Since last Friday’s mass-shooting at a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, fingers have pointed in many directions. In a New York Times op-ed, for example, film critic Roger Ebert joins others in blaming the gun lobby and “paranoid fantasies about a federal takeover of personal liberties” for slack firearms regulations. Others, like Texas congressman Louis Gohmert see connections between the shooting and “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs.” This sort of thing is normal when senseless acts of violence happen on this kind of scale—especially when the motives of the perpetrator are not readily known.
Surprisingly, while many people are drawing connections between the choreography of the shooting and the familiar imagery of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, few people are blaming the films themselves. LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan suggests that this may be because most people realize that Nolan’s films, despite their violence and “dark and disturbing” tone, do not “[revel] in the carnage” the way films like Oliver Stone’s Savages do.1 Rather, they are “determined to make us feel just how punishing and personally painful brutality really is.”
Still, when a shooter calls himself “The Joker” and carries out a massacre with cinematic precision, it’s hard not to raise tough questions about an artist’s responsibility to and for his work. So far, Christopher Nolan and his violent vision of Gotham City have not become media scapegoats, but that might change if it turns out that a gross misreading of Nolan’s work led the perpetrator to menace. I doubt that will happen, though, since the American people generally forgive artists at the end of the day.
But does that forgiveness mean the artists’ hands are clean?
This is an important question for Mormon artists, I think, because it touches on the thorny matters of agency, influence, and accountability. Mormon culture, after all, puts a premium on “uplifting” and “inspiring” art because it not only influences others to use their agency righteously, but also leaves no margin for error, no opportunity for gross, tragic misreadings. Art that dares ambiguity, nuance, and layers of meaning is more suspect—not necessarily because what it has to say is edgy or heretical, but because what it has to say is open to interpretation.
The reasons for this viewpoint in Mormon culture are many. I like to think of it as an outgrowth of a belief that salvation is partly based on the relationships we form with the living and the dead. Technically, we are only accountable for how we use our individual agency, but there’s also the expectation that we use that agency to influence others positively along the way. Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming accessories to the sins of those we either fail to influence or influence negatively (see Jacob 1:19, Mosiah 2:27, D&C 68:25, D&C 88:81-82, D&C 112:33, D&C 128:18, etc.).
For Mormon artists, such a belief can directly affect the contents of their art. For instance, a Mormon writer may rein in the transgressive violent or sexual content of her fiction for fear of appearing as if she were promoting or even glorifying it. As a phenomenon like CleanFlicks demonstrates, Mormon audiences are notorious for the way they dissociate content from context. No matter what virtuous end it may serve, if something sinful happens on stage, page, or screen, it immediately becomes excisable. Cut it out, the reasoning goes, if it has the potential to lead others astray.
The results of this are familiar: bloodless vampire stories, “clean” romance, non-violent action/adventure, minimally thrilling thrillers. With few exceptions, Mormon artists—including those who toy with the murky boundary between “appropriate” and “innapropriate”—tend to play on the safe side. Often, the part of us that scorns censorship and idealizes the free-wheeling artist figure decries this aspect of Mormon culture. As “sophisticated” readers, we resent our fellow Mormons for their inability to contextualize and interpret what is “clearly” a moral depiction of immorality. We ask, “Why can’t they see the fallacy—the danger!—of their simple dualistic thinking?”
Admittedly, I’m one of these “sophisticated” Mormon readers. When I read, say, the line in For the Strength of Youth that counsels young men and women to “not attend, view, or participate in anything that is vulgar, immoral, violent, or pornographic in any way,” my impulse is to deconstruct and rationalize rather than follow it to the letter.2 At the same time, however, I agree with Flannery O’Connor when she says that the very thing that “leads the writer to his salvation may lead the reader into sin” (148). The creation and reception of art are subjective experiences, the very nexus of art and agency, and it seems naïve to expect artists and their audience to always be of one mind.
Or does it? Because agency exists, artists cannot wholly dictate how an audience receives their work, but skilled artists often know their audience well enough to anticipate its reactions. Knowing this, then, do artists—especially Mormon artists—have a moral obligation to do what they can to ensure that their work is not misread? Or does the art justify the risk—even when the consequences turn out to be dire?
These are, again, tough questions for Mormon artists. No artist, after all, wants his or her work to be the site of tragedy—especially when it’s within his or her power to prevent it. Moral obligations, however, are not always about prevention, and sometimes moral messages need ambiguity, nuance, and layers of meaning to work their full effect. How, then, are Mormon artists supposed to proceed through this plain of agency, influence, and accountability? Should they play it safe or take the risk?
 I reference Savages herebecause Turan does. I’ve seen not it or The Dark Knight Rises (yet).
 “Wait! Wouldn’t that eliminate the scriptures? Don’t they have vulgarity, immorality, violence, and even pornography?”