Violent Fantasy: It's not the Hollywood Gore that's the problem - moral relativism at heart of problems with mass media

National Review, Oct 23, 2000 by Jonah Goldberg

Violence in popular entertainment, then, has a complicated history; it's neither new nor especially harmful. What really is new and harmful is the trendy moral relativism that characterizes so many movies and TV shows. These cultural products receive rave reviews from liberal activists for their "positive" (and relatively nonviolent) content. But in these films, protagonists do not defy the legal order so that they can uphold a higher moral order; instead, these "heroes" rebel against the notion that there is any moral order at all.

"Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go f**k himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost sixty thousand dollars. Pass the asparagus," says Lester Burnham (played by Kevin Spacey), the hero of American Beauty, one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the last decade. A brilliantly executed film of a very conventional story, American Beauty typifies the reigning attitude in today's Hollywood: The pursuit of personal liberation, especially sexual liberation, is the only legitimately heroic endeavor in American life.

Lester Burnham is a bourgeois professional with a bourgeois-professional wife and an alienated daughter. Lester "suddenly" realizes-just in time for a midlife crisis-that he hates his conventional life when he becomes sexually obsessed with a friend of his high-school-aged daughter. "I feel like I've been in a coma for the past twenty years. And I'm just now waking up," declares Lester, who commences on a campaign of "self-improvement" that involves flipping off all social conventions and indulging every desire.

"Your father seems to think this type of behavior is something to be proud of," Lester's wife tells their daughter at the dinner table.

"And your mother seems to prefer I go through life like a f**king prisoner while she keeps my d**k in a mason jar under the sink."

American Beauty won the Oscar for best picture last year, but it wasn't alone in its message. Indeed, the winners in almost every major category involved some variation on the theme that external moral authority is illegitimate, or that personally designed morality is superior. For example, another academy favorite was Boys Don't Cry, a film about a petty criminal, a transsexual woman who prefers masquerading as a boy in order to seduce and bed teenage girls. What raised the film to heroic status for Hollywood is its assertion that America remains, at heart, a nation of sexual fascists who cruelly impose conventional bourgeois standards on courageous nonconformists.

The entertainment industry has hammered home the idea that conformity of any kind is a sign of spiritual surrender. While films with excessive violence often receive considerable critical and popular scrutiny, the idea that we are all our own priests is celebrated throughout the popular culture. This idea is found even in technically well-made films like Dead Poets Society and the pernicious Pleasantville, both of which redefined the concept of "to thine own self be true" to mean "thine own self is the only truth." It is also the moral of hundreds of individual TV shows and movies; it is the core social and political insight of rock 'n' roll and rap music. How else to explain the familiar litany of rap songs which exult in killing and rape?