Evil

First published in Column 8, 12.6.91            

In the last week I’ve read two reviews of a film showing in Dunedin at present. Apparently overseas critics have raved about the story in which, among other things, a character skins his female victims in order to make a coat out of them.

According to some, The Silence of the Lambs is one of the best horror movies ever made. Critics say it portrays its human monsters in an intelligent way.

No doubt the film has been made intelligently. While we may laugh at most of the horror movies of the past, the best of them – if that’s how you’d describe them – have always been made with considerable intelligence. And I don’t mean those of the Friday the 13^th ilk.

The use of intelligent writers, directors and actors, however, doesn’t mean that the producers of such sick films are concerned about the audience’s intellect, only that they are keen to make a buck – or a million of them – out of any means at their disposal.

In this century I would hazard a guess that we’ve seen more horror than at any other time in history. When I say ‘seen,’ I mean actually viewed it, whether in magazines, in the movies or on television. We’ve been bombarded with graphic pictorial records of every kind of insanity mankind can devise.

Anything to keep the dollars rolling in.

Book publishers are the same. The writer Bret Easton Ellis was paid an advance of $500,000 for the novel, American Psycho, in which an insane but ‘respectable’ killer describes in gross detail how he dismembers men, women and children. Then the publishers got cold feet at the last minute, and cancelled publication.

A glimmer of light in the darkness, you’d say. Unfortunately not. Some other publishers, who by then had the benefit of all the free advertising sent their way, came along and quite happily put the book before the public.

The determination of Viking-Penguin Press to publish The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie in spite of protests was a similar case. No matter that at least two people lost their lives as a result of a book offensive to Muslims, or that the author has been imprisoned, as it were, by his own words.

The recent authorised biography of Nancy Regan is another case. Even if every destructive word of the book had been true, and it seems very little was, its existence is an indictment against the money-greedy publishers who put it on the market.

Nevertheless they wouldn’t have had so much success with it if every newspaper in the USA hadn’t reviewed it – some of them, like the New York Times (in a quite unprecedented move), on their front pages.

Few newspapers or magazines could resist the lure, even though they may have been deriding the book. Anything to keep their readers reading their paper.

What am I trying to say? Not just that the heart of man is desperately wicked – even though few of us would care to admit it – but that when it comes to promoting evil this century seems one long downward spiral.

Maybe there is hope. As far as movies are concerned, pundits quote box office figures to show that moviegoers are mostly staying away from more distasteful films. I’d be interested to know if readers are buying less distasteful books, or people watching less distasteful videos.

Will the producers of these movies and the publishers of the books get the message? The Silence of the Lambs, for instance, is already spawning other horror-movies for ‘intelligent’ people.

Apparently the purveying of evil will go on as long as there’s money to be made out of it. Where there’s muck there’s brass.

 

The advance figure quoted above may have been in NZ dollars; the US figures was $300,000 – still a colossal sum for an advance.

Since this column was written, of course, Rushdie has continued to be a virtual prisoner as his memoir, Joseph Anton, shows, and he has been attacked in public, in 2022, being severely injured. Other people have died or being attacked.

Nancy Reagan’s biography was written by Kitty Kelley who wrote a number of similar ‘unauthorised’ biographies.

As for audiences staying away from ‘distasteful’ films, I think I was being hopeful rather than realistic.