IT'S TIME TO TAKE SIDES Has Commonweal surrendered to the spirit of nihilism in the arts? Yes
Jr, John D Hagen
IT'S TINE TO TAKE SIDES Catholicism, yes; popular culture, no John D. Hagen, Jr. On his celebrated essay, "Defining Deviancy Down" (American Scholar, Winter, 1993), Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...I]t seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest....[T]he only political result of Brecht' s "revolution" was to encourage everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob...
...This film romanticizes mass murder...
...This failure is particularly striking in view of Commonweal's tone on other social and cultural issues...
...To romanticize mass murder, to cynically tempt young people to empathize with psychopathic killers, to "make us feel that all humanity should be slaughtered," is vicious conduct...
...Tarantino notoriously traffics not just in violence but in sadism and preternatural cruelty...
...It shows two young nihilists diabolically slaughtering innocent people for fun...
...That it should pass undenounced in a review in a Catholic intellectual journal shows that we live in desperate times...
...The victims are photographed in close-up at the moment of death," he observes, "and are made to look stupid, craven, repellent, and bereft of dignity...
...Et cetera...
...No effort was spared to make the moral anesthesia complete...
...Alleva reviews this barbaric film in an absolutely clinical manner, without any moral comment whatever...
...And Pulp Fiction cries out for moral denunciation, if ever a movie did...
...This is diabolical imagery...
...It seems to have lost all sense of outrage over any sort of turpitude in the world of the arts...
...These words came forcefully to mind as I read Commonweal's reviews of two arrestingly vicious movies: the infamous Natural Born Killers (October 7,1994) and Pulp Fiction (November 18,1994...
...Reviewer Richard Alleva can readily be pictured seated astride the smoking corpses in these films, in the posture described in Moynihan's essay, imperturbably assessing the aesthetics of the slaughter...
...The "mystical murderer" [sic] delivers a mock-profound speech in which he argues that "all people deserve to die...
...This nihilist boosterism calls to mind Hannah Arendt's account of the renegade elites of the Weimar Republic...
...Alleva blandly discusses this sadism as if it were just an ordinary element of style...
...If ever a movie cried out to be critiqued in moral instead of aesthetic terms, it was Natural Born Killers...
...Commonweal offers a forceful Christian moral witness on issues of politics, economics, the rights of the disadvantaged, and international justice...
...But it treats the arts from an absolutely secular and (generally speaking) completely amoral perspective...
...A society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction...
...The moral abdication of arts critics has been denounced by Michael Medved in his recent philippic on popular culture, Hollywood versus America (HarperCollins, 1992...
...A rescue takes place, during which one rapist is disemboweled with a samurai sword and the other is shotgunned in the genitals...
...It is hard to conceive of an artistic project more utterly reprehensible...
...We are in desperate times when Natural Born Killers evokes more outrage in the Outland comic strip than it does in America's most prominent intellectual Catholic journal...
...Then it uses all sorts of clever ploys to induce the audience to empathize with these predatory killers...
...The elite read the Marquis de Sade and applauded savage works of art, and many were gleeful when real savages erupted out of the earth: The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability...
...As the fallen rapist screams, the victim gloats ferociously and tells him that he is going to torture him slowly to death "with a blowtorch and a pliers...
...The truth is that Commonweal exemplifies the thrust of Moynihan's essay...
...If evil is "glamorized" successfully, we applaud, whereas if evil is merely made "garish" we disdain it...
...If Christian intellectuals cannot muster outrage over brazen displays of cruelty in the arts, then the culture of death will devour us all...
...Meanwhile, humbler folk confront increasingly uninhibited violence on the streets and in the schools...
...Doesn't Commonweal facilitate such violence when it fails to speak out against nihilistic art...
...Lurid posters of the murderers were plastered up in record stores...
...His script gave the killers excuses (child abuse), a twisted emotional depth, and a certain amount of high-sounding discourse...
...Among other atrocities, Killers shows the teen-age heroine's mother being bound, gagged, and burned alive, and her father being ferociously bludgeoned with a tire iron and drowned...
...Two homosexual sadists bind and gag two captives in a cellar...
...Alleva does not even mention Pulp Fiction's most outrageously vicious scene...
...An observer who can recognize all these elements, yet form no moral judgment about the film, has lost the capacity for outrage...
...As John Paul II has warned repeatedly, America is in the grip of a burgeoning "culture of death," and every Christian has a moral obligation to speak out against it...
...Director Oliver Stone stated candidly that Killers was meant to convey "the thrill of it, the joy ride from [the killers'] point of view...
...Is this what has happened to Alleva...
...Once again, the review is all about style, without the least tincture of moral critique...
...Commonweal's reviews are erudite, witty, clever, diverting-but for the most part they are sophisticated persiflage of the sort one finds in magazines like Harper's and the New Yorker...
...Pulp Fiction panders to the public with outrageous sadistic displays completely superfluous to its plot...
...He critiques this hateful film exclusively from an aesthetic standpoint: he faults it for a lack of style...
...He paced the action and the dialogue at a frantic, maniacal pace, allowing viewers no time to reflect...
...Medved (a critic for the Public Broadcasting System) broke ranks with the critical establishment for its touting of a spate of sadistic movies in the early 1990s...
...They treat the arts as a sort of intellectual parlor game, without any social or moral ramifications or points of reference in the gospel...
...He particularly deplored the nonchalance of many Americans toward violence in our culture...
...Alleva matter-of-factly concludes: "the net effect of Killers is to make us feel that all humanity should be slaughtered for cravenness, vulgarity, and physical unattractiveness...
...Meanwhile, the victims were dehumanized, and policemen were depicted as brutal hypocritical goons...
...The same disastrous patterns are visible in American culture today...
...Commonweal should be up on the line beside Michael Medved castigating nihilistic art...
...Moynihan quotes a New York trial judge, Edwin Torres: This numbness, this near narcoleptic state can diminish the human condition to the level of combat infantrymen, who, in protracted campaigns, can eat their battlefield rations seated on the bodies of the fallen...
...The "standards of the mob" discussed by Arendt- unabashed predation, ruthless cruelty-are flaunted and glamorized in the arts...
...Garishness, certainly, and plenty of high-tech display, but not style....Stone's dramatic strategies often turn out to be incoherent....Almost everybody is wildly overdirected...
...When the killers were captured, Stone had his police beat and stomp one captive in an aping of the capture of Rodney King...
...A similar travesty occurred a year before, when Commonweal's Frank McConnell gushed like a supermarket tabloid over the mayhem and obscenity of TV's "NYPD Blue" (October 8,1993...
...One captive is tortured and raped, while the other is left with a mute dehumanized slave (a sort of Jeffrey Dahmer zombie) in a suit and mask of black leather...
...Alleva heaps unqualified praise on Quentin Tarantino for cleverness and polish as a director: "The script is put together with a jeweler's precision....The cinematic flourishes, the pop references, the movie-movie in-jokes, the glamour of the performers, the self-conscious hipness of the dialogue-all this cushions the violence, makes it bearable, and, yes, even glamorizes it...
...John D. Hagen, Jr., practises law in Minneapolis, Minnesota...
...Our culture is radically debased, and our intellectuals (conspicuously, Catholic intellectuals) seem oblivious to the problem...
...This incongruity becomes even more acute in Alleva's review of the ultraviolent Pulp Fiction...
...On his celebrated essay, "Defining Deviancy Down" (American Scholar, Winter, 1993), Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm against passivity in the face of barbarization...
...Rape, torture, unspeakable cruelty, murder for hire, murder for fun, all are chattered about with bland sophistication...
...Alleva's tone would be disturbing in any public commentary...
...But to find such a tone in Commonweal at a time when every Christian ought to be denouncing violence in our culture is incongruous in the extreme...
...Arendt describes a tacit alliance of avant-garde intellectuals with Hitler's lawless thugs, drawn together by contempt for bourgeois culture and determination to wreck it...
...Pulp Fiction, he notes, is packed with "a Tarantino specialty"-"heavy-duty, sadistically gloating speeches made by hitmen to their victims just before the bullet to the brain is dispatched...
...Even more outrageous was the way in which Stone's film was aggressively marketed to disaffected youth...
...Here there is no equivocation...
...If lines in the sand are not drawn against sadism, no lines will ever be drawn...
...Trouble is, Stone hasn't achieved any such [surreal] style...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 16
