Our Sunday Visitor
June 19, 2005
INTO THE DEEP
Stories About Nothing
Americans deserve better than Hollywood's obsession with obscenity and vulgarity
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor once said, “A people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells.”
If that is true, then Americans have reason to be embarrassed. In the past few decades, Hollywood screenwriters have become our national storytellers, and American culture has become synonymous with trashy television shows, gratuitous violence and entertainers who use obscenity to hide the fact that they have nothing to say.
For most Americans, pornographic sex and violence have become the background noise that we barely notice, the soundtrack that plays ceaselessly as we work and play. We have learned to overlook the obscenity and brutality in our television shows and movies because we so desperately long to lose ourselves in a good story.
But try as we might to ignore it, our cultural soundtrack has a powerful effect on us and our children. Consider the time we invest in television alone: American adults watch an average of nearly three hours of television a day, and the average American child spends nearly four hours a day – or about 60 days a year – watching TV.
Our time before the tube is largely spent imbibing scenes of sex and violence, scenes that are often introduced to compensate for otherwise insipid plots. Judging by a 2001 study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, television writers are relying more than ever on racy scenes to spice up their sagging stories. The study found that the number of programs with sexual content has shot up in recent years, from about 50 percent of all shows in the 1997-1998 television season to 66 percent in the 1999-2000 season. An analysis conducted by the Parents Television Council between 2001 and 2002 showed similar findings, noting one in every seven television programs included a portrayal of sexual intercourse, but only 15 percent of those portrayals included any references to the risks and responsibilities associated with sexual behavior.
Hollywood’s depiction of violence is similarly cavalier. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the average American 18-year-old has seen about 200,000 violent acts on television, including tens of thousands of murders, the vast majority of them unpunished. This simulated violence and its glamorous depiction has real-world consequences: More than 1,000 studies confirm the link between media violence and aggressive behavior in children.
The good news is that Americans are increasingly troubled by Hollywood’s excesses and failures. A recent Time magazine poll showed that 68 percent of Americans believe the entertainment industry has lost touch with their values and 53 percent want the Federal Communications Commission to place stricter controls on broadcast channel shows depicting sex and violence.
Entertainment executives have responded by bellowing about their “artistic freedom” and arguing that the heaping doses of sex and violence with which they pummel the public are necessary to tell interesting stories.
Sexuality and conflict are indeed key aspects of the human experience and most compelling stories include some elements of both. Storytellers like Flannery O’Connor certainly knew how a violent outburst or a grotesque image could rivet readers and make a point. But unlike today’s shock artists, storytellers like O’Connor did not celebrate violence for its own sake or rely on obscenity to attract a following. They created characters, settings and plots that resonated with their audiences, and their stories echoed enduring truths. In O’Connor’s case, the truth her stories told was often as harsh as sin itself. But it was truth, and as such, it had transforming power.
Today’s purveyors of pornographic sex and violence have no such power because their airbrushed images of sexuality and suffering contain no such truth. We get nothing better than this because we demand nothing more. Until we do, we will remain a nation numbed by violence, vulgarity and vacuous stories signifying nothing.
Colleen Carroll Campbell is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.