When Senator Bob Dole attacked Hollywood and the music industry last spring, it was hardly a surprise. Nor had it been a shock when President Bill Clinton, in his 1995 state of the union speech, urged Hollywood to reconsider the impact of "violence and irresponsible conduct that permeates our media."
What else would a politician say -- especially if he's running for president? Fewer actions are more likely to win approval than attacking popular culture from the moral high ground. One suspects that even in primitive times, whether it involved stories told around a campfire, a new dance from the next village, or the shows put on by traveling players, the people's entertainment was never looked on too fondly by those in charge of the community's morals.
The Catholic Church historically has been divided between its role as patron and preserver of the arts -- especially during the long dark ages -- and its profound understanding that art, fun and beauty, while great gifts, are not ultimate values. American Catholics have seen the church grind away at popular entertainment as the enemy for most of this century. In recent years, though, the official tone has been gentler. The angry stuff with a doomsday flavor has come from individual church leaders or aggressive watchdogs like the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
The major 1995 controversy involved Priest, a British import originally made for the BBC's highbrow Channel Four. It was a sincere but doleful study of several English parish priests in conflict with both hierarchy and their parishioners over sexual issues, both straight and gay. Even before it opened, the film was briefly rescued from art-house oblivion by a hugely publicized attack by the Catholic League and some bishops. Still, it received a passing A-4 (adults with reservations) rating from the bishops' own U.S. Catholic Conference.
Since Miramax, the distribution company, had recently been purchased by Disney, the affair aroused calls for protest and boycott that produced no obvious results, although it may have stirred some caution at Disney. But Priest posed no threat to the church or public morality; it wasn't even going to be seen by more than a few movie buffs in little cinemas in big cities. Still, some moralists couldn't help pummeling it, even if it meant boosting its box office.
An off-center, art-house movie, Priest, like such earlier examples as Hail Mary, The Last Temptation of Christ and True Romance, was easily pegged by critics as somehow "outrageous." Much less likely to be attacked are films that may do the most harm because they are hugely popular both in theaters and on video. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Basic Instinct, True Lies and the Home Alone series come to mind, although identifying "harmful" movies is clearly a subjective business.
The heaviest assault on the culture, however, has always emanated from conservative Protestant sources. For those who know history, that's no surprise. From the days of Plymouth Rock, the puritanical strain in American Protestantism has been zealously anti-art, anti-pleasure, anti-entertainment. Fundamentalism does not compromise with Satan: Why waste time watching movies or baseball when you could be in church?
As politicians know well, attacks on popular culture still resonate best among Calvinist-influenced Christians. As the so-called "religious right" grows and becomes more politically sophisticated, more Americans seem influenced by its agenda. In a June 1995 national survey, 77 percent of Americans were "very concerned" or "fairly concerned" about violence (70 percent about sex) in movies, TV shows and popular music.
Sex and violence in the media are fixed in the national psyche as part of the decline-and-decadence syndrome. Isn't it getting worse? And isn't that why the country's morals are shot, and the crime rate and illegitimacy are going through the roof, and you can't walk down your neighborhood streets, and more taxes are needed for law enforcement and prisons and welfare?
We all know the routine arguments and fear they are true, even if they come from those with vested interests in alarming us -- the politicians, who need to divert attention from problems they can actually do something about; the clergy, who have a sincere interest in moral danger; and the news media, who need crises on a regular basis. It's especially easy to arouse the fears of adults who see only one or two movies a year and read about the latest film or pop music sensation in Time or Newsweek.
In his blast, Senator Dole fixed on True Romance and two 1994 films, Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers. All, oddly enough, can be attributed to the sensibility of a Hollywood outsider, 30ish newcomer and sometime Catholic Quentin Tarantino, either as a writer or director. His hip style is to mock sex and violence with humor and exaggeration, a fact audiences comprehend quickly but is not easily explained to someone who seldom sees movies. Even more oddly, Tarantino and Dole probably basically agree on pop culture's obsessions and trashiness.
Two more recent films under attack were The Bridges of Madison County, for adultery, and Kids, for general debauchery. The first is popular, the second is art-house, but again if you seethese movies, you realize the film version of Bridges is not simply pro-adultery, and that Kids, while hardly art, is decidedly against what's happening to "kids" these days.
Some pop trends -- in music, gansta rap and its defiant violence and misogyny; in comedy, the vulgarity and general raunch; in all media, the easy sexuality and exploitation -- defy understanding. Most of these art forms are aimed at the young: The vast majority of moviegoers or pop music fans is under 35. It almost seems like a conspiracy to corrupt a generation.
Changing things, however, presents a policy dilemma. Few want censorship, even if it were legally possible. Trying to intimidate the popular arts can backfire. In the past, we've had bland movies (from Mickey Rooney to Doris Day) and sappy songs (pick your own elevator music), and they haven't been the answer.
The latest political attacks also have had an ironic edge. They amount to free-market ideologists pleading with entertainment executives to forego profits for the perceived common good -- a plea that is unlikely in, say, the jeans or tobacco business. The critics are paternalist in morality but antipaternalist is areas of economics and social change.
Show business -- especially movies, TV and music -- is one of the few American industries with a favorable foreign trade balance. It's a smash around the world. The foreign market now accounts for more than half of the movie industry's worldwide gross income. Action movies aren't intended solely to attract American teens. Violent films like Die Hard and Terminator do well overseas, sometimes even double the U.S. gross. Even mild moneymakers (Sliver, Robocop 3, Perfect World) do splendidly abroad. Big stateside hits (Jurassic Park, The Lion King, Forrest Gump) soar off the charts in Europe and Asia.
Nearly all of this "product" is produced by mega-corporations: Disney-Buena Vista, now linked with Capital Cities-ABC Broadcasting; Time Warner, which owns HBO Cinemax and at this writing ponders a merger with Turner/CNN; Paramount Communications-Viacom-Blockbuster; Universal, linked with the Dutch music giant Polygram; Sony-Columbia-Tri-Star; and Fox, newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch's worldwide broadcast and film conglomerate. Given that Disney grossed roughly a billion each last year from both stateside and foreign markets, how quaint to think the profitability of Priest for one of its subsidiaries could cause even a blip on the seismograph.
Thanks to mutual funds, mega-companies have millions of investors and stockholders. It's not a few greedy guys in Guccis who make money from violent or sexy movies, but people saving for retirement; the same people who made money from investments in South Africa. Last year, violent films like True Lies made $210 million; Demolition Man, $101 million; and Pulp Fiction, $51 million, overseas. What would investors in Omaha and Buffalo think if those films were not made or not released?
"The free market that the economic conservatives champion undermines the moral character that the social conservatives desire," Senator Bill Bradley has said. Or, as Jeffrey Rosen put it in The New Yorker, "Republicans who glorify the market and demand the abolition of PBS and the NEA can hardly complain when the market produces Snoop Doggy Dogg." Or Showgirls or Pulp Fiction.
How did all this bad stuff get here? Some kind of plot? No, unfortunately. You need a sinless world to have a sinless culture, unless you artificially create one, as movies did in the era of the Production Code. That won't happen again soon.
Father Ron Rolheiser, a columnist published in the Catholic press, has noted that, in recent decades, all our major institutions have been attacked and discredited: business, the church, the media, the military, sports, medicine, science and education, the courts -- perhaps government most of all. Is it any wonder that major characteristics of the arts include irreverence, cynicism and some bad words? It puts more sex and violence in a different perspective.
Catholic writer Louis Pintar blames the "cultural climate," the classic zeitgeist. It's different in the 1990s. Older generations often assume this intangible "climate" is the same as it was when they were young. This change happens to every generation, and none of us cope with it very well.
Pintar cites the wonderful image in Ghostbusters II of the River of Slime, the monstrous polluted stream that runs under the city, created by all the little meanness and rotten actions committed by everybody every day. They all go into the river, and sometimes it floods. Now could be one of those times.
Violence has been pandemic in movies, especially those aimed at young males, since the demise of the Production Code and the start of the "parental guidance" rating system in the 1960s. Consider just the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Steven Seagal or Bruce Willis or dozens of other action heroes. It is a cinema of anger, conflict, mutilation.
The subject has been researched to death, and we know that exposure to fantasy violence in this very realistic medium affects the behavior of some people under some circumstances. These are often people already primed to act violently by their real-life conditions. Others, especially the immature, are desensitized -- they get "used to" violence. When it happens in reality, they are unmoved.
Human attraction to violence is not new. Every human society has struggled to control this dark impulse. In 18th century England, according to historian V.A.C. Gatrell, hangings had developed "into vast drunken, disorderly, semi-riotous carnival proceedings in which huge mobs of up to 4,000 people sometimes took control of the show." The curious came early to get the best view, caroused all night, and by the following morning were an inebriated horde. Horrific examples could go on and on.
In this context, the taste for fake violence on stage or screen, which has been popular since the Greeks and Shakespeare and, in America, especially since the late 19th century, seems more like moral progress. On the other hand, hangings didn't occur frequently. Our own times are different because the media can show us sensations and horrors every minute, every day.
Escape from the darker sides of human nature used to be possible. Parents, if they were middle-class and lucky, could control what their children saw. Now, by a tender age, even the most sheltered children have been exposed to the worst, at least in their imaginations.
So who will protect us? Public-spirited moguls who are CEO's of vast corporate enterprises? The V-chip in our television sets? The regulators of local or national government? The advertisers who covet TV's largest possible audience of 18-to-49-year-olds? Some zealous Calvinist preachers?
And who will warn us of the subtler dangers that lurk in the songs and stories our artists create for us? How often do they define success as the acquisition of money, fame, sex appeal and power? Do we worry enough about the comedians and sitcoms that find humor in hostility and attack, especially on the weakest elements of society? And does Mickey Mouse's recent hegemony over the national culture (via the Time Warner/ABC merger) raise any doubts, back there in the recesses of our minds?
The answer seems clear. We must take care of ourselves.
Some comforting ideas are worth considering. First, our arts and entertainment is never as bad as people publicly claim it is. As proof of the danger of today's pop culture, Hollywood critics invariably cite movies they have misunderstood, often because they have neglected to watch them. Dan Quayle criticized Murphy Brown for promoting the idea of single motherhood, when the sitcom could as easily have been praised for encouraging women to reject abortion. Dole shuddered at Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, written by Tarantino, which is one of the few movies ever made to support the thesis that media have a hugely corrupting influence on American youth. Dole blasted a movie that argued his own case.
No doubt anyone could list some 1995 movies that would turn little children and their parents into stone, perhaps including Disclosure, Showgirls, Strange Days and Kids. But these films were not intended for children, and you often had to search to find them.
What moviemakers do right is largely ignored. In attacks on the general depravity of Hollywood, critics scrounge for the bad apples while tossing the rest of the barrel overboard. A list of recent "morally positive" films is about 10 times longer than the negative list, and includes such obvious 1995 examples as Smoke, Before Sunrise, Little Women, Hoop Dreams, The Little Princess, Apollo 13, Babe, and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? And some films, including To Die For and Plato and his famous attack in the Republic on the poets he believed would undermine the morality of his ideal state. My own yellowed clippings suggest that authorities have been complaining about decadent trends in the arts about every three years this century. The argument itself is good, since it forces both sides to adjust and moderate. If the state is too restrictive or the arts are irresponsible, society is in a disruptive situation.
Of course, every generation thinks "things are worse" today than they were in the past. Much nonsense has been written recently about how good it was to grow up in the 1930s or 1950s, when families were presumably strong, children were protected by certitudes about manners and values, and heroes populated the media, from John Wayne's cowboy and war heroes to St. Bernadette, Shane and Jackie Robinson.
But anyone who actually grew up in those decades knows that even then the arts were under attack for their corrupting influence. The infamous "condemned" rating from the Legion of Decency was not a rare event in its 1930-60 era. Controversial movies of the time ranged from Gone with the Wind (that famous "damn") and Tobacco Road to Chaplin's Modern Times and movies starring Mae West and W.C. Fields or directed by Fellini.
The movies were completely under self-censorship by the Production Code, written and enforced by Catholics Joseph Breen and Father Daniel Lord, and most of the films were inept and full of illusions. How little of the truth they revealed about the lives of real people.
Still, this doesn't excuse the excesses in some films today. Among the worst is the obligatory expression of physical love, since one of the reasons young adults undoubtedly go to the movies is to learn how to behave with the opposite sex. But a yearning for the code years, when all aspects of human sexuality were a total mystery, is misdirected.
Another surprising nostalgia among many conservatives today is for the Victorian era. Much of the 20th century debate on public morality can be interpreted as a complex struggle between modern "liberation" and Victorian "repression."
Thus, Victorians stigmatized pre-marital sex, and the removal of that stigma, it could be argued, has created enormous social woe. But could we really return to a system in which young women (chiefly) were ostracized for breaking that taboo?
Movies and the arts have, no doubt, been generally on the "liberation" side in this contest. To the extent that they have undermined certain virtues, like chastity, they have contributed to moral and social mischief. But Victorian ideals were doomed by their own flaws, and no movie code could have stopped the sexual revolution of this century.
The real change in movies over the last five decades has been from a family medium, in which the product was not always designed for children but assumed the presence of children in the theatre, to a medium in which child and adult audiences are segregated.
The points of irritation in the new system are easily identified if not easily soothed: (1) the frankness and unpredictable taste levels of adult films alienates some adults; (2) the "leakage" of children into films aimed at adults; (3) the problem of adolescents (not quite children, not quite adults) and the impact on them of exposure to the full range of adult films.
The third is one that most resists solution. But face it, bringing children intelligently through their transformation years -- in a relatively unfettered society like our own -- is the most difficult task of parenthood. Helping children learn how to cope with adult movies is relatively minor compared with helping them adjust to the universe of American adult life.
It has always been the Catholic tradition not to retreat from the world but to enter and engage, to discover God's presence there and to bring him into places where he appears to be absent. We have always believed that the world is not perfect, but that it responds to grace.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who urged us to "find God in all things," might have agreed that God can be found in movies as divergent as Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump and in "the signs of the times." As Franciscan Father Richard Rohr advises, "The Catholic way is to stay incarnate as Jesus did, in the middle of the world, in the middle of the city, in the middle of the culture, in the middle of the problems. The trouble is, when you do that, it's a great risk."
It is a gift, an opportunity as well as a danger. The culture today searches desperately for insights. Often it comes close enough to wisdom to give us heart and inspiration. We must identify and cherish what is good. No magic will fix the spirit of a haunted world, expressing itself in the stories we tell each other.
It doesn't help to say, "Don't tell so many cruel, loveless stories ... they frighten our children." We should get into the dialogue. Something like Gump, when he said, "I'm not very smart, but I know what love is."