Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Evil and the Madeleine Ad
The cinema groups Odeon, Cineworld and Vue have refused to run an ad promoting the search for Madeleine McCann. The ad had been passed with a 'U' certificate, but the cinemas said parents didn't want their children to see it. They had been shielding them from the publicity about the abduction. Everybody now seems to agree that maximum publicity is the best way to go in these cases; it is, we are told, an important investigative tool. Maybe, maybe not. But the reason these cases attract such high levels of media interest is that abusing children seems to be the only act we can all agree is evil. Evil is, of course, a socially cohesive force - look at the war against Hitler - and the nation has, indeed, been brought together, in some weird way, by the horror of the Madeleine abduction. We aren't, however, brought together by, for example, Robert Mugabe's starvation of his people. This is because, for a number of reasons, we are no longer equipped to understand evil in its more complex and truly lethal forms and, perhaps, because we no longer think any war against big evil is winnable. But the big downside of our obsessive focus on easy, local evil is that it become a kind of pornography. The cinema groups, in short, are right to stop the ad and the 'U' certificate is a form of moral illiteracy.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
There is not a person over thirteen, that cannot bring an image of the little blond child into their mind. But how many could convert that image to the same child with dark hair.
ReplyDeleteOne reason we feel such empathy for McCann family is we instantly recognise their pain. Somebody took their beautiful child, a child like yours or mine. The sheer horror of their plight made me wince. It has a visceral quality. Mugabe's crimes, on the other hand, are distant. To get a handle on what is happening there we need to think very hard and use our imagination. In recent times, this is not something we do a great deal. It seems the laws of perspective apply here - losing a child is in the foreground, starving to death at the hands of a brutal dictator is somewhere in the background.
ReplyDeleteSame point essentially, Vince. Sorry, didn't see your comment.
ReplyDeleteyou know it never fails to irritate me when I see statements like, the people didn't want this or they didn't want that. do they actually ask the people as they enter the cinema - how do they ask them exactly?
ReplyDeletein nearly half a century the only thing I've been asked by a big corporation is if I wanted fries with my burger.
hmm, is it like pornography because we have become obsessed with it or have we become obsessed with it because it is like pornography? I can't imagine what could be in it that would disturb children to an extent greater than that that would give them some benefit and understanding.
your link leads me to a registration page, I'm not going further...
I'm reminded of something comedian Eddie Izzard said (if you'll forgive the introduction of some light humour on a fairly dark topic): "Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people, and we can't even deal with that. We think that if someone kills someone, that's murder, you go to prison. You kill 10 people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick, that's what they do. 20 people, you go to a hospital and they look at you through a small window forever. And over that, we can't deal with it. You know? If somebody's killed 100 thousand people, we're almost going, "Well done! You killed 100 thousand people?! You must get up very early in the morning! I can't even get down the gym! Your diary must look odd: Get up in the morning, death, death, death, death, death, lunch, death, death, death, afternoon tea, death, death, death, quick shower."
ReplyDeleteThe abduction of one child is horrific to us, yet we haven't been crying out about all the other starving, sick, abused, dying children around the rest of the world. Are there just too many? We can focus on Madeleine because this one case provokes sympathy, and doesn't challenge us in the same ways. We have all been able to do as much as we can to help the McCanns, i.e. pretty much nothing, save think, "If I spot her, I'll let them know."
should we let our imaginations run free with this story? we don't know whether any of those things have happened, only an abduction.
ReplyDeletewe do know that children are abused but we don't seem so concerned about those. It's because this particular story is presented as offering hope of a conclusion whereas the others don't. that's why we all want to be a part of it.
i guess the human imagination is drawn to the specific case, so we love particular people, or feel horror at particular crimes, when perhaps there are more admirable people we pass by without a quiver, or objectively worse crimes that we shrug at. It just seems the way our minds work, that goodness is spotlit onto apparently arbitrary points, rather than diffused over everything & everybody. The attempt to distribute goodness, empathy, etc., over the whole seems to make it a bureaucratic duty, or - as in the late USSR - even worse than its supposed adversary.
ReplyDelete