The Magistrate of Morals

By RICHARD CORLISS

WHY DON'T WE JUST AGREE WITH Michael Medved and have done with it? In his new book, Hollywood vs. America (HarperCollins, $20), Medved, a critic on the PBS show Sneak Previews, denounces today's movie industry -- and by extension the TV networks and music business -- as "an alien force that assaults our most cherished values and corrupts our children. The dream factory has become the poison factory."

Medved has tapped into a general queasiness about pop culture, and not just from religious and social conservatives. A large segment of the public senses that the trash has risen to eye and ear level, and it smells rank. Freddy Krueger slices his way into little girls' minds, and Madonna's siren song & turns little boys into prematurely dirty men. Once the U.S. cinema was ruled by sentiment; now it is tyrannized by cynicism. Movies have assumed the omniscient sneer of a '50s greaser; they mock or duck any authority, whether the unfeeling parent, the stodgy teacher, the irrelevant clergyman or the brutal cop. And where once there was subtlety in popular art, now there is sensation. Traditional standards have given way to tribal impulses, which push Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers aside to make way for a dance of the seven veils. By now the dancer is naked; the next stage must be flaying.

So Medved is on to something: the public's numbness at Hollywood's shock tactics and the reluctance of critics to attend to -- let alone defend -- Ice- T or Studs or the latest sadistic horror movie. But he doesn't know what to do with it. Instead of just isolating a disturbing tendency in pop culture, he is compelled to document it with suspicious statistics, to draw conspiratorial conclusions, to call for a return in spirit to the movies' puritanical Production Code of the 1930s -- all with the fervor of a modern Martin Luther, an angry evangelist determined to nail his 95 theses not on a church door but on a movie marquee. Problem is, he keeps hitting his thumb.

Medved argues, for example, that the public's revulsion at nasty films is reflected in a slump at the box office -- that people are mad as hell and they're not going to pay for it anymore. It's true that Americans bought only about a billion movie tickets in 1991 (the lowest in 15 years), but they also rented an all-time high 4.1 billion movie cassettes. And it's true that the three major TV networks "have lost a third of their nightly audience" in the past 15 years. But viewers didn't turn off the set; they switched to independent and cable channels. So Americans are watching as much TV as ever, and they are seeing more films (in the 'plexes or at home) than they did in the mid-'40s, the top years for movie attendance. If people hate this garbage, why are they still buying it?

We sympathize with anyone who each year must watch 300 new movies, many of them junk. This may explain why Auntie Lee's Meat Pies, Lucky Stiff, Homer & Eddie and Closet Land -- films that barely achieved theatrical release -- are among the targets of Medved's dudgeon. It also leads him to catalog, in avid detail, outrages of manners in the movies. Who else would think to tabulate recent films with scenes of vomiting (36) or urination (18)?

Medved's bloodshot rage makes it hard for him to perform the crucial job of a film critic, which is to see movies -- to figure out what's going on -- and report it. Here is his analysis of Sleeping with the Enemy: an "indictment of conventional wedlock as a cruel and unhealthy arrangement." Well, it's not; it is a melodrama about wife abuse -- a social disorder Hollywood didn't invent. Medved, determined to alienate even his core audience of people who think Disney cartoon features are innocuous entertainment, proclaims that The Little Mermaid "effectively encouraged children to disregard the values and opinions of their parents." Well, Disney has been traumatizing kids for half a century. When Bambi's mother died, kids screamed in horror.

Even in Hollywood's so-called innocent so-called Golden Age, movies were objects of public controversy or rejection. In Medved's favorite film year, 1939, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was condemned by many U.S. Senators and editorial writers, and Gone with the Wind stoked a furor with its use of the word damn. Today, other tendencies in Golden Age movies -- the stereotyping of blacks, gays and other minorities -- seem vicious in retrospect. Back then, the middle class was in charge, and they made fun of those below. Now films are a minority pleasure, so the majority is the butt of harsh humor.

But there's no proof that people go to movies because they approve of the messages, or stay away because they don't. Most likely, they are looking to be seduced by entertainment, not by politics. They know, if Medved doesn't, that the basic stories and attitudes have changed little since the movies were young. Comedy always exalts the clever over the dull; romance promotes the beautiful over the plain; gangster movies and westerns resolve moral dilemmas with fistfights or gunfights. The hero is a fellow cocky toward authority. And drama has always been a charged debate between good and evil. The more vivid the evil -- whether the Nazis in Casablanca or Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs -- the more satisfying the final triumph of good.

Medved may see himself as one of Old Hollywood's lonely heroes: a radically righteous Mr. Smith tilting against the liberal establishment, both creative and critical. And many people will buy his book for the reason he thinks they would go to movies: to see their political virtue expressed in public. But censorious guidelines for behavior will not eradicate the blight, if such it is. People will have to stop going, buying, renting. Until that G-rated day comes to pass, Medved might lighten up and read some other book. We suggest The Golden Turkey Awards, a humorous survey of legendary bad movies. It ought to be in Medved's library; he wrote it.