Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values

National Review, Oct 19, 1992 by Joseph Sobran

ONE OF THE great misnomers of this age of misnomers is "adult entertainment." That which is totally unfit for children is assumed to be thereby suitable for adults, when in fact it's pitched to adolescent appetites, emotions, and curiosities.

Over the past generation, the entertainment industry has become "adult" only in this sense. Not that it ever aimed very high, but at least it used to respect public decency.

Just how bad it has gotten, and why, is the subject of Michael Medved's Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values. "Hollywood" here is an eponym for the whole industry; only Paramount, of the ten major movie-production companies, still inhabits what Medved calls "the sadly seedy district of Los Angeles that is of-and he has noticed patterns others have missed.

Everyone knows about the intensifying sex, violence, and foul language in movies (and TV is catching up). But Medved assimilates these familiar things to a deeper theme: hostility to the normal. Not only is "sex" pervasive in films; it's nearly always what used to be known as fornication. (Quick: name a movie in which married people are shown making it.) And violence is no longer a matter of punchings and shootings and slumping bodies, a la Cagney; it increasingly means mutilation, shown in closeup, complete with shrieks.

Medved makes the convergent point that the industry rarely shows religious life except to ridicule it or use it for sinister effect. Clergymen are usually shown as fanatics or hypocritical buffoons: these have become cliches of the business. Ordinary characters seldom pray, even when faced with death--though as Medved notes, one survey found that 78 per cent of Americans say prayer is an important part of their daily lives.

Two of the few recent films that have dealt with religion, The Last Temptation of Christ and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, were not only hostile to traditional faith; they were simply ignorant of their subject and, despite claims to have been deeply researched, full of howlers.

But other forms of behavior are overrepresented in the movies. One of Medved's more startling lists is his roster of recent films in which characters are shown vomiting and urinating. Medved rattles off more than thirty movies that have included barf scenes, plus 15 featuring pee. The more ambitious films show characters being puked or peed on by others.

Of course Hollywood's perps always plead Art to justify their deliberate bad taste. Surprisingly, Medved grants that there is something in this. Contrary to the common assumption, Hollywood's excesses don't pay commercially: since the late Sixties, when the New Candor set in with a vengeance, Hollywood has driven away a large part of its old audience. He cites statistics indicating that even now, G and PG movies outdraw R movies by a wide margin.

What's going on? Medved's explanation is that Hollywood producers and directors really want to think of themselves as artists, not hacks, so they affect the alienated--and alienating-- poses they think of as artistic. Within the Hollywood community, status attaches to films and even TV shows that epater. Witness the way Candice Bergen's stock has risen since she managed to provoke an attack by Dan Quayle. As the Emmy ceremony showed, she is the pride and envy of this industry that yearns to be seen as something more than a mere industry.

It's all very well to make money, but the real payoff is prestige among one's peers. One way to get that is to keep pushing at the margins of bourgeois morality, even-or especially--if you lose money on a controversial project. That's art, baby, and the more the Quayles attack you as a "cultural elite," the more self-congratulatory all Hollywood can be.

Just by enumerating the industry's excesses, Medved exposes this stuff as so much cliche. It is mass-produced, and it's hard to keep a straight face when its purveyors claim artistic necessity. The best test is retrospective. Has anyone ever suggested that Casablanca would have been improved by a nude scene between Bogie and Bergman? Nonsense. We wouldn't have been seeing Rick and Ilsa making love; we'd have been seeing Bogart and Bergman with their clothes off, that's all--a distraction from the story, not an enhancement of it.

It may also be worth pointing out that sex and violence, whatever their separate merits, at least used to be two different things. But nowadays movies and pop records are combining them in scenes and lyrics of sexual torture and maiming, which actually invite you to complain, since your complaint automatically yanks the tripwire to self-congratulation (not to mention publicity). Nobody who has convinced himself that he's an artist is capable of entertaining for even a moment the possibility that he really is obscene and vulgar. The accusation itself certifies not only his innocence but his affinity with Joyce and Lawrence.

Some culture. Some elite. The industry is flattered to be attacked in such terms. Alarm is certainly justified, but hooting would probably have more effect, since the industry has constructed ideological defenses that convert all criticism into persecution and vileness into victimhood.