That’s Entertainment!
I have signed my first petition of 2015. One of my friends sent me a petition together with articles from three different publications from Ireland and the UK, related to British media development of a sitcom, “Hungry” that will be rooted in the Irish Potato Famine. “Hungry” will follow a fictional family similar to the fictional Gallagher family in Showtime’s series “Shameless.” I admit that I am a bit ashamed to follow “Shameless.” I started watching “Shameless” because a friend told me “Shameless” was about an Irish American family. Well…that’s not quite all of it.
I believe what the Dalai Lama said in 2012 at SU, beware of labels and don’t label. To this, I add: beware of conversations starting with “you have to admit…” when someone not of your ancestral origin pegs negative behaviors common to all people specifically onto your people. Beware of comedy predicated on the maxim that tragedy plus time equals comedy.
Will 9/11 be funny to New Yorkers? Here and there, it is certainly funny to some non-New Yorkers already.
In 1997, I was alone among my friends in finding the comedy/drama/romance “Life Is Beautiful” to be an airbrushed minimization of Nazi genocide. Italian actor Roberto Benigni won the Academy Award for portraying a Jewish concentration camp victim in this homage to Benigni’s father who survived three years in the camps. “Life is Beautiful” features an Italian Jewish father outwitting the Nazi’s at every turn to keep his little boy, also imprisoned in the camps, safe, clean, and well fed. It is a fantastical magical story that did not actually happen and could not happen.
Creating and viewing art can function as catharsis. Art can instruct, inform and insult. I like my fiction to be fiction and my fact to be fact. I ask myself this: by signing a petition expressing my distaste for the underlying plot of “Hungry,” a show I’d likely never see, did I support censorship?
What is censorship exactly?
Many artists spoke out against Sony for suppressing free speech and caving to terrorists by limiting the scheduled Christmas 2014 release of “The Interview.” In case you don’t know and I am sure you do know, “The Interview” is a fictional comedy revolving around a plot to assassinate real world despot Kim Jong-un of North Korea. I find the timing interesting in view of our recent re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba. There are reports that, during the Cold War, the CIA sought to assassinate Fidel Castro with an explosive laden cigar. Fidel Castro is a bad leader for Cubans who do not suit Fidel Castro. Castro imprisoned poets, priests and anyone unlucky enough not to throw in with him after his overthrow of Fulgencio Battista in 1959. Earlier in the 1950’s US Senator Joseph McCarthy led a sort of ideological purity purge that resulted in many artists losing their livelihoods in Hollywood. In 1953, Arthur Miller wrote “The Crucible” an allegory about the McCarthy hearings based on the Salem Witch Trials. The allegory of “The Crucible” and the satire of “The Interview” might reflect artists’ attempts to fight systems in which which they have no direct power. Of course, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Many of us laugh or we would cry. Many just laugh.
What we know of history suggests that for every million average citizens who just want food, shelter and a little respect, there are a handful of despots controlling millions by denying food, shelter and any respect. I wasn’t around to see Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler inspired satire “The Great Dictator,” but looking back from today, I conclude that while Chaplin satirized Hitler, Hitler and his cohort Mussolini were developing the totalitarian infrastructure that would swallow Roberto Benigni’s father for three years.
My favorite film of 2014, “The Imitation Game,” depicts the Allies rush to fight Germany’s Enigma code, salient point being, Germany had already developed the Enigma machine. Totalitarian hate-mongers excel at attack and control. Sony found that out. And as I just now read in the New York Times the day after I signed the “The- Irish-Famine- is- not- funny” petition, that 12 people died in Paris in an attack on “Charlie Hebdo,” a satirical newspaper formed in 1970 and firebombed previously in 2011. The Times reports that “Charlie Hebdo,”whose title is based on “Peanuts” “Charlie Brown,” satirized a wide range of public figures, past and present, French and not so French.
Nazi Joseph Goebbels said that if one repeats the same lie often enough, people start to believe it. The belief that slicing and dicing people ever improved anything might be an example of what Goebbels termed, “the big lie.” Some people swear by it.
That’s censorship.
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