'Scarface' School Play

Music video director Marc Klasfeld has released a controversial new YouTube video depicting a phony school play based on Al Pacino's Scarface. In the video, young children under the age of 10 are shockingly depicted in a famous scene from the 1980s film, in which Michelle Pfeiffer confronts Al Pacino's Cuban gangster crimelord.

The video was quickly exposed as a hoax. It is not a real school play, but rather a tongue-in-cheek satire with professional child actors on stage, and an audience made up of the cast's friends and family.

We are getting into all kinds of strange territory now, and the standards for content online should perhaps be examined. Some of the issues here include:

1. No matter what the director's intentions, these are still children being used in a very inappropriate experiment. Exposing them to this film and its contents means showing them extreme violence, with scenes depicting domestic abuse, dismemberment, drug abuse, murder, and more.
2. The parents who consented to allow their children into this video could be called into question, as could the agency that booked the talent. Parents of child actors are frequently found to be exposing their children to age-inappropriate and potentially exploitative situations.
3. The filmmaker is a provocateur who is perhaps sending a message about the exploitation of children in media. YouTube is full of cute videos with children using foul language and the like. Most of these are home videos, put online for their strange cute appeal. But this is a professional production, and so the professional ethics of the entertainers have to be examined.

Agencies employing child actors no doubt have ethical codes protecting their talent from entering into dangerous situations. In the case of questionable material like this, it is not the circumstances of the making of the film, but the content itself that is the issue. The children were most likely treated well and were paid, and their parents had to consent to allow them to do this.

It is possible that our discomfort will subside and we will see that there are more harmful issues involving children in entertainment. This video may not be the worst example of what is out there. But in an unregulated system like youtube, where controversy drives viewers to the site, many times it is the questionable material that winds up getting the most exposure.

YouTube contains other far more dangerous material, including combat footage from the middle east, videos of gang violence and group beatings, and more. The site is best known for its controversial content. So does all of this material present a case for new regulations to be imposed on online video? And how can such a widely used resource like youtube, where waves of content are uploaded every day, ever be controlled?