单项选择题

Why does the Western movie especially have such a hold on our imagination Chiefly, I think, because it offers serious insights into the problem of violence such as can be found almost nowhere in our culture. One of the well-known peculiarities of modern civilized opinion is its refusal to acknowledge the value of violence. This refusal is virtue, but like many virtues it involves a certain willful blindness and it encourages hypocrisy. We train ourselves to be shocked or bored by cultural images of violence, and our very concept of heroism tends to be a passive one: we are less drawn to the brave young men who kill large numbers of our enemies than to the heroic prisoners who endure torture without capitulating. And in the criticism of popular culture, the presence of images of violence is often assumed to be in itself a sufficient ground for condemnation. These attitudes, however, have not reduced the element of violence in our culture but have helped to free it from moral control by letting it take on the aura of " emancipation". The celebration of acts of violence is left more and more to the irresponsible. The gangster movie, with its numerous variations, belongs to a cultural "underground" which glamorizes violence and sets it against all our higher social attitudes. It is more "modern" genre than the Western movie, perhaps even more profound, because it confronts industrial society on its own ground — the city — and because, like much of our advanced art, it gains its effects by a gross insistence on its own narrow logic. But it is anti-social, resting on fantasies of irresponsible freedom. If we are brought finally to ’’acquiesce’’ in the denial of these fantasies, it is only because they have been shown to be dangerous, not because they have given way to higher values of behaviour. In war movies, to be sure, it is possible to present violence within a framework of responsibility. But there is the disadvantage that modern war is a co-operative enterprise in which violence is largely impersonal and heroism belongs to the group more than to the individual. The hero of a war movie is most often simply a leader, and his superiority is likely to be expressed in a denial of the heroic: you are not supposed to be brave, you are supposed to get the job done and stay alive (this too, of course, is a kind of heroic posture, but a new — and "practical"— one). At its best, the war movie may represent a more civilized point of view than the Western, and if it, were not continually marred by ideological sentimentality we might hope to find it developing into a higher form of drama. But it cannot supply values we seek in the Western movies. These values are in the image of a single man who wears a gun on his thigh. The gun tells us that he lives in a world of violence, and even that he "believes in violence". But the drama is one of self-restraint: the moment of violence must come in its own time and according to its special laws, or else it is valueless. He is there to remind us of the possibility of style in an age which has put on itself the burden of pretending that style has no meaning, and, in the midst of our anxieties over the problem of violence, to suggest that even in killing or being killed we are not freed from the necessity of establishing satisfactory models of behaviour. The reason given for our acceptance of a gangster’’s downfall is our being convinced that________.

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