The death of reality by Gunduz Kalic

Does a culture of illusion underpin the culture of violence?  In the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre, media attention has focused tightly on, in Prime Minister John Howard’s words, the deleterious effect of violent make believe in films, videos and video games.

A federal Cabinet task force into media violence has been established yet, as Robert Manne and other observers have noted, it seems unlikely that Australia will come to grips with the issue.  Have we set the parameters of discussion too narrowly?  Our difficulty, perhaps, lies in our considering violent make believe only, in isolation from the rest of the illusion saturating our lives.

Our lingering disquiet, in the wake of Dunblane and especially Port Arthur, may lie in the fact that these tragedies, like terrorist attacks, are not only acts of violence, but also acts of performance - for the world audience.  The men who made small towns in Scotland and Tasmania household names round the world are killers, yes, but also, appallingly, actors and stars.  A means has been discovered by which, through a single well-calculated act, an ordinary member of the world audience can take global centre-stage.  And thereby rival the greatest celebrities.

What do showbusiness, the entertainment media and the performing arts have to say about the increasingly dark shadow cast by their industry?  To date, precious little.

The simple fact is that little more than a century ago, most people rarely watched plays.  When they did it was a big event in their lives.  Nowadays, we are utterly saturated with recreational and commercial make believe.  Through technology, entertainment of all kinds - including the news, lately called infotainment - is available to us around the clock.  This illusion epidemic has caught us unawares - and is creating problems and challenges for which we are unprepared.

The English drama theoretician and BBC producer Martin Esslin has suggested that the exponential increase in the usage of what he calls dramatic communications in modern societies constitutes the most important social revolution since Gutenberg introduced the printing press.  Certainly, the fact that each of us consumes a far heavier diet of illusion than our ancestors did is rarely discussed.

What is the effect upon human beings of massive, continuous and ever more powerfully realistic doses of make believe?  My observation is that saturation levels of fiction tend to turn audiences into actors in everyday life.

As has often been pointed out recently, media operators like to have it both ways.  When they talk to prospective advertisers the power of the media to induce people to buy is acknowledged as great indeed.  But they would have it that the rest of their programming - and not just the violent stuff - is utterly ineffectual in affecting the psyche of anybody.  After all, it’s only entertainment.

But modern entertainment - and the performing arts tradition from whence it comes is all about affecting people’s inner lives.  The aim of entertainment is to have us voluntarily suspend our disbelief and make us imaginatively identify with some part of the action. This is a natural and, at best, a magical pleasure - though not one without risk, as the ancients were well aware.  Plato especially warned of the power of art to affect the psyches of audiences for ill.  Yet traditionally, the closing of the curtains and the raising of the lights served as an effective enough signal to audiences that the time had come to return to their own reality.

Nowadays, the enormous increase in the sheer quantity of performed make believe is inevitably causing us to carry bits of the illusions we watch back into our own lives and behaviour.  Obviously the degree to which different people are affected at different times varies.  We may become caught up in a particular trend in dress - and notice we have done so.

Or we may thoroughly immerse ourselves in, for example, the Rocky Horror Picture Show  cult.  Most of our identifications most of the time are harmless enough in themselves.  The problem lies in the fact that we are probably affected much more often and more deeply than we know.

Theatre historian Jonas Barish has described the act of being in an audience as sustained imaginative collusion with the action.  The important thing for each of us as audience members is that this process will always elude our conscious control.  Subliminal and residual effects will occur.  That we are better educated and believe ourselves more aware of the effects and structures of media than previous generations is not much defence.

In the open, aroused state of suspended disbelief at the heart of film or and television watching, we inevitably, in our imagination, picture ourselves going beyond our usual or ‘normal’ ways of thinking, feeling and acting.  In other words, we have been involuntarily rehearsing new possibilities, putting ourselves in other shoes.  Nothing wrong with that.  But have we really and truly chosen to do so.  Are we even aware of having done so?  Our landscape, so richly full of electronic entertainment and commercial make believe, seeks constantly to invite us, one way or another, to be in the audience.

Definitely, the incessant volume of all too readily available illusion in our society clearly triggers uncontrollable effects in some people - and not only violence.  For the rest of us, the effect upon us is not least that our perceptions are often warped - illusion and reality blur together.  When Ronald Reagan was shot early in his presidency, the first reaction of one of his aides was to want to see the replay.  Several years ago, in Darwin, a mother about to commit suicide deliberately drove herself and her child off a bridge.  Some teenagers watching thought that they must be shooting a film.  After the Port Arthur massacre, survivors reported that at one and the same moment people were dying from the gunman’s bullets, running for their lives, and laughing because they thought the whole thing was some kind of show.

Arts and Communications Minister, Senator Richard Alston ought to broaden the Government’s inquiry into mass media violence and invite illusion-makers of all stripes - especially film, advertisement, and play directors - to begin work on a voluntary code of guidelines to govern the manufacture of make believe.

This article appeared in the Brisbane Courier Mail, July 16, 1996.