The Godfather
This 1972 film, The Godfather, is known for its powerful and violent imagery as well as known for its artistic and classic movie qualities. In James Harold’s A Moral Never-Never Land: Identifying with Tony Soprano, he analyzes The Sopranos television series and discusses the questions about morality brought up by watching the TV show. Much like The Sopranos, The Godfather brings up questions about watching/enjoying violent art. The movie is a work of art and considered a classic movie. Can enjoying mobster/gang movies that involve underworld crime, sex, and violence corrupt a person morally?
I think that art can affect people deeply and emotionally. Art is created for the very purpose of evoking a certain emotion or thought. Movies are specifically a form of art to create an experience for the viewers that the director wants to portray. Therefore, movies have a tendency to bring out strong emotional responses in the audience from the images on the screen. These emotions, if not controlled, can bring out the violent behavior portrayed in movies like The Godfather. However, the ability to react appropriately to emotions is a character of adulthood and from my experience, many movies do not cause me to act out violently just because the movie was violent. If anything, The Godfather convinces me that a life of crime and violence is horrible and that each character who gets involved in the wrong thing with the wrong people is punished. Movies can provide an experience of these emotions and provide a message, such as a message of evil being punished, to prevent people from living life in this violent way. My final thoughts are that movies can evoke strong emotions in everyone, emotions that could cause harm, but these emotions can be controlled and appropriately dealt with, even by the movies that brought them out. It’s just very important to have ratings for movie to prevent younger audiences with weaker constitutions from viewing these movies and not being able to control these emotions.
