Film Media Theater 330PF - Advanced Courses in History and Theory: 'Dangerous Movies'

Kathyrn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (2012), a thriller about the CIA's hunt to track down Osama bin Laden, was highly praised by critics, but it was also widely criticized for appearing to promote torture. Movies can be morally dangerous, seemingly endorsing immoral or discriminatory ideals, or romanticizing immoral characters and behavior. And of course movies seem to have the power to promote virtue and goodness as well. In this course, we evaluate the arguments given for treating movies as moral or immoral, and we examine whether and how our moral evaluations of movies should affect our judgments of these movies. When, if ever, are movies immoral? Should movies ever be censored? Should we withhold praise from morally objectionable movies?

Prereq: 8 credits from Philosophy.