"The modern media has become the mother and father of all terrorism everywhere. It was also clear to me that a media in love with violence was responsible for most major crimes in our modern world from the assassinations of our leading figures, particularly in America, to the alarming spread of violence on our housing estates and soccer hooliganism in our stadiums."
Additionally, "The vision of the black rain says very clearly, to me at least, that we live in a world where most of our artists, writers and communicators are obsessed with perversion, crime and violence and this obsession is, in itself, leading the world into a growing disorder."
A media obsessed with perversion, crime and violence grows copycat violence in those who participate in its obsessions which in turn creates new images on which the media can feed.
The strength of this vision can be seen in the quantity and frequency of violent images that can be found in all forms of media. We are immersed in violent imagery whenever we watch TV, read a newspaper or play a computer game. It is commonly accepted in advertising that images can become surrogate objects of desire or other emotions but in other media this same association becomes contested. Davies is arguing for a direct link between the flood of violent imagery in the media and copycat actions in those who become obsessed with such imagery.
The weakness of the vision is in its lack of discrimination between those portrayals of violence that critique or explore the sources of violence and those portrayals that glorify violence or use it gratuitously. For example, in a Caradoc article he sees the television dramatist Dennis Potter as characterising this Romantic Mind that he identifies as a tide of evil. Potter was stereotyped in the tabloid press as Dirty Den, a sex-obsessed Mr Filth of television, but, as I wrote in an early post, he was also the TV dramatist with the most pronounced religious vision.
Davies' vision, therefore, seems to take no account of either authorial/editorial intent or the narrative of the pieces he criticises. His focus seems solely on the portrayal of violent, criminal or perverse imagery when he writes about his visions and not on the way in which these are used within the work itself. Interestingly, when it comes to his own novels we do not find an absence of violence, crime or perversion. Instead, these things are set within the moral framework of his visions and are then presumably justified by this intent and narrative. The central dilemma of Davies' writings and visions, it seems to me, is that his visions are actually expressed in the same romantic and violent imagery that they seek to critique.
At the same time as reading Davies' Testament I was also reading and reviewing Daniel A. Siedell's God in the Gallery. Siedell has a much more positive vision of contemporary culture claiming that “remarkably beautiful, compelling, and powerful” ‘altars to the unknown god’ are “strewn about the historical landscape of modern and contemporary art.” Such altars are artworks whose insights point to, but do not name, Christ. Siedell argues that such cultural artifacts and the insights they reveal and illuminate should be examined and celebrated by Christians and ultimately bent toward the gospel, making them work “as a means of apologetic grace.”
The two approaches are clearly opposed, at least when neither are nuanced. So, which is right or is there some way to hold both together? Siedell's argument if taken to its logical conclusion, which Siedell does not do, would mean that all art could be bent toward the gospel. I accept enough of Davies' argument to think that, although "beautiful, compelling and powerful altars to the unknown god" can be found in many surprising places, some artworks embody values, narratives or images whic are simply opposed to the values, narratives and images of Christianity. Juliette and Grand Theft Auto would seem to be two disparate examples.
The Christian critic then should not simply celebrate, à la Siedell, or condemn, à la Davies, but do what all good critics do by celebrating the positive and critiquing the inadequate and having some underlying methodological basis for making such judgements. However, there is a further and more post-modern means of combining aspects of the two and that is for the Christian artist or critic to re-tell or re-present narratives or images of violence in terms of their victims. This is an approach that I will explore through fiction in the final post in this series.
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Bruce Springsteen - Chimes Of Freedom.
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