Final Draft

Amy McLean

Kaleigh Spooner

WRTG 150

September 29, 2014

The Flood of Immorality in the Media

            I am a student, and like all the other students out there, I have watched my fair share of Netflix while procrastinating homework. The struggle is familiar to all of us: you have finished the last season…what do you do now? Aimlessly browsing can lead to you finding your favorite show in the whole world, but most of the time its only fruits are boredom and frustration. So you start looking up the shows that are popular, you know the ones, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, or Game of Thrones. It only takes a few seconds before you are accosted with images that stick in your head long after the episode is over. I’m talking about all the violence and sex that is portrayed in today’s movies and TV shows. Writers and producers today stuff the media to the brim with the “sensational,” crossing lines of traditional values that should not be crossed. This has been coming on since popular media was created; writers wanted to do something different, to make their name in the world, so they would go slightly beyond what society at large taught, blurring the hard lines of morality and trespassing into the gray area. Today it has gone beyond the grey area. The lines are no longer simply blurred; they are gone, erased for all time by the revenue that applying to these base instincts brings in. The media has gone too far in its willingness to portray things that were entirely taboo subjects fifty shades of gray ago. We need morality in the media. We as a society need to reaffirm the limits that once existed on what could and could not be shown on screen, and we as individuals need to reaffirm our limits of what we are willing to watch.

            First of all, what is morality? Websters dictionary defines it as beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior; or the degree to which something is right and good. Some might argue that the first definition is all that morality is: a belief. It is nothing but an individual standard and that there is no overarching code of right or wrong that goes beyond one person’s opinion: morality is nothing but an opinion held by a person. George Washington said that “Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.” If people cannot agree on what is right and wrong, crime rates increase and the society becomes less stable. When a society has a clear set of morals, it is more stable and produces a better quality of living for everyone involved.

Our society used to be more united on our morals; they are still reflected in our laws, such as that against murder.  But if we believe that killing is wrong, which is one of the few standards that it seems we can all still agree on, then why do we get such enjoyment out of watching people die? I cannot answer that question and I will not try to, but it is an observable fact that our society is now unable to agree on what is right and wrong, so, for the sake of the argument, I’m going to appeal to religion, which has traditionally been the foundation for common morality. It is recorded in the Bible that God gave ten unchangeable commandments to the children of Israel, two of which were, “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not commit adultery.” In the meridian of time, Christ further emphasized and expanded these commandments to say that you should not be angry or lustful.  When producers choose to show gory violence, viewers are witnessing glorified murder, and is there any question that when TV shows use sex and nudity to attract viewers they are marketing to pure lust?

When you stop to think about it, what these shows appeal to is our basic animal instincts. Animals are driven by instinct to reproduce and hunt and eat. We as humans have been blessed with a higher intellect and should live more altruisticly, not being held captive to our natural instincts. “for the natural man is an enemy to God” if we ever hope to live in Joy as He does, we cannot be constantly catering to our basest instincts. But movies and TV are now constantly relying on these basic animal instincts to obtain viewers. Shows both use sex and violence as tools to obtain viewers, and unfortunately, yes, it works in many cases. However, this use of sensationalism has the potential to destroy creativity in the media. As long as a show has enough “excitement,” often in the form of sex and violence, writers don’t need to have a creative plot or three dimensional characters to keep viewers interested for the whole film or series. We can see this laziness of Hollywood creeping in in different respects as well: there always seems to be nothing but sequels and reboots on the menu of new releases. The media is getting lazy, substituting explosions for plot and love scenes for complex characters. Allowing writing and producers to use sex and violence to get viewers does not encourage writers to reach their artistic potential, instead it encourages them to exert the least amount of effort possible in their writing and creative process.

 I believe that we as a society have grown tired of the laziness that Hollywood is increasingly falling prey to. We hunger for works that entertain without offending, that feed our minds instead of just our carnal instincts. A few movies come to mind that, in the past few years, have had huge commercial and popular success in all age demographics, despite, or perhaps because of, that fact that they were squeaky clean: free of gory violence and overt sexual elements. Frozen, although originally geared toward children, was a success among adults, even those who do not have children to go watch it with. The Lego Movie, a financially successful and popular film, was marketed to young adults as well, even though young adults are the demographic that most of the immoral media we have been discussing is written for. There are also examples of films like The Princess Bride that have remained popular through the chaotic shifting of virtues that characterizes the time that we live in. The popularity of these movies and other clean media sources shows that society at least enjoys, if not craves, cleaner sources of entertainment.        

            In conclusion, the media has crossed lines of what should be shown in terms of sex and violence. These activities are immoral according to God’s laws and we should not be watching them depicted in increasingly vivid ways. I don’t know if we can turn back the tide of increasing immorality in the media, but we can chose not to let it drown us. Find the moral high ground. Rise above the floodwaters. And when the flood is gone, we will remain