Should Movies Aspire to Moral High Ground?

When he gave his acceptance speech last week, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joseph Lieberman downplayed the criticisms of Hollywood that once angered the locals, though his complaint about the erosion of “standards of decency” stirred echoes of his more vehement tirades.

That same day, Lieberman dropped out of a conference on violence in the media, but his old pal William Bennett (with whom Lieberman once instituted the Silver Sewer awards to target TV and movie trash-mongers) held forth on the “degradation of our culture” fostered by the entertainment industry. Certainly the Lieberman nomination revives questions about the moral responsibility of movies and television that seem certain to intensify in the months ahead.

Cultural critics like Lieberman and Bennett insist that they are not simply calling for a reduction in the amount of sex and violence on screen, but imploring movie makers to reach for the high ground and champion loftier moral values. But that raises a fundamental question: Is it appropriate to look to movies or any art form for lessons in morality?

Unfortunately for the moralists, movies come in irregular packages. A film--the current No. 1 movie in America, “The Cell,” is a good example--may display an unstable mix of despicable and transcendent elements. Can you throw out the bathwater without losing the baby?

Hollywood’s original censorship mechanism, the Production Code, was built on the assumption that movies had a moral mission. Armed with zealous intentions, the administrators of the code spent a lot of time protecting audiences from entertainment that, in their words, “lowers the whole living conditions and moral ideals of a race.”

When F. Scott Fitzgerald was in Hollywood, he poured a lot of energy into a script called “Infidelity” that the industry’s chief censor, Joseph Breen, refused to approve; the film was never made. When Robert Anderson’s play, “Tea and Sympathy,” was adapted for the screen, the censors insisted on adding a ludicrous epilogue in which the heroine wrote a letter to the young man she had seduced telling him that their affair was wrong.

The code is long gone, of course, and movies are freer to tackle adult stories without flinching--and some appallingly violent, vulgar movies have skulked into theaters. But there is usually no agreement about which movies are morally repugnant. When the Mick Jagger bacchanal, “Performance,” was released in 1970, critic John Simon wrote, “You do not have to be a drug addict, pederast, sadomasochist, or nitwit to enjoy ‘Performance,’ but being one or more of those things would help.” I guess I’ll have to stand up and be counted as a member of at least one of those groups, but I still remember “Performance” as one of the most exciting, eye-opening movies of that turbulent time.

Movies haven’t lost the ability to provoke moral outrage; the only problem is that the outrage is rarely unanimous.

Distasteful Content, Stunning Style in ‘Cell’

“The Cell” illustrates how difficult it is to reach any consensus about what constitutes degenerate art; Roger Ebert loved the film, Kenneth Turan hated it. But it’s possible to both love and hate “The Cell,” and that’s where matters get really sticky.

Like many other recent movies about depraved serial killers, “The Cell” spends an inordinate amount of time detailing the abuse of women; the protracted torture scenes seem designed as a turn-on for necrophiles. Several of the sadistic touches--the flesh-piercings and the close-ups of women thrashing to stay alive--are particularly horrific.

Will “The Cell” or other serial-killer movies encourage vulnerable viewers to give vent to their own fantasies of violence against women? I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone else does either. I would agree that there is probably something deadening about a steady diet of these grisly movies.

Yet here’s the rub: The content of “The Cell” is distasteful, but its visual style is stunning. From the opening sequence of a rider on a black horse traversing the orange dunes of a desert in Africa, this film is a striking mix of lush landscapes and slightly stylized, painterly designs. The director, Tarsem Singh, with the help of a gifted technical crew, has created a startling nightmare landscape that takes us inside the mind of a disturbed killer.

If this movie were never made, as some people would undoubtedly prefer, we would be spared some grotesque scenes of sadism, but we would also miss one of the most hypnotic visual odysseys of recent years. Like it or not, it is possible to be aesthetically stimulated by a movie whose subject matter is repellent.

Today it isn’t just the religious right or the conservative cultural critics who want to regulate movies. We have a whole new breed of righteous crusaders who didn’t exist in the era of the Production Code and the Legion of Decency. Now left-wing groups lambaste and sometimes even attempt to stop production of movies that they see as racist or sexist or homophobic. These champions of political correctness usually simplify the movies they’re attacking just as relentlessly as the right-wing zealots who want to stamp out sex and violence.

For example, the feminists who assailed “The People vs. Larry Flynt” because it glossed over the disgusting images that Flynt purveyed in Hustler were themselves guilty of ignoring the complicated, far-from-idealized character that the filmmakers presented.

Wherever they fall on the political spectrum, these protesters contribute to a repressive atmosphere that discourages already timid producers from taking chances. Critics of the media like Lieberman say that they don’t want government censorship; they want the entertainment companies to regulate themselves. But self-censorship has a long and ignominious history in Hollywood; living in terror of the censors’ wrath, producers and studio executives did an exemplary job of stripping movies of any provocative, inflammatory content. Do we really want to be left with nothing but “Touched by an Angel” or “Disney’s The Kid”?

Yes, it can be inspiring to watch people on their best behavior (if you can resist the impulse to gag). I can also be bracing to confront our worst potentialities; even if we ultimately reject the vision, we may gain a bit of self-knowledge by peering into the heart of darkness.

Today, moviegoers have a wide array of choices, and that’s the way it ought to be. In the fall, Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt star in “Pay It Forward,” which could satisfy Sen. Lieberman’s prescription for uplifting entertainment. It tells the story of a child (Haley Joel Osment of “The Sixth Sense”) who tries to encourage all the adults around him to bring more acts of kindness into the world. The film’s director, Mimi Leder, has said that the story appealed to her “because I think our social climate is in such dire straits and it needs to change. I thought this movie--maybe--could have a tiny impact.”

This Fall’s ‘Quills’ Sure to Intensify Debate

But the fall also brings “Quills,” Philip Kaufman’s movie about the Marquis de Sade, one that’s sure to be furiously debated. It could prove especially timely at this moment of Hollywood-bashing, for it’s a movie about controversial art and the impact it has on those who come into contact with it. The story centers on the notorious Marquis’ efforts to keep writing and distributing his salacious tales even while he is imprisoned in an asylum.

The film doesn’t take a simplistic, libertarian point of view regarding pornography and society; it shows that some of the Marquis’ lurid tales have a destructive effect on the inmates who drool over them. But in the end it celebrates the storyteller’s compulsion to express himself, and it sees that urge to entertain--no matter what scatological form it takes--as one of the most irrepressible of all human impulses.

“Quills” is about the unquenchable lust to create gleefully indecent stories and is meant to stimulate dialogue about just what entertainment encompasses in a free society. I hope that Joe Lieberman takes a couple of hours away from the campaign trail to sneak a peek at it.