September 27 2009

Watch old movies or TV shows from fifty years ago and you will find it easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. I'm defining “good guys” as the movie characters whom the audience was supposed to like and “bad guys” as those whom people were expected to hate and despise. In those old dramas, the bad guys frequently murdered people in cold blood, including children. Bad guys had no qualms about using torture to get information or just for fun. Good guys didn't murder or torture. Not only did they think that such actions were immoral, but good guys couldn't sink to that level without losing the audience's respect.

You can see the beginning of a shift in the 1970s film Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson. The movie supplied a template for almost every revenge flick produced since. Bronson plays a liberal lawyer who supports due process and gun control. One night, he comes home to find that his wife and daughter have been raped and then murdered by a pack of thugs. The perps are so stupid that the police soon catch them, but they all walk free on a legal technicality. Some bleeding heart judge cares more about civil rights than he does about justice. In this kind of film, anyone who is even slightly liberal is portrayed as an idiot who believes that violent criminals just need a hug to reform them.

Bronson realizes that he will never obtain justice within the system, so he gets a gun. He finds the gang who killed his family and snuffs all of them. Suddenly, Bronson has an epiphany. If the courts won't protect innocent people, then he will. He stalks the nighttime streets, looking for muggers or purse snatchers. When he finds one, he doles out .38 calibre justice on the spot. Bang bang. Case closed. We never see Bronson pop somebody just for illegal parking, but he likely would. The police know what Bronson is doing, but they turn a blind eye because they secretly approve. Hundreds of revenge movies since then have used the same join the dots plot. Some goon kills the hero's wife or one of his fellow cops. That outrage justifies our guy going on a rampage of beatings, torture and killing to get even.

Flash forward fifty years and you'll find contemporary TV shows like 24 and Dexter. Now, the good guys commit murder and torture people routinely. They don't even need revenge as an excuse.

On 24, Jack Bauer is a Federal agent who is always placed in some contrived time pressure scenario. Terrorists have planted an atom bomb, a biological weapon or a (fill in the blank) somewhere in the city and the thing will detonate within a few hours. Thousands of people will die. How can we quibble when Jack shoots a few people in cold blood or fries some guy's testicles to get information if so many lives are at stake? Especially when Jack's victims are shown as the kind of people who make Charles Manson look like a choir boy.

Dexter is a serial killer, but that's okay because he's a nice serial killer. He is always polite and he kills only people we fear, like pedophiles and serial killers. But isn't Dexter a serial killer too? Weren't you listening? He's a nice serial killer. You don't have anything to fear from good old Dex, unless he decides that you're not nice. If he does, then he'll tie you up and turn you into ground chuck while you're still conscious. What a kidder!

How did our society change from one that saw torture as evil to one viewing it as entertaining? Certainly there is some blood lust in all of us and movie makers have been happy to pander to those darker desires to sell tickets. Still, I think there are other factors at work.

Governments have used torture in most countries for centuries. Nothing new there. The most disturbing shift has occurred in three countries that were once seen as liberal democracies holding human rights in high regard. These nations are the United States, Britain and Israel. All three countries have the following things in common:

· Since the 1970s, governments in all of them have steadily drifted farther and farther toward the Political Right. Governments on the Extreme Right like to use torture.

· Terrorist attacks have killed large numbers of people in all three countries, leaving the rest of the population afraid. Frightened people are not very compassionate, especially toward those whom they fear.

· The governments of all of these countries have used this widespread fear to get their people to accept new laws that are intrusive to privacy and that trample human rights. Anyone who objects is accused of being soft on terrorists.

· All of these governments (especially the former Bush Administration in America) have tried hard to redefine torture more narrowly than before. Water boarding a prisoner, applying electricity to his genitals, or even sodomizing him with a broom handle no longer counts as torture. These are just “intensive interrogation techniques”.

· All of these governments have tried to justify torture by arguing that it is expedient, effective, and not as bad as some people say it is. They also claim that prisoners who are “illegal enemy combatants” are fair game because they fall outside of The Geneva Convention and any other laws that call for their humane treatment.

In short, we're being sold torture as part of a larger effort to sell us Fascism in the name of national security. This propaganda eventually filters through to the way torture and killing are portrayed in the media.

History often seems like a swinging pendulum. Centuries ago, parents took their children to the village square to watch some poor wretch being disemboweled or burned at the stake. Torture and executions were fun, so long as you weren't the guest of honour. Gradually, revulsion set in. Executions became less bloody and were no longer done in public. Eventually, every advanced nation (except the United States) dropped the death penalty altogether. In our time, events like international terrorism have pushed the pendulum back toward barbarism. Now, revulsion seems to be setting in again. It will be interesting to see how far we advance into a free and humane world before that pendulum tracks back once more towards blood and darkness.

What do you think?

George

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