Linda Frye Burnham - Nightmares of Depravity

Nightmares of Depravity...Not

By Linda Frye Burnham

When Bob Dole made his "nightmares of depravity" speech on May 31, he shook loose an avalanche of cultural discourse unlike anything we've seen since Jesse Helms took on Robert Mapplethorpe. Suddenly everybody's a critic. From hysterical parents to major playwrights to corporate CEOs, everybody is putting their two cents in about Hollywood's culpability in the coarsening of the culture and its danger to the hearts and minds of our kids.

"I want the leaders of the entertainment industry to think about the influence they have on America's children," said Dole. "Let there be no mistake: televisions and movie screens, boom boxes and headsets are windows on the world for our children." Kids can't tell the difference between art and the real world, Dole said, and "a numbing exposure to graphic violence and immorality does steal away innocence, smothering our instinct for outrage. And I think we have reached the point where our popular culture threatens to undermine our character as a nation."
In this burning indictment, in which many heard a future president proposing censorship, Dole did not shrink from pointing a finger at certain films, gangsta rap groups and media giants who, in the process of "reaping the rewards of our capitalist system," are initiating "the decline of an empire." In making this thunderous appeal, he conceded that they hold in their hands the power to "reaffirm the goodness and greatness of the United States of America."
I can just see Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone, the Geto Boys giving each other high-fives. Hollywood, apparently, rules.
Who are these victorious monsters, standing astride our culture like the Colossus, and what have they wrought? And why? For Time Warner, of course, the motive is coin. What pictures and records get made is the province of business, and the media conglomerates will produce whatever is profitable. But when it comes to the motives of the artisans who create these products, what we have here is nothing more than a pissing contest, a question of who has the bigger, more powerful dick.
Gangsta rap music is many things, but first and foremost it is threat, braggadocio, swaggering pretension to power. From its early beginnings rap, like break-dance, was a substitute, almost a metaphor, for gang fighting. For whatever cultural or historical reason, it is about who is badder, more dangerous than whom. Coming from a group as seriously disempowered as young black men, it is not surprising that much rap extols insulting, dominating, torturing and killing women, the only group chronically less powerful than they.
When it comes to movie directors, Oliver Stone is one of Hollywood's prime pissers, having challenged our ability to stomach images of violence, aggression and greed over and over again for fifteen years with movies like "Salvador," "Platoon," "Wall Street" and "Talk Radio" and the screenplays for "Midnight Express" and "Scarface." Not long ago Stone looked around and saw a new kid on the block, Quentin Tarantino, packing a couple of stylish gore-epics--"Reservoir Dogs" and "True Romance." Tarantino was being vaunted by critics as deep, witty, blazingly original, audacious, fresh, amazing and "absolutely new" (Janet Maslin, NY Times). Yeah? said Stone. That little needle-dick from Manhattan Beach who learned about life in a video store? In one of the more dramatic and sarcastic Hollywood throwdowns, for his next movie Stone took Tarantino's screenplay for "Natural Born Killers" and rewrote it.
"To be honest," Stone offhandedly told Los Angeles Magazine in October 1994, "it was not a valued script. It was at the bottom of the junk pile....The film does not resemble the first draft of the script. The characters have been fleshed out and deepened. They were very much stick figures in the original script. [Here's where Stone unzips his symbolic fly.] I told him I have seen a lot of violence in my life, far more than he has ever seen. I have been in Vietnam. I have been wounded. Before I made the film I said to him, 'You're in your twenties, and I'm in my forties. I'm not going to make the film that you wrote.' " To assure his victory over Tarantino, his whole generation and the horses they rode in on, he pumped up the violence to a new high, enhanced it with grandiose film school and music-video techniques, then attempted to distance it from charges of exploitation by slapping on a ham-fisted message about media glamorization of crime. Take that, kid.
In a now-historic parry, Tarantino countered with "Pulp Fiction," so well written that actors were climbing over each other to get to it. "Jesus," Harvey Keitel is reported to have said, "I haven't seen characters like these in years." The violence, while not as full blown or sustained as Stone's, was considerably more original: everybody laughed. And critics salivated. Janet Maslin said two things about "Pulp Fiction" and its creator that no critic will never apply to Stone, and they must have stuck in his craw: "Mr. Tarantino proves he can write clever, sardonic women on a par with his colorful men," and "Mr. Tarantino knows just when to quit." When Tarantino picked up his Oscar(s) he was crowing like a kid who had just beaten his biggest rival.
Watching Tarantino giggle and prance at the Oscar podium, I realized that our culture, at century's end, is a naughty boys' playground. Since time began, kids have been escalating the war between the generations, trying ever-nastier strategies to differentiate from their parents. It's one of the great struggles in human nature.
Somewhere around the middle of this century parents lost their nerve. Having spent the last 50 years pampering children, glorifying adolescence and basing our economy on their appetites, we are now paying the price for our cowardice in the face of their contempt. The 20th Century is the era of The Brat Triumphant.
Baby Boomers were the first generation to get successfully up in their parents' faces. Bob Dole's generation saw mine as sexually permissive, traitorous and rude. My generation sees Tarantino's as amoral, numbed-out, literally capable of the unthinkable.
We old farts stagger from movie theaters, gasping over the level to which media violence has descended, and Bob Dole, acknowledging their stranglehold on the culture, hands them victory. While the elders beg movie makers to take responsibility for the "trash" they are producing, Tarantino and the boys guffaw all the way to the bank. To them, violence, or more precisely their genius ability to simulate it on screen, is far from tragic. Cinematic death and mayhem isn't real, Dad. It's fun, farce, comedy. It's only a m-o-o-o-vie.
Dole's "nightmare of depravity" seems to consist mostly of the notion that movies and rap music can rot children's minds. How else can we explain the fact that kids can stand to watch all this blood and gore over and over again and remain unaffected, when we, the adults, are literally sickened by it?
We worry that children don't understand the difference between death on the screen and death in real life, and this confusion produces ethical paralysis and emotional disability. We point to juvenile copycat crimes and foul language in the mouths of babes. The sky, we fear, is falling. But as it turns out, it is we and not them who can't tell the difference.
I asked my son about this. He is 30 years old and he adored both "Natural Born Killers" and "Pulp Fiction." He grew up on movies, he reminded me (as I recalled with appropriate guilt all the hundreds of movies we have seen together), and they are his culture, as literature was mine.
While I am recoiling from disgusting film characters wielding fake weapons and rolling ecstatically in stage blood, he is remarking on the expert and adventurous special effects and animation, the editing and sound, the speed and scale of the production. He waxes eloquent about Tarantino's and Stone's ability to comment on the trashy tabloid mentality that assaults us in the supermarkets and on television.
There is a right and wrong in the '90s. He does, in fact, know the difference, and he learned it, he says, from cultural criticism, from listening to his parents and their friends analyze movies and rock-and-roll around the dinner table over the past three decades. He knows how to see and hear because we taught him.
But even kids who don't have the benefit of this home-schooling, he says, are not necessarily victims of media. It depends on the kid. Violent film and music screw around with your head only if your head is not well. They affect your life only if you are in the grip of neurotic obsession that needs release, in the same way that sexual material becomes pornographic in the hands of a sick user. In this world view, the well-parented child is not at risk.
If my son is right, we don't need to worry about whether to apply censorship to this pissing contest. Censorship is impossible anyway. Boys will be boys. And the entertainment business will go right on cranking out what the audience wants, and will, in fact, flourish in the fertile climate for unregulated business and unbridled greed the Republican Party is creating.
What we need to worry about is whether our children are being born to parents who are prepared to love and guide them through the stormy seas of youth, and whether the government is doing all it can to help families survive. Instead of shaking his finger at the entertainers, Bob Dole has more business finding out why 40% of the kids in America are growing up below the poverty line, why they need school lunch subsidies, why they can't afford to go to college, why they have so few work opportunities to look forward to, why they are suffering in an atmosphere polluted not by art but by guns and drugs.
There is a power dynamic at the heart of this controversy that is far more serious than we think. With his hysteria, Bob Dole is creating a climate of fear, and he may ride to the White House on this grandstand plea to Time Warner. And with that in mind, we need to send him an urgent message too: Let's regulate poverty, not culture. Let's raise healthy kids. Not natural born killers.

Copyright 1995, Linda Frye Burnham — All Rights Reserved
This essay may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of the author.
"Nightmares of Depravity...Not" first appeared in The Independent Weekly, June 21, 1995.

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