Movie industry must do more to protect children
RE: ‘All the glamour of the Oscars where fashion was the big winner’ (Mail): when an Oscar nominee wins and accepts the prestigious award at the podium, he/she thanks the various other participants in the relevant film’s creation. For me what’s always conspicuously lacking in the brief speech is any mention of the infant or toddler ‘actors’ used in filming negatively melodramatic scenes, let alone any potential resultant harm to their very malleable psyches, perhaps even PTSD trauma.
Long before reading Sigmund Freud’s theories or those of any other academic regarding very early life trauma, I began cringing at how producers and directors of negatively melodramatic scenes – let alone the willing parents of the undoubtedly extremely upset infants and toddlers used – can comfortably conclude that no psychological harm would come to their infant/toddler actors, regardless of their screaming in bewilderment. I’d initially presumed there had to be a reliable educated consensus within the entertainment industry and psychology academia that there’s little or no such risk, otherwise the practice would logically and compassionately have ceased.
But I became increasingly doubtful of the factual accuracy of any such potential consensus.
Cannot one logically conclude by observing their turmoil-filled facial expressions that they’re perceiving, and likely cerebrally recording, the hyper-emotional scene activity around them at face value rather than as a fictitious occurrence?
I could understand the infant/ toddler-actor usage commonly occurring during a more naïve entertainment industry of the 20th century, but I still see it in contemporary small and big screen movie productions.
Animal abuse during filming rightfully isn’t tolerated, and likewise the entertainment industry shouldn’t use infants and toddlers in adversely hyper-emotional drama – especially if contemporary alternatives, such as mannequin infants and/or digital manipulation technology, can be utilised more often.
Really, I’m not at all entertained by infant and toddler ‘actors’ potentially being traumatised.
FRANK STERLE JR, White Rock, British Columbia, Canada.
Church’s wise words
IT will take the political parties a long time to recover from the belt of the crozier, which was delivered with aplomb by the Catholic bishops at a strategic moment before the referendums. Two beautifully constructed, readerfriendly sentences provided the clarity and leadership the public was crying out for and cost the referendums the Catholic vote and many more votes besides.
The proposed family amendment to the Constitution, the bishops said, ‘diminishes the unique importance of the relationship between marriage and family in the eyes of society and State and is likely to lead to a weakening of the incentive for young people to marry’. The care amendment, they added, ‘would have the effect of abolishing all reference to motherhood in the Constitution and leave unacknowledged the particular and incalculable societal contribution that mothers in the home have made and continue to make in Ireland’. Suddenly, the incomprehensible was crystal clear to me as I listened to the priest at Mass the week before the vote.
The referendums were a definite No/No for me.
In addition, the Government scored a spectacular own goal by bizarrely holding the referendum on International Women’s Day, two days before Mother’s Day, when the ‘incalculable societal contribution of mothers’ was the talk of the town. Mná na hÉireann responded by delivering a fatal knock-out punch from which there was no recovery.
BILLY RYLE, Tralee, Co. Kerry.