I saw a youtube interview of an addict who said he started taking painkillers regularly because he saw House doing it. Surely the writers didn’t know they were setting up some kid in suburban America up for addiction by giving him that mannerism
The whole point of publishing an idea or art piece is to influence people. Sure, some people will misinterpret it, but it should be pretty obvious that if you make a heroically brilliant protagonist dismissive of an opioid addiction that some people are going to think that's cool, especially if you're portraying that on TV. That's why Burgess wrote:
> I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation...
Kubrick's film (disclaimer: I've only read the book, I've never seen the movie) has apparently made this problem worse for Burgess. Similarly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was a deeply flawed protagonist, which readers of his books would see, but I believe that the way the character was portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the recent film/series adaptations similarly disguised those flaws and had a strong potential for some misinterpretation and more negative impacts.
One of the topics constantly running in my mind is Alan Moore saying that writing a comic, novel, movie, is an act of magic.
You write, or say, something. Other people hear, and their brain is forever changed. They will think and/or act differently.
So he truly is a wizard.
As an author, I throughly disagree with this statement. Humans like to tell stories and entertain each other.
My primary goal for publishing my stories is for people to find them enjoyable. Some of my stories have a secondary goal of showing less common perspectives for the purpose of introducing people to ideas they may not have considered.
Any idea can influence someone, but does not mean all ideas are published to influence.
But I also can't help but think of art and literature as a bit like a radio transmission. It depends on your being in tune enough to influence the receivers, or no signal comes across at all.
Despite the book's quite unflattering depiction of Wall Street firms and many of the people who worked there, many younger readers were fascinated by the life depicted. Many read it as a "how-to manual" and asked the author for additional "secrets" that he might care to share
Just because a minority wrongly take inspiration from an ill behaved character is no reason to temper a fictional character actions. Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lead to an increase in bank and train robberies?
The movie Disnified the character just like so many Grimms tales.
Doing petty crime and being misogynistic piece of shit is easier than robbing a bank.
In general society agrees that people are responsible for unintentional effects to their actions when they're obvious and predictable, such as involuntary manslaughter for killing someone while driving drunk. A reasonable person should understand the risk of that and take it into account before deciding to drive after having a number of drinks.
Where it gets more complicated and divisive is when the unintentional effects become less obvious or easily attributable.
I feel there are lots of behaviors that we're able to show empirically have negative impacts on the world yet aren't immediately obvious or unavoidably attributable, and because they're not intuitably, at-first-glance attributable there begin to be people who dismiss them despite empirical evidence proving their cause. Things like chemical dumping into rivers as an externality of an industrial process causing health impacts to surrounding communities come to mind as an example.
Where it gets even fuzzier is when impacts are social and diffuse.
A place I see a lot of discussion related to this topic is in the comedy world. You regularly see people criticize comedians for their jokes being harmful or hurtful. In my opinion these criticisms are sometimes accurate, and sometimes are inaccurate due to mistaking the topic of a joke as being the butt of it (a good example highlighting the difference I feel is Shane Gillis' jokes about autism from his standup https://youtu.be/ly14Pr2RLys, vs him calling out Andrew Shultz for jokes on the same topic but done in a derogatory manner: https://youtu.be/ENpTQ6ws3P8?t=954).
The general retort from comedians to people criticizing them is that "The intent of the joke isn't bad, it's all about the intent." I feel this is partially true, but it completely ignores the potential unintended consequences of the things they say, and the potential responsibility people have for the them.
I think this area and ones like it, involving the question of to what degree people with cultural influence should be held accountable for the unintentional impacts of their influence is really interesting and complex. I don't have much more to say beyond that I find it interesting and nuanced.
It seems that the desire to grandstand our outrage has exploded as we all now have access to our "15 minutes of fame" via our new global social platforms. Like children finding their ability to speak, society as a whole is still in a dadaistic phase. I hope that, with much time and troubles, we eventually learn to speak in a more mature way.
>I think this area and ones like it, involving the question of to what degree people with cultural influence should be held accountable for the unintentional impacts of their influence is really interesting and complex. I don't have much more to say beyond that I find it interesting and nuanced.
Well said and agreed. In our complex social web, the unintended consequences of every nuanced thing we do makes it very hard for the wise to be sure of the societal value of our beliefs and resultant actions. There are very few topics where I am comfortable fully embracing a side.
This is already enshrined in law as "negligence" and "reasonable person". It's not helpful to hold people responsible for not considering every possible outcome of what they say, including perspectives that aren't well known.
For example, I'm bipolar. Almost every media representation of bipolar individuals is reinforcing a stereotype that is actively harmful to me. I don't think the average reasonable person would be aware of this.
Bipolar is not limited to mania and depression. I call it the grab bag of issues. My brain went to the grocery store of mental illness, stuck out an arm across a shelf on aisle 3, and swept everything into the cart, like a snow plow clearing a highway.
I'm going to disagree with this. Music, movies, and TV have been proven to be very effective at influencing. While the writers may not have intended to promote drug use, they had to expect that the wrong idea might be taken away from it. Is their fault, hell no. Does it mean that a writer should take pause before writing something? Maybe, but now we're on the verge of recommending pre-censoring content. My contention is that someone putting something out for mass consumption should not be surprised by anyone coming back later and saying they were influenced by that work as it has been demonstrated time and time again. You think Salinger thought his work was going to influence serial killers?
The drug use is another thing - Sherlock used cocaine and morphine. House used Vicodin. Morphine and Vicodin are both opioids.
If they had him abuse cocaine, it would be too unrealistic. If they had him abuse Adderall, it might not be obvious to audiences that he has a substance abuse problem - people could write it off as him using it to focus. A prescription opioid is something audiences understood were abused at the time, and maintains the Sherlock connections the writers were going for.
Plus it gives plenty of plot hooks to explore the effects and consequences of addiction to someone we believe to be very successful (success is happiness, right?) in season 1
The cocaine habit is probably exaggerated. Watson does not give a frequency of his usage and reports Holmes as saying that he only uses it when he doesn't have a case to occupy his mind. Whether this means he uses it a few times a week or a few times a year is not stated.
"Which is it today," I asked, "morphine or cocaine?" "It Is cocaine," he said, "a seven-percent solution. Would you care to try it?..."
I strongly suspect mandatory opioid and cocaine testing in politics - never mind finance and law - would be a very good thing.
C'mon.
There's a huge difference between popping pills and having a local anesthetic. To even attempt to compare the two is being disingenuous at best. It's not even something prescribed to take home.
You get used to the effects. House wasn't high. He was just addicted.
Ya think? I disagree. It was product placement at the time. Now, it's hard not to call it outright drug pushing.
Despite all of that, he has crippling pain and a painkiller addiction that he’s utterly dependent on. It brings him back down to earth.
I ain't watched much of the show for a while, my wife is fond of it.
So, he canonically has more problems with drugs than social disapproval.
This doesn't contradict the fact that he's an addict, which is clearly portrayed in the show from the very beginning.
Not everything is some vast conspiracy...
How would "hey we can include your product in our TV show" be a "vast conspiracy"? It's done all the time, with no one hiding any aspect of the business.