The Talkies/Heroes of Our Time

...Such "artists" as Karen Finley or Shawn Eichman (she who made an objet d'art of the results of her own abortion) are really partisans, combatants in the culture wars...

...B ut I am not all that happy with Michael Medved's conception of art either...

...For those who watch such stuff do so not because it is intrinsically interesting to them but in order to give a boost to their almost incredible self-righteousness, according to which they are being positively heroic in supporting their local artist against Jesse Helms or George Bush or the Pope or God—or Medved—who are supposed to object to what they do...

...It's enough to make a cat laugh, this pretension to intellectual seriousness on the part of a bunch of people who regularly confuse images and gestures and bogus professions of compassion with thought...

...The hero business is all a charade, got up by the media, anyway—though some kind of putative hero to deliver Message No...

...The black rappers are addressing a different audience in different rhetoric and with a different purpose, but they depend on the same disjunction between art and life that has been insisted on by the producers of violent movies...

...All the emotions it evokes are only valid inside it and are not meant to escape the artist's hermetic seal...

...2) Don't believe what you see on television...

...Both he and the nightclub owner will do anything for it...

...CI NEXT MONTH: 25 more years of TAS Statement of Ownership, 78 The American Spectator December 1992...

...He's right to draw a distinction between violent films that people seem to enjoy for the sake of the violence and those which, like the violence in Shakespeare, "affirm the humanity of the victim...

...Miss Hershey's character, who also has artistic longings, is able to manipulate him into taking sides for once by flattering his vanity as an artist...

...A scandal like that in the film, for instance, requires not just seeing but seeing into—the ability to discern the reality underneath appearances...

...Although the language of both performers was completely unambiguous, both denied that they had meant what they had said...

...alone as art...

...The artists themselves, like their corporate apologists and large segments of their audience, simply assume that there is no connection between the fantasies that are their business and real life...

...What this seems to mean is that the world of manufactured images is to be considered complete fantasy and nothing whatever to do with real life...

...Its images of sex and violence, however crude, are taken over from that larger intellectual culture which has set the standards of (continued on page 78) The American Spectator December 1992 61 THE TALKIES (continued from page 61) reality in their terms ever since, perhaps, Freud identified the id as "true psychic reality...

...This might be called the congressional plan: send in enough lobbyists and you'll get what you want...

...and I think he is right to identify an artistic folie de grandeur as the real reason...

...Number one is an illustration of Medved's point that Hollywood loves to trash heroes: if everybody's a hero then nobody is one...

...I've always tried to be a good role model and therefore have made these changes to avoid any possibility of affecting any individual's behavior...

...Medved sees only that public pressure on an entertainer made him withdraw offensive material, not what on earth the industry thinks it is doing if itis axiomatic that it has no intention "of affecting any individual's behavior...

...But first let us look at a couple of recent pictures that illustrate Hollywood's transformation into America's biggest Western Union office...

...On the contrary, it is meant to upset and cause pain to those who arenot in its audience, to those who have no interest in looking at the kind of disgusting or blasphemous objects it trades in but who, like Medved, want to stop them from doing it...

...I believe that that dehumanization is accomplished by sentimentalism, which is another name for the disconnect between feelings and real life, and by the corrupting effect of too much fantasy on the imagination...

...Medved rather misstates his case against violence...

...If that sounds to you like serious thought, you'd better stop reading now before your brain overheats...

...When there was a public outcry following its broadcast on television, Jackson changed the offensive bits and said: "It upsets me to think that 'Black or White' could influence any child or adult to destructive behavior, either sexual or violent...

...Why should they feel that any more than what it is like to be killed, beaten, or mutilated...

...The sad thing is that this is probably true...

...Neither the country nor the culture is just the sum of its interests...

...today, even the heads of major studios assert that making significant statements—not crafting entertainment—is the essence of what they do...

...Medved is right to say that popular entertainers are simply copying the more traditional and highbrow arts in their plunge into sordidness, sex, and violence, but he is wrong, I believe, in thinking that, among the NEA types, "the most respected work of the moment aims to upset us rather than uplift us, and producing pain is considered a more meaningful achievement than providing pleasure...

...however, the single-minded pursuit of such "reality" by the image-makers leads to greater and greater unreality as the gap between art and real real life for both artist and audience becomes ever wider...

...He sacrifices everything, including decency and humanity, in order to get a picture of murder not just when the corpses are still warm—which is everyday stuff for him—but while it is actually happening...

...The only thing left of his common humanity is pride in his craft and a crush on Barbara Hershey, who plays a glamorous night-club owner in need of his help...

...Until the artistic notion of reality and the common sense one get back into alignment our national cultural life will remain in a perilous condition...

...You can even have a message, like Miss O'Connor's tuneless ditty, from which all possibility of entertainment has been purged, so long as it is passionate and sincere enough...

...He wants it to teach and "uplift" its audience...

...Trust Hollywood to come up with the idea that being an artist, a hero, and a star are all really just the same thing...

...America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Valuesl: The old struggle between art and commerce has tilted decisively in the direction of art as the movie business takes itself more seriously with each passing year...

...It is true that he claims he only wants the values of morality, family, and religion respected and not instilled and that he wants the popular culture to be less propagandistic rather than more...

...And what makes Bernzi into an artist is that he deals in images of the appalling and therefore real...

...In fact it is a widespread misconception that the sort of art which produces controversy when it is funded by the NEA is meant to upset and cause pain to its audience...

...Michael Medved's book goes some way toward explaining where Hollywood' s self-importance and moral earnestness come from, and I want to return to what is right and wrong with his explanation in a moment...

...Nevertheless, he has written what is in many ways a good and a useful book...

...His photos of the murders break up a gang of black marketeers (led by a Republican, of course), turn Bernzi into a national hero, and give him his big break and, finally, recognition as an artist...

...I'm an artist," he says, "and I'm going to let people do what they're going to do...

...It's a good idea, but the ending spoils it...

...We might take a hint from The Public Eye...

...I know of no one else who has shown so conclusively that obscenity, indecency, and anti-family, anti-military, anti-religious messages are persisted in despite the fact that they are bad box office—though his analytical methods do not allow for a very clear idea about whether or not the same is true for pure violence...

...But the whole tone of his book and especially its last chapter suggests an enthusiasm for messages of a morally edifying sort not unlike that of the Hollywood producers who are fond of telling us that we should all be nicer to one another...

...But she also gets bonus points because, as an Irish colleen and thus one of the world's few bona fide white oppressees, she can claim the Pope (or the Queen, if the mood strikes her) as her nemesis instead of having to make do with George Bush and Ronald Reagan like everyone else...

...It is to the credit of the great image factories on the Pacific that they are occasionally willing to take on the fakery of images—on television if not in the movies themselves...

...T he Public Eye, by Howard Franklin, is a bit more successful as a film...

...Heroes of Our Time by James Bowman p robably the only people in the world who loved it when Sinead O'Connor tore up a photograph of the Pope on "Saturday Night Live" were a few florid-faced, bowler-hatted sots in the back rows of Orange Lodges in Belfast and me...

...there is also the interest of the whole which, if it is not pursued naturally and voluntarily by people whose chief concern it is, will not be pursued at all...

...As Michael Medved says in his new book Hollywood vs...

...Paradoxically...

...That's why I found it wonderfully appropriate when this no-talent baldie with even less inside her head than on top of it tried to form her infant lips into a protest against—what was it...

...Bernzi is at first so completely the observ60 The American Spectator December 1992 er that there is almost nothing of the participant in life left in him...

...James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...But it is really less self-criticism than self-congratulation for these artistes who sit atop the big Hollywood studios to look down with scorn upon the ratings-ridden television executives as if to say that they are too refined for such crass commercialism...

...People buy newspapers to look at pictures of corpses because it gives them a buzz: this is the real world because it is so appalling...

...For what art does is to select and focus on the significant, like a good photographer...

...3. This banality only goes to show how quickly the motorbikes of these highly refined and artistic messenger boys run out of gas...

...He doesn't take sides, he says, in the conflicts he records with his camera, but lives a monk-like existence in which nothing matters but getting the pictures...

...Sam Goldwyn used to say, if you want to send a message, go see Western Union...

...Medved's solution to the problem is basically that if everybody bands together in pressure groups, enough economic force can be brought to bear on Hollywood to produce the kind of pictures the pressure groups want...

...Joe Pesci plays a tabloid photographer called "The Great Bernzini" (or Bernzi) in New York in 1942 who is caught between the two halves of the artist's schizoid personality, between being a participant and an observer...

...Well, that's what Hollywood thinks too...

...What he does not do is go deeply enough into the connection between common perceptions of what "art" is and the offensiveness it gives rise to—what we might call the Sinead O'Connor factor...

...If, when you get to the payoff, that's all you've got left, you really ought to get out of the message business altogether...

...Nowadays popular culture is shot through with messages, most of them worthless even as morality or politics, let 1HarperCollins, 386 pages, $20...

...3) We should all be nicer to one another...

...child abuse, I think—by blaming it all on the Pope...

...Her badge of authenticity in Hollywood is that, like most of the other rich people there, she claims to have suffered at the hands of some authority figure...

...Here is where Western Union suddenly becomes very knowing and sophisticated...

...Moreover, such films represent the people as really pathetic dupes, deceived with ease into believing the most incredible nonsense...

...In Hero, the deception about the identity of the hero is as nothing compared to the preposterousness of the sheep-like following he obtains for proclaiming Message No...

...it's the only way they can do it right...

...This is not because I am such a very bad Catholic but because her gesture was a perfect example of the way in which the Hollywood mind works...

...How does this "bias for the bizarre," as Medved calls it, among the highbrows transmit itself to the lowliest of popular entertainers...

...They have nothing to say to the likes of Medved or me but only to those who are already of their party—whom they do not shock but comfort and reassure...

...3 may be useful...

...Medved is right to complain about the dehumanization of the victims of violence in films, but this would not be so easy to do if the audience had not been dehumanized first...

...Seeing someone shot in the head is funny if all your nerves have been disconnected...

...Now it is because of the tradition of high art in this century that everyone knows what that word "reality" means: it means corruption, sordidness, greed, crime, and violent death...

...Especially impressive is his demolition of the argument that Hollywood produces offensive stuff only because the viewers want it...

...tephen Frears's film, Hero, has S several messages...

...It doesn't really matter that it was the petty thief, Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman), rather than the charismatic John Bubber (Andy Garcia) who pulled the survivorsout of a crashed airplane...

...The point is that these things numb rather than enhance feeling...

...But is it really true that the thrill violence fans get comes from enjoying "the feel of killing, beating, mutilating...

...The three most important are: (1) Everybody's a hero if you can catch him at the right moment...

...As the sordid and gritty little entertainer who aspires to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Bernzi could be said to stand for Hollywood itself in its desire for intellectual respectability...

...That is also the assumption on which Bernzi makes his living...

...But whether you are thus fragmenting the common interest or the common culture, if everything is a matter of competing pressure groups, who is left to look after the commonality...

...Neither would be possible without the 12-yearold girl whose remarks, apropos of Total Recall, Medved quotes: "I can't say that it's violent, really, It's pretty funny to see people getting shot in the head...

...Similar things were said last spring when the rap artists Ice-T and Sister Souljah were taken to task for recordings and statements that advocated, as it seemed, the killing of police and of white people in general...

...Take, for example, Medved's account of the famous Michael Jackson video "Black or White" in which the star simulated masturbation and smashed a car window with a crowbar...

...Images of violence by themselves will not do it, but the belief that spending hours every day in Fantasyland is harmless "entertainment" will...

...Like Network a few years ago, Hero shows us unscrupulous and heartless image-makers willing to do anything to bump up the ratings...

...Increasingly this kind of partisanship is to be found even among non-subsidized artists, such as Sinead O'Connor, who you would think would need a wider audience than the little band of the smug...

...She sacrifices everything, including love, to keep her club—not because of a love for art but because of a love for the artists that gather there and allow her to bask in their reflected glory...