For Whom the Bells Toll

I saw the movie “Shaft” on the same day that 200 protesters marched against violence in predominantly black South-Central L.A. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

The juxtaposition was a perfect metaphor for the conflicting values of a society out of control. On the one hand, a cry for peace. On the other, a cry for box office.

“Shaft” is a stupid, brutal movie with a black “hero” who manages, in the name of skewered justice, to violate just about every precept of decent human behavior and emerge unscathed.

A couple of hundred black kids cheered and clapped as Samuel L. Jackson smashed and shot his way through a film utterly devoid of any redeeming qualities, offering the message that it’s OK to be above the law if you’re a really supercool dude.

And as this message was battering itself into the heads of the kids at the theater, men, women and children were on the streets trying to envision a world, or at least a neighborhood, without violence.

The marchers walked through some of South-Central’s most troubled areas and ended up at Gompers Middle School, near the scene of a recent shooting that wounded two students.

“Our babies are dying,” said one speaker to a crowd far smaller than what the march sponsors had hoped for. “This is not a game. We are burying our own children.”

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I chose to see and write about “Shaft” because crime has seen its greatest increase in areas where many African Americans live. The neighborhoods deserve better.

Violence is a disease that ultimately crosses all color lines. Like a deadly, airborne virus, it permeates all areas of a society with little regard for background or status.

The people we love are in as much peril as the people others love across town. To paraphrase the poet John Donne, we’re not islands anymore. We’re part of the whole, diminished by the violent deaths of any human. His words are as relevant today as they were 400 years ago: “And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

I’m tired of bells tolling for those who die too soon. I’m tired of seeing flowers propped against a fence to memorialize a gang victim. I’m tired of candlelight marches, headlines and news bulletins that tell us how brutal we are.

The phrase “gang-related” has become a mantra of our age, and I fear we’ve become desensitized to the condition, accepting the gunfire as a perverted rite of manhood.

It was only “gang-related,” but it killed a police chief’s granddaughter. It was only gang-related, but it killed a father picking up children at a neighborhood playground. It was only gang-related, but it killed a boy sitting in his living room.

Meetings to address the problem bubble with rage and promises, but we’ve heard both before, and the killings go on.

So we march and we meet and we memorialize and we write and we pray, and the solemn bells toll.

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“Shaft” bothered me on many levels. Movies made for the simple reason of selling violence, white or black, are appalling contributions to a culture that doesn’t need a role model who smashes faces and kills with impunity.

I’ve searched hard for any redeeming social message in “Shaft,” any purpose for its creation, other than raking in the $10 million on the weekend that parents and children were marching against violence in South-Central L.A.

And I’ve read the opinions of others, including Time magazine columnist Jack E. White, an African American, whose plaintive speculation strikes a chord: “If only Hollywood did not have such an exploitative view of the young black urban audience this gratuitously violent and graceless remake of Shaft is meant to attract!”

If only.

Am I overreacting? “Entertainment” rarely alters the movements of cultures, and I suppose even dumb, exploitative movies fall into that category.

The Rev. Leonard Jackson, associate minister of South-Central’s First AME Church, worries more about violent cartoons and blatant sex than about movies like “Shaft.”

But then he admits that young people who participate in programs at the church have trouble distinguishing between reality and fiction. And therein may lie the biggest danger of all in a society that spends more money on movies than education. The line that separates the real from the unreal is blurring, and one day may not exist at all.

I don’t believe movies alone direct conduct. But I do believe we don’t need one more negative influence in a world that already has too many.

Please God, no more flowers. No more candles. No more tolling bells that summon us too often to the gravesides of the young.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com