Screen Guide for Americans

8. DON’T GLORIFY DEPRAVITY.

Don’t present sympathetic studies of depravity. Go easy on stories about murderers, perverts and all the rest of that sordid stuff. If you use such stories, don’t place yourself and the audience on the side of the criminal, don’t create sympathy for him, don’t give him excuses and justifications, don’t imply that he “couldn’t help it”.

If you preach that a depraved person “couldn’t help it”, you are destroying the basis of all morality. You are implying that men cannot be held responsible for their evil acts, because man has no power to choose between good and evil; if so. then all moral precepts are futile, and men must resign themselves to the idea that they are helpless, irresponsible animals. Don’t help to spread such an idea.

When you pick these stories for their purely sensational value, you do not realize that you are dealing with one of the most crucial philosophical issues. These stories represent a profoundly insidious attack on all moral principles and all religious precepts. It is a basic tenet of Marxism that man has no freedom of moral or intellectual choice; that he is only a soulless, witless collection of meat and glands, open to any sort of “conditioning” by anybody. The Communists intend to become the “conditioners.”

There is too much horror and depravity in the world at present. If people see nothing but horror and depravity on the screen, you will merely add to their despair by driving in the impression that nothing better is possible to men or can be expected of life, which is what the Communists want people to think. Communism thrives on despair. Men without hope are easily ruled.

Don’t excuse depravity. Don’t drool over weaklings as conditioned “victims of circumstances” (or of “background” or of “society”) who “couldn’t help it”. You are actually providing an excuse and an alibi for the worst instincts in the weakest members of your audiences.

Don’t tell people that man is a helpless, twisted, drooling, sniveling, neurotic weakling. Show the world an American kind of man, for a change.