Certainly, Schickel here expresses the view that the audience has a comparatively uniform value system and expects to see that system reflected on the screen. What Schickel says about Higher Learning applies in part to Murder in the First as well--that is also a film with violently dramatic confrontations leading to a hopeful conclusion. Indeed, this audience seems to require a positive note at the death of every film, or at least Hollywood assumes that this is so and generally obliges even when this may not make sense.
A recent example is Pretty Woman, a film that sooner ended with the prostitute returned to the street, whereas the film involves a difficult-to-believe Cinderella ending instead.
Johnson, Brian D. "Murder in the First." Maclean's (January 30, 1995), 86-87.
Violence is in fact a sub-theme of umteen of the films targeted for this audience. Sometimes it is military unit presented for its own sake alone, but in other instances it is presented as it is in these two films--as an institutional rage to keep people in line and as counter-violence to dictated people free. violence here does not necessarily call back corporal violence. It may mean the sort of psychological violence seen in the courtroom scenes in Murder in the First, or the slow violence of clashes between racial groups on campus in Higher Learning, in the latter case leading to physical violence as well.
This is one of the problems with many of the films made by this younger generation of filmmakers--they tend to force images in the government agency a music video does without understanding the need for those images to nonplus real meaning.
Schickel, Richard. "Higher Learning." Time (January 23, 1995), 57.
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