speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

The Excesses of State Regulation
accused of obscenity for saying no more than white performers, so
they can point to far more violent movies by Bruce Willis, Arnold
Schwarzenegger or Clint Eastwood. 65 But some black filmmakers
may be guilty of false naivete. The poster advertising "Juice"
depicted four young black men with the caption: "Juice. Power.
Respect. How far will you go to get it?" 66 An independent producer
who worked on marketing the film commented: "The vocabulary of
film and television entertainment is dominated by sex and violence.
To address real social issues in a marketable way, it is hard to avoid
the reality of that vocabulary." 67 The writer and director of "Boyz N
the Hood" insisted that the trailer focus on violence: "I wanted that
action crowd." Had he promoted the film as a story about relationships,
no one would have seen it. 68 The stakes are high: African
Americans are twice as large a proportion of movie-goers as they are
of the population. 69
Scepticism about sweeping generalisations blaming violence on
the media does not preclude causation in specific instances. Using
stringent standards of causality the criminal law of conspiracy holds
speakers responsible for their words. Parents have sued when their
9-year-old daughter was raped with a soda bottle a few days after
television portrayed a rape with a plumber's helper, and when their
adolescent sons attempted or committed suicide after listening to
heavy metal recordings by Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne. 70 The
Southern Poverty Law Center won a $7 million judgement against
the Alabama Ku Klux Klan on behalf of a black woman whose son
was lynched, and a $12.5 million award against Tom Metzger and
the White Aryan Resistance for the murder of an Ethiopian immigrant
by Portland, Oregon skinheads. 71 The sons of a contract murder
victim won a $4.4 million judgement against Soldier of Fortune
magazine, through whose advertisement the killer had been hired. 72
Yet the relationship between life and art usually is too complex to
reduce to unidirectional causality. At John Gotti's recent trial a taped
telephone conversation recorded the mobster saying: "He didn't rob
nothin'. You know why he is dying? He's gonna die because he
refused to come when I called." One prosecutor said Gotti was
copying Al Capone in "The Untouchables." A scriptwriter for
"Married to the Mob" based the protagonist, Tony (the Tiger) Russo,
partly on Gotti's performance at his 1986 racketeering trial. Dean
Stockwell, who played Russo, stayed in character off the set: "I
would get the most extraordinary reactions. Waiters, cabbies, they
would do anything for me; I was like a king." Salvatore Locascio, the
son of a Gotti co-defendant in the 1992 sequel, expressed outrage
96