Illusion trade in need of tighter rein   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 the words of the Prime Minister John Howard, the deleterious effect of violent make believe in films, videos and video games.

Yet with the Federal Cabinet task force into censorship and media violence about to report there is the real risk that we have 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.

The simple fact is that little more than a century ago, most people rarely watched plays.  When they did so it was a big event in their lives.  Nowadays, we are utterly saturated with recreational and commercial make-believe.  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 has suggested that the exponential increase in the usage of what he calls ‘dramatic communication’ 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 every more powerfully realistic doses of make-believe?  My observation is that saturation levels of fiction tend to turn audiences into actors in everyday life.

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 ill effects of the power of art on the psyches of audiences.  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.  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.

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 suiciding mother deliberately drove herself and her child off a bridge.  Some teenagers watching thought that "they must be shooting a film".  Following 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.

Virtual reality is on its way, yet is in a sense already here.  As audiences, we are increasingly - and ever more vividly - drawn into our entertainment "as if" it is really us "right there" in the action.  Within the universe of make-believe surrounding us, anything goes.

Entertainment has become the latest and greatest drug of choice.  Audiences who once upon a time participated in artistic creations as witnesses or who sometimes had a bit of light relief through watching an occasional entertainment, now pop the illusion tablet with hardly a second thought, many times a day.  Imagine the ancient Greeks watching their tragedies and comedies everyday, all day, throughout the year.  And hyping a substantial part of their commerce with their performance skills to boot.

At key historical moments, societies wake up to destructive or self-destructive practices and begin the long and arduous task of reversing the damage. It’s time now to take a good hard look at the illusion industry’s open slather, which, unnoticed, has been disintegrating individuals and society alike.

This article appeared in the Australian Financial Review, June 26, 1996.