In being able to engage an
audience both visually and audibly, and to do so at close range—something we
don’t get from watching a play on a distant stage—the medium of film is capable
of resonating with, challenging, and rebounding from both heart and mind. That
is to say, the medium can engage us at a comparatively deep level and even
touch us profoundly. The medium can tug at our ethical strings and even provoke
uncomfortable thoughts and feelings precisely because sound and image can
conjoin at close range such that we are brought closer to an ethical harm than is
likely in our own daily experiences. Some ethical harms, such as that in a
young woman not being able to stop a rape by an older man abusing a stark power
differential, may simply be too horrific up close to experience even
vicariously. A filmmaker can use devices, whether photographic, audio, or
narrative, to moderate our exposure without sacrificing the depth at which the
harm and its sordid scenario can reach in us. Such exposure to ethical problems
or even to situations in which the ethical verdict is debatable can give to an
audience a better realization of the ethical dimension of the human condition
and improve our ability to render ethical judgements on specific issues and
generally. Writ large, the medium of film can do these things for a society,
reflecting and even provoking it with just enough directness to be palatable
and grasped. The genre of science fiction in particular has been used to serve
this purpose. Even by contrasting an original film with its remake decades
later, a society’s changing nature can be glimpsed by an audience, especially
as censorship guidelines are loosened as per changing social mores and ethical
sensibilities of a society. The fictional film, Lolita (1962), and its
remake, Lolita (1997), provide us with an excellent case study not only
of changes in twentieth-century American society, but also of how powerful the
medium of film can be in its treatment of the ethical dimension of the human
condition.
The full essay is at "Lolita."
