gang, following the attack on the old man, were quoted as saying 'then we
went on our way'. Palmer, after his
attack on the old man, told police 'when I got home I noticed I had some blood
on my trousers, then I went to bed'. Mr
Gray continued, 'how many impressionable young men have these sadistic
tendencies which film directors and TV producers turn into mindless
sensationalism producing a dreadful canker among them? All responsible people desire to see this
dreadful trend stamped out'.
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ut far from being 'stamped
out' the film, well launched with Stephen Murphy's X Certificate (1971), became
a cult with a language of its own. The
film, with its masochistic setting, reiterates a theme which is fundamental to
much now freely available pornography - woman is there to be raped, she
deserves to be raped and raped she must be.
'Gang-bang' suggests a romp - give crime a jolly name and even depravity
and multiple rape sounds fun. The
mascaraed, clockwork orange 'droogs' with their anarchic speech, mannerisms and
clothes, engaged in tellingly formal acts of rape, robbery and murder, had
become the 'heroes' upon whom, as Scotland Yard reported, a dozen gangs in
Central London alone were modelling their life-styles. And in May 1976, Herbert S. Kerrigan, one of
Scotland's leading advocates, spoke of the three murder trials in 1975 which to
his knowledge had been 'triggered off by seeing A Clockwork Orange'.
All this did not - could
not - happen in a vacuum. As Enid
Wistrich, then chairman of the Greater London Council's Film Viewing Board
pointed out in her book I don't Mind the
Sex, It's the Violence (1972),
the public backlash against the so-called 'liberalisation' of film and
television resulted in the GLC itself coming under pressure to ban Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Ken Russell's The Devils.
It is interesting, and significant, that Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard (29.1.72) made a
statement to the effect that the Committee's decision to see A Clockwork Orange meant it would 'have to consider the social and
political implications of such films in the light of the chaos in Ulster, the
Aldershot outrages and the violence in the picket lines'. He pointed out that the broadcasters were
anxiously watching all these developments 'with their own medium of television
in mind. If such films were to be shown
in the cinema where would that leave them?'
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lastair Milne, Director
General of the BBC, 1981-85, has told how the governors of the BBC became so
concerned about the increasingly violent and obscene films becoming available
for television that a private session was arranged for them in the office of
the British Board of Film Censors in Soho Square early in 1973. After, apparently, being handed a warm glass
of gin, they were regaled with the burning at the stake in The Devils, the rape and mutilation scenes from Straw Dogs and the gang rape from A Clockwork Orange.
Apparently, Alastair Milne
tells us, 'the Governors were stunned; indeed two lady Governors were
speechless while the Chairman, Michael Swann, was moved to articulate their
anxieties'. However, Mr Milne and his
colleagues at the BBC comforted the Governors by telling them that the
Corporation already had 'pretty tough guidelines' to help them handle such
productions.
That's as may be, but what is certain is that the problem
didn't even begin to go away and it was Sir Michael himself who argued that
violence and 'society's attitude towards it should be based on the assumption
of adverse effect until that is disproven'.
It was around this time
that I addressed the Royal College of Nursing and referred to the fact that the
techniques of conditioning used in the film A
Clockwork Orange were similar to those being used by the American Army to
train assassins. I went on to say:
When
the movement which I represent was founded in 1963, we said quite simply that
the constant presentation of violence on our television screens would
significantly promote and help to create a violent society." We were ridiculed for our pains, called
cranks and accused of being squeamish.
We sensed then and believe strongly now, that the screening of violence,
horror, shock and obscenity into the home, where the viewer sits comfortably,
detached, in his easy chair, where he can switch off mentally or physically
whenever he wishes, can have nothing but a destructive effect upon our
sensitivities and our society. So do
the real horrors of war, death and poverty become no more than conversation
pieces, fantasy worlds, increasingly accepted as no more than entertainment.
As an example of the
conditioning power of television I referred to Dr Who. I said I 'detected a pronounced increase in
what one might refer to as conspicuous violence: strangulation - by hand, by
claw, by obscene vegetable matter - is the latest gimmick, sufficiently close
up so that they get the point. And,
just for a little variety, show the children how to make a Molotov Cocktail'.
The evidence for this
corruptive power of the mass media, I argued, lay in the equation we now make
between sadistic violence and entertainment - we are, I said, becoming
desensitised as well as corrupted and that is good neither for the individual
spirit nor the social climate.
I then went on to argue
'television violence has not only made man more violent and less sensitive, it
has, paradoxically, also made him more passive. The effect of television has, I suppose, never been more clearly
seen than in the coverage of the war in Vietnam. That is the other side of the coin'. We increasingly took it in our stride.
To say that there is no
end to the problem of violence on film and television is to put it mildly. It not only does not lessen, neither does
its impact decrease nor its contents soften.
This has been highlighted
by the controversy, which has surrounded the release of certain 'Video Nasties'
amongst them the notorious Serial Killers
labelled, almost gleefully, 'Unbelievable True Horror', which includes
graphic first-hand accounts from 'some of the most infamous sexual
psychopaths'. The film includes
interviews with 'Harvey the Hammer', who bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer
and also with Arthur Shawcross, 'The Monster of the Rivers' now serving ten
consecutive life sentences. Apparently,
despite warnings that the film 'contains footage which is not suitable for
television and material and language which some may find offensive' - really! -
it was never submitted to the BBFC because its makers said that it was
'educational'.
James Ferman, then
director of the BBFC, admitted that film-makers use the 'educational' category
as 'a loophole' and went on to say that he found the cover description of Serial Killers really alarming and that
he had to admit that he had 'a good deal of sympathy' with Nigel Evans,
Conservative MP for Ribble Valley, who called for the system to be reviewed -
'Films are coming in under the guise of education but they are going through
sensational subjects to make a fast buck'.
Indeed.
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ll that, of course, was
twenty years ago. So where do we stand
now? Readers will be aware of how, as I
write in the summer of 1995, hardly a day goes by without the report of a
callous murder, so often of a child. The Times (17.8.95) carried the headline
'Wife stabbed sailor after watching Basic
Instinct', and tells how 'a depressed housewife took a knife and went out
looking for a stranger to stab only hours after watching the film on
video. The woman, aged forty-one, put
her two young boys to bed, went to a Portsmouth night club and met a stranger -
a sailor - who became her victim. She
led him down an alley and stabbed him with a serrated kitchen knife which she
had taken from her home'. She told the
Court that the film had suggested to her that 'it would be good to stab a
man'. Basic Instinct was described as an 'erotic thriller' in which a
naked woman sits astride a naked man, reaches for an ice pick and lashes up and
down on the man in a frenzy until his body is covered in blood. And that's by no means all. The whole film is incredibly violent,
finishing with police looking at photographs of teenagers lying dead with their
throats cut.
So who can be surprised at
the effect of all this on the 'depressed housewife'. The Recorder at the Crown Court told her 'you were sadly
suffering from a very severe depressive illness at the time. But for the illness, you would be looking at
a very long term of imprisonment'. As
it was she was committed to hospital under the Mental Health Act.
When one is involved in a
fight - in itself a violent word - to reduce and in certain cases to eliminate
violence on film and television, it is necessary to document the content of
such material, and pretty harsh, evil and repetitive a great deal of it
is. Nothing original, nothing
uplifting, nothing to inspire any generation to challenge and change.
It is, of course,
necessary to know one's facts and between July and December 1994 members of
mediawatch-uk watched and analysed sixty-four films all shown on terrestrial
channels and transmitted, with one exception, on and after 9.00pm. I dealt with the matter of film and TV
violence at some length in my book Quite
Contrary (Pan Books 1993) and I believe that what I said then is equally
applicable today.
I quoted from Dr William
Belson's report 'Television Violence and the Adolescent Boy' (1977):
Serious violence is increased by long
term exposure to: plays or films in which close personal relationships are a
major theme and which feature verbal or physical violence; programmes in which
violence seems just thrown in for its own sake or is not necessary to the plot;
programmes featuring violence of a realistic kind; programmes in which the
violence is presented as being in a good cause; Westerns of the violent kind.
Dr Belson found, for
example, 'that teenagers exposed to violent programming committed 49 per cent
more violent and antisocial behaviour than those in matched low exposure'.
Violent video and computer
images are desensitising young people, according to Sir Paul Condon,
Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
In the age of electronic equipment, he said, there was compelling
evidence that lack of family stability and a mistaken view of violence acquired
in video arcades and from unlimited access to television can be very
destructive. Sir Paul said that some
cities in the United States were now 'reaping a murderous harvest' as a result
(The Times, 2.3.95); while latest
crime statistics in Britain show that violent offences have increased by 17,300
to 311,500.
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n 27 February 1995 the
BBC's current affairs programme Panorama examined
the question of screen violence and its effects on children and society as a
whole. The film Natural Born Killers had just been released at the cinema after a
three-month delay while the BBFC investigated claims that this film had been a
factor in a number of murders in the United States. Panorama examined the
case of Nathan Martinez, a seventeen-year-old boy charged with killing two
members of his own family after watching Natural
Born Killers ten times.
Oliver Stone, the film's
director, said in the programme, 'film is a powerful medium, film is a drug,
film is a potential hallucinogen - it goes into your eye, it goes into your
brain, it stimulates and it's a dangerous thing - it can be a very subversive
thing'. Professor Rowell Huesmann of
the University of Michigan said that he was in no doubt that 'fictional screen
violence raises the level of belief in the appropriateness of aggressive and
violent behaviour, it raises people's beliefs that this is a mean world, a
violent world and it just makes aggression more acceptable'.
In the same programme Dr
Susan Bailey said that "in the early eighties I encountered over a
five-year period, twenty youngsters who had murdered and a quarter of that
group presented me with descriptions of how they had watched violent and
pornographic films in the weeks leading up to their offence of murder - films
where there were particular issues of violence against one person or another
and where quite often the message in the film was that being bad and being
violent brought with it rewards and power and this seemed to be an important
issue for them'.
Speaking on the same
programme, James Ferman of the BBFC said, "I won't be here in the next
century doing this job. I think there
will be a problem. I think our children
will be assaulted from all sides. They
will all have television in their rooms by then, probably video, probably
satellite dishes attached to those televisions so they will all be seeing
everything. We must somehow give them
the strength to resist".
And that, it seems to me,
raises, as they say, the $64,000 question.
But there is another question, very much related: how do we fill the
filmmakers with a sense of their own responsibility for the health and welfare
not only of the whole of our society, but especially, for pity's sake, the
welfare of the children who are the future?
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