ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Nov. 08 2007

Maybe Hollywood viewers should strike, too
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Hollywood writers have it rough. Week after week, the scribes of Tinseltown
must churn out enough sitcom episodes, late-night jokes and grisly crime dramas
to keep America's entertainment-industrial complex humming along. Laboring long
hours in relative obscurity, screenwriters rarely enjoy the same fame and
fortune as the actors who recite their lines and movie moguls who buy their
scripts. And when the ink-stained wretches finally get fed up enough to strike,
no one seems to care.

As a writer, I feel a certain kinship with the 12,000 members of the Writers
Guild of America who traded their laptops for picket signs on Monday. It can't
be easy to meet our nation's insatiable demand for entertainment, especially
while everyone but you seems to be getting rich off your work.

Yet the screenwriters' strike is not having its intended effect on the public
psyche. Entertainment journalists have covered it with breathless urgency,
warning that a long walkout could result in a dearth of fresh and compelling
television shows and films in the coming years. Viewers have responded to this
doomsday scenario by asking the obvious question: So what else is new?

The shortage of good onscreen stories is not, after all, a novel problem for
Hollywood. Even when scores of wordsmiths are on the job, most of the tales
that make their way to our TV screens and multiplexes could not be mistaken for
masterpieces. The special effects might be dynamite; the action might be
intense; the scenery might be eye-popping. And, of course, the gratuitous
helpings of sex and violence grow more copious and scandalous every year. But
good stories increasingly are in short supply.

Critics often bemoan the sensationalism of the stories Hollywood produces — the
obscenity, brutality and stomach-turning gore that has led growing numbers of
parents to play policeman with the remote control or ban television altogether.
That sensationalism surely coarsens our culture and our kids, yet it obscures a
deeper problem with today's TV shows and films: the nihilistic worldview at
their root.

The world according to Hollywood is a place largely devoid of ultimate meaning
and deficient in genuine mystery. It is a place where good is banal,
sentimental and illusory, while evil is powerful and worthy of reverence. In
this world, sociopathic anti-heroes command our respect. Authority, tradition
and sexual restraint deserve our derision. Religious characters almost
invariably are exposed as hypocrites or rehabilitated as libertines. And the
pursuit of transcendent truth, goodness and beauty takes a backseat to the more
modern and mundane search for self-fulfillment.

Even Hollywood's lighter films often smack of this soft nihilism. Their moral
permissiveness masks a cynical indifference and despair of discovering meaning
in life beyond self-gratification. Cloying sentimentality cannot disguise the
emptiness at the core of romances where the passionate struggle for endless
love is supplanted by the banal hunt for a good sex partner capable of a
long-term relationship, and genuine redemption is replaced by superficial
makeovers signifying nothing.

Viewers rarely analyze such shortcomings while watching movies. But the fact
that most films are forgotten as soon as they end their run at theaters speaks
volumes. So does the popularity of reality television, which, for all its
voyeuristic excess, at least offers us believable characters and flashes of
self-recognition.

Novelist Flannery O'Connor once said, "A people is known, not by its statements
or statistics, but by the stories it tells." As America's movie moguls export
their vulgar, vacuous stories to the world in our name and with our dollars,
that truism should worry us. Maybe screenwriters aren't the only ones who need
to take a hiatus from Hollywood.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.