A real leader is a person who recognizes a problem, diagnoses the situation, and takes affirmative action to remedy it, even when it may be unprecedented or unpopular. Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley has given us a good demonstration of leadership by trying to do something about a major cause of the tremendous recent increase in teenage crime.
His remedy comes to grips with the fact that violence in the movies is to the urban concentration of teenagers, minorities and unemployed what a lighted cigarette is to a parched forest. Just as the safety of the people allows us to prohibit a smoker from tossing his lighted cigarette butt out the car window, the safety of city dwellers requires that we stop the movie violence which panders to impressionable teenagers with sadism, senseless brutality, and unconscionable cruelty.
What Mayor Daley did was to persuade the Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance by a vote of 45 to 2 prohibiting the admission of anyone under age 18 to movies which are obscene or extremely violent, including such acts as “cuttings, stabbings, floggings, eye gouging, brutal kicking, and dismemberment.”
The City Council heard evidence that the average teenager in Chicago sees 11,000 murders on television before he is 18. This conditioning to brutality is then inflamed by gory violence in the movies, with blood oozing in living color.
Alderman Adeline P. Keane pinpointed the issue clearly when, in urging passage of the ordinance, she said: “Kids are mimics, and they mimic whatever they see . . . when they see this violence they are liable to act it out.”
Particularly offensive are the movies of excessive violence which cater especially to the “blacks and are called ”black exploitation” films. A sixth grade teacher who testified before the City Council called them “blaxploitation” films because they glorify criminals, “pimps, hustlers, and nonworkers, ” thereby giving wrong role-models to young blacks.
It is to be expected that yor Mayor Daley and the City Council will be condemned by the pornography profiteers who want a broad interpretation of the First Amendment to override every other moral and
constitutional value. The First Amendment, however, does not and should not include the right to obscenity, blasphemy, disturbing the peace, or incitement to crime — and that is exactly what these films do.
One of the specious arguments made against the new Chicago ordinance is that we should leave it to the movie industry to police itself. At the annual Film Festival in Cannes, France, during the last week of May, films of violence received all the prizes, despite a strong condemnation from American playwright Tennessee Williams, who was president of the jury. Williams condemned films which “take a voluptuous pleasure in spilling blood and in lingering on terrlble cruelties as though one were at a Roman circus.” He said that ”watching violence on the screen is a brutalizing experience for the spectator.”
The film selected for the top trophy at the Cannes Film Festival was “Taxi Driver.” Last month a Chicago youth saw this very movie, and then went out and shot up a Northwest Side convent.
The same rights that permit us to restrict teenage drinking, drug use, driving, and marriage permit us to prohibit movies which incite teenagers to criminal violence. Mayor Daley’s courageous action should be imitated in other big cities with the problem of escalating teenage crime.
