The Trouble with Mood Lighting

(Ever since renewing my covenant with you, the reader, I have adopted a much more outgoing and socially conscious tone to my entries, speaking at length about the overtly self-serious topics of politics and religion,which many of you no doubt find regretful. But take heart, my hopes and dreams are still firmly anchored in trivial minutiae, and it is to that great cause which I devote this third and final lecture on moral relativity.)

Here's the thing. I do believe in a satisfying, intellectual sort-of-way that most people default to thinking about the world as either black and white or shades of grey, but I also have to accept that this premise is totally refuted by simple observations of American cinema. Generally speaking, people want a hero. Most people (if you exclude the French) feel uninvolved with stories that lack ethical polarity, where characters all mire around in the same indefinable swamp of activity that's neither very good or very bad, but just kind of...morally lame. We don't tend to like anyone in these kinds of fictional worlds, and maybe it's just because they hit a little too close to home - they make for poor allegory or fantasy fodder.

On the other hand, there does seem to be a large cross-section of the viewing public that embraces the opposite: clear moral tales where the good and evil factions are blown out into their opposite extremes. And I think many people rely on films and television for reinforcement and approval of the simplest black and white aspects of their beliefs. And yet, though low-brow action romps (where the Bad Guys are clearly marked as black-cloacked consciousless bastards - usually Asian men wearing sunglasses) may be incredibly popular, hardly anyone would accuse them of being good films, ie films of merit or importance. I would argue that the only films that can really get away with simple morality while still retaining some dignity are aimed at kids - grand epics like Lord of the Rings or Disney's typical offerings. Sure, the best of these attract just as many adults, but adults who are acknowledging at some level that they have chosen to enjoy a children's movie. Black and white ethics are stark and overly-simplified, which is perfect for kids. No one's going to fault them for that.

So if "great films" aren't going to contain obvious morality or a void of morality, where does that leave us? I personally believe that the true common ground, what people are really looking for from their cinematic landscapes, does not lie within the half-hearted swamp of 'somewhere in between,' but firmly in the worlds of both. Moral ambiguity is important - it makes for dramatic intrigue and sophisticated characters, but for whatever reason, the missing ingredient is almost always incomprehensible evil. Good is important too, I guess, but no one really struggles with Good, it's not a subject that keeps people awake at night. No, if Hollywood wants to bolster its sagging profits they'd do well to inject a little more unquantifyable menace into their recipe. And it doesn't have to be a really bad guy vs. a kind of normal guy, no (although this worked remarkably well in No Country for Old Men) - the evil just has to be in there somewhere, and it has to be dramatic.

Let me give you some examples, by illustrating what I consider to be "great" films. There's a risk here, that by showing my hand it leaves my whole argument vulnerable to subjective disagreement, but I'm willing to do it because I know I'm right. And also because these films we're chosen by other people. Here's the top 10 films from IMDB's top 250, as voted by the countless denizens of the Interwebs:

1.	9.1	The Shawshank Redemption (1994)	372,678
2.	9.1	The Godfather (1972)	317,736
3.	9.0	The Dark Knight (2008)	271,151
4.	9.0	The Godfather: Part II (1974)	180,116
5.	8.9	Buono, il brutto, il cattivo., Il (1966)	106,149
6.	8.9	Pulp Fiction (1994)	311,196
7.	8.8	Schindler's List (1993)	206,116
8.	8.8	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)	156,748
9.	8.8	Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)	217,063
10.	8.8	12 Angry Men (1957)

There are some dark films on that list. And those are the best (I'm going to mentally omit the last two, because I don't like Star Wars and 12 Angry Men kind of undermines my premise) rated films (in theory) of all time. Sampling selectively from the rest of the top twenty-five, we also get Psycho, Fight Club and The Silence of the Lamb, which all feature some pretty potently dark material, beyond the realm of most people's worldview comfort, balanced with a nuanced and very complex perspective on the vagaries of good and evil. Look at just the top three. Here we get multiple instances of confessed criminals, gangsters and vigilantes, all of whom balance poor decisions with good intentions, often trying to just make the right choice at important moments: doing right by their family and friends, fighting larger evils, etc. These films don't fit neatly into my dichotomy at all, and I think that's why they're effective. If you're going to subscribe to their worlds, the ethics aren't handed to you (or denied you altogether) - you've got to mull it over a little bit.

There's something else at work here, though. Ungraspable evil specifically goats most grey-vies, even those who normally find terms like 'good' and 'evil' impossibly over-simplified. If someone is kind of evil, and even if they've done something pretty obviously bad (like sexually assault someone), there's almost always room on the morality scale for sympathy. All you have to do is look further down the spectrum for perspective (ie people who have sexually assaulted lots of people) , and then you can start to think about what unfortunate life events must have lead to this person taking such a regrettable course of action. Well-adjusted, confident people don't spend their time dicking over others; human-on-human violence is almost always the result of fear or trauma or righteous indignation. No one really considers themselves "evil," and one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, etc. These are all platitudes obviously, but they're true, and doubly so if you've got a bit of divergent grey-ness to your worldview. But take someone who's unapologetically evil, inhumanly unremorseful, someone for whom there is no further on the morality scale to go (if you darken a pitch-black room, can anyone tell?) and that really gives something for everyone to chew on, regardless of ideological bent.