Old movies, old mores

Anyone who has ever watched a few movies from the 1950s may have noticed how the emotional temperature tends to be lower than modern offerings. Apart from a few very young actors, all the actors and producers involved in a 1950s film lived through World War II. Life may be a serious matter but war is far worse and fifties people knew that – the knowledge was in their bones. Old movies project a stoical determination to sort things out rationally because that is the best way and at that time everyone knew it. Just soldier on – they knew what that meant.

Certainly fifties movies had lower budgets, less convincing special effects, more limited locations and more obvious studio work. Mrs H thinks many of the actresses weren’t very good either but that’s another issue. Yet to my mind the major difference is emotional.

Fifties characters had emotional outbursts but they tended to be more restrained and they subsided more quickly. A cup of tea or a cigarette were the main inducements to get over it and carry on. Modern movies depict characters who seem to be on a semi-permanent emotional binge. Not only that but they seem to value frequent emotional binges as an important aspect of their lives, as if it adds something essential to their personality.

We see the effect in politics where rational arguments are powerless against permanent emotional barriers to any kind of rational debate. As if inarticulate emotion is a valid and acceptable response – as if it means something deeper than mere reason could ever elucidate.

Suppose we leave that for a moment and move on TV soaps such as EastEnders. Here again the emotional temperature never returns to something sane people would regard as rational. A permanent churlish abundance of anger, resentment, sneering, shouting, contempt and dull-witted idiocy. At least a few people at the BBC must surely find it shameful, yet year after year the same miserable imbecility is pumped into the airwaves.

I don’t know how much damage it does to a civilisation such as ours, but it is virtually impossible to imagine how it could cause no damage at all. The core problem is its essential mendacity. The world is not as EastEnders depicts it and neither are the people. Mendacity is a key to the damage and it comes across as deliberate. It could hardly be accidental.

Maybe this is the real damage and the real message of mainstream drama in movies and TV. It says you don’t have to argue rationally – cursing, swearing and emotional incontinence are easier, more fashionable and completely acceptable. Emotional mendacity is okay – that’s the message.

All obvious enough but where does it take us? To my mind it takes us away from the emotional highs to lower level emotional mendacity which is more pervasive and more acceptable in polite society. The frown, the shrug, the slight moue of distaste, the raised eyebrow, the hand waving. Social acceptance and social rejection – emotionally it is made clear which is which and don’t you dare try to counteract it with reason.

This is where emotional mendacity probably does its real damage. Round the dinner table, in private political discussions, mainstream news outlets, media presentations, documentaries, mainstream comedy, movies, TV drama, charity campaigns, popular science, popular history, environmental campaigns. Even pandemic campaigns.

Ultimately, the emotional mendacity of our era is strongly associated with totalitarian politics. In the 1950s they knew that and it was reflected in movies of the period. We don’t know it now and this is reflected in the movies of our period. And much else.