My sight is either jaundiced or clairvoyant: which, I leave the reader to decide.
Strip life of its color, mystery, infinitude; make it stale, make it grey, make it flat; rob the human being of his aura, deny him speech, quicken his movements into galvanic action; people a glaring parallelogram with these gigantic simulacra of men and women moved by sub-human motives; drug the tormented nerves with music, so that the audience shall not go mad—this is the movie as it is to me.
The other day I read a panegyric on the most beautiful of all moving pictures. I forced myself to sit through it though I could scarcely forbear shrieking aloud. It was an amusement seemingly devised for devils in hell.
Only degradation of the soul and a vast despondency result from this seeking joy in the pictured suffering wickedness, weakness of others; in this orgy of sex-sentimentality, silliness, meaningless violence. Such amusement either depraves the mind or arrests its action, and makes of the heart a mechanical toy which must be shaken violently before it will act.
Why do people go to the movies? Because their caged souls seek forgetfulness and joy as insistently as blind eyes yearn for light. But joy is such a stranger to them that they ignorantly mistake this owl-eyed Monster of Darkness for the Blue Bird of Happiness. I have asked many why they go to the movies, and have heard many reasons—most of them bad—but one answer recurs like a refrain: “There isn’t any thing else to do.” It reminds me of John Russel’s reason why Eliza (of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) crossed the river on the ice. “The poor girl had no other place to go—all the saloons were closed.”
Today all the saloons are closed, and professional philanthropy prides itself on the fact that more men go now to the movies. The saloon was an evil institution, but the prostitution of the mind is worse than any poisoning of the nerves.
The priests of the temple of the Movie Momus do not know that they are offering a form of amusement which stifles the mind and hardens the heart. Doubtless they believe the contrary, but it is a case of the blind led by the blind: Neither know where they are going, and each depends upon the other to lead the way. Producers, impresarios, scenario-writers have always their ears to the ground to catch the first faint rumble of condemnation or approval. Their business is frankly to assimilate the popular taste in order to reproduce it. But this taste is fickle, being that of a child with a digestion impaired by too much of the wrong kind of food. The movie public is like the Athenian populace always eager for “some new thing,” and like the Roman mob it shows an insatiable greed for danger (to others) cruelty and destruction. Of daring it demands more daring; of beauty more nudity; of wickedness a deeper depth of wickedness; scenery must be ever more sumptuous, orgies more orgiastic, violence more violent. Lacking anything to turn its imagination away from these things, into some new channel, the public can only build high and higher this particular house of cards.
There is a great deal talked and written about the “educational value” of the movies, and this acts as a deterrent to many persons who are minded, as I am, to denounce this evil in the market place. But such deceive themselves with the word “education,” forgetting that mankind is one. In order that some may learn easily a few merely physical facts, such people countenance and support an institution that eats at the very heart of the spirit of man.
I hear in anticipation the crushing argument against my point of view: The Movies constitute the fourth largest industry in the world; they command the respect of governments, the service of the press, the participation of captains of industry, cabinet members, international bankers. But all this is quite beside the point, and reminds me of the answer once given to my criticism of an absurd soldiers’ monument: “It cost fifty thousand dollars and was carved out of a single piece of granite that weighed ten tons.”
The Movies too are carved out of a single piece of granite: the granite of ignorance of the obscure spiritual forces now active in the secret hearts of men.