What does Hollywood think about torture?
The answer isn’t as obvious as you think. As a political force, Hollywood is against torture, which ranks somewhere in the parade of horribles ahead of SUV ownership and perhaps voting Republican. No doubt Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin have delivered dinner-table stemwinders against the Bush administration’s defense of “coercive measures” in extreme circumstances.
To be fair, the Hollywood crowd isn’t alone. In Washington, the issue of torture has united liberals and divided conservatives. One disagreement is what people mean by “torture.” If you mean hot pokers in unwelcome places, pretty much everyone is against it, save perhaps in the famous “ticking time bomb” scenario.
But the meatier part of the argument is in the nuanced area of “coercive measures,” “stress positions” and what one unnamed official described to the Wall Street Journal as “a little bit of smacky-face.” Some, such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., want even that stuff banned (but acknowledge that in a ticking time bomb situation, well, “you do what you have to do,” as McCain put it). Others go further. Human rights groups are appalled by the suggestion that harsh treatment is ever justified. Similarly, blogger Andrew Sullivan dismisses the ticking time bomb as a “red herring” and argues that “you cannot raise or lower the moral status of mass murderers with respect to torture. The only salient moral status with respect to torture is that the mass murderers are human beings.”
In other words, it doesn’t matter what the persons you are coercing did or why you are coercing them in the first place. Torturing an evil man to save innocent lives is no less a sin than torturing a noble man in order to snuff out innocent lives, or for the fun of it. The way Sullivan and those who agree with him see it, torture is torture is torture — and torture is always wrong, even when defined as intimidation and “smacky-face.” “Not in my name” is their rallying cry, often with the sort of self-righteousness that suggests that those who disagree must admire cruelty.
That’s where Hollywood comes in. Politically, the entertainment community is two-dimensional in its liberalism. But artistically — and to its credit — Hollywood grasps that life can be morally complicated. After all, tactics that qualify as torture for the “anti” crowd show up in film and television every day. On “NYPD Blue,” Andy Sipowicz, played by Dennis Franz, smacked around criminals all the time. In “Guarding Tess,” Nicholas Cage shot off the toe of a man who wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to know — and told him he’d keep shooting piggies until he heard what he wanted.
In “Patriot Games,” Harrison Ford shot a man in the kneecap to get the information he needed in a timely manner. In “Rules of Engagement,” Samuel L. Jackson shot a POW in the head to get another man to talk.
The audience is expected to cheer, or at least sympathize with, all of it. I know many will say, “It’s only a movie” or “It’s only a TV show.” But that will not do. Hollywood plays a role in shaping culture, but it also reflects it. It affirms and reflects our basic moral sense (which is one reason why it dismays some of us from time to time).
It is hardly imaginable that Hollywood would — or could — make long-running TV shows or successful movies in which the protagonist is a soaked-to-the-bone racist. Why? Because audiences would reject the premise, and so would filmmakers. But, last I checked, there were no howls of outrage when a racist mayor in “Mississippi Burning” was brutalized and threatened with castration in order to give up information. The movie was nominated for six Oscars, including best picture.
The issue here is context. Coercion of the sort we’re discussing is used by good guys and bad guys alike — in films and in real life. Just as with guns and fistfights, the morality of violence depends in large part on the motives behind it. (That’s one of the reasons so many on the left oppose the war: They distrust President Bush’s motives. Very few of Bush’s critics are true pacifists.)
American audiences — another word for the American public — understand this. A recent poll by AP-Ipsos showed that about 61 percent of Americans believed torture can be justified in some cases. Interestingly, roughly half of the residents of that self-described “moral superpower” Canada agreed, as did a majority of French citizens and a huge majority of South Koreans.
My guess is that when presented in cinematic form, even larger numbers of people recognize that sometimes good people must do bad things. I’m not suggesting, of course, that the majority is always right. But it should at least suggest to those preening in their righteousness that people of good will can disagree.
— Jonah Goldberg is a contributing editor of National Review and editor-at-large of National Review Online.
