| With the Olympics over and the networks rolling out new fall series, culture warriors are denouncing the new immoralities and indignities Hollywood is foisting on the viewing public. In Shows About Nothing, Thomas S. Hibbs (Spence, 1999) argues that violence and glorification of evil in popular culture are only reflections of a bigger problem: the influence of nihilism in modern society. This scholarly work first seeks to define nihilism; no easy task, it turns out, for nihilism can take many different forms. Essentially, nihilism is a philosophy of despair whose believers have no lofty goals to aspire to, no credible moral codes, and no possibility of excelling without being dragged down by some malevolent force. Mr. Hibbs then traces nihilism's influence on American film and television, from the violent evil of The Exorcist to the "normal nihilism" of Seinfeld, where nothing is taken seriously, and no one ever changes. Although Mr. Hibbs offers a few rays of hope (Schindler's List is an example of a modern film going against the grain of nihilism), for the most part Shows About Nothing is a sobering look at a very real problem in a culture where, increasingly, good and evil are viewed as matters of taste with no objective difference between them. |
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