NO, BUT HE READ THE POLLS

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Let's get real. or, as the politicians prefer to put it, let's look at the record -- actually analyze the movies Bob Dole praised and condemned in his anti-Hollywood hissy fit. Here, the movies he blithely cited as "friendly to the family":

True Lies. At its center is a sequence in which Jamie Lee Curtis, playing Arnold Schwarzenegger's wife, is abducted, locked up in a dank cell and subjected to grievous and extensive mental torture by her temporarily estranged husband.

The Lion King. At its heart is a musical number in which all the little animals of the jungle gather round the big animals and sing a song cheerfully celebrating the capacity of the latter to gobble them up whenever they feel like it.

Forrest Gump. Its message is that if you are sufficiently stupid, you can wander happily unscathed through the horrors of our time-and get rich too.

The Santa Clause and The Flintstones. Deliberately inane, lowest-common-denominator movies (talk about "coarseness," Senator), they still manage to present father figures who are, respectively, sullenly distracted and moronically inept.

What commends these movies to Dole is their marketplace success -- he is a Republican, after all. If he had actually seen them (his staff admits he hadn't), he might be less pleased. For this is what they really say: that women need to be kept in their place, preferably by degrading them; that the powerless should gladly acquiesce in their exploitation by the powerful -- incidentally, a basic definition of fascism; that privatizing emotions is, like privatizing social services, the way to build a happy, healthy society; that white males truly are boobs. We're past Republican now, heading for Neanderthal.

And what about the two movies cited as "nightmares of depravity"? Natural Born Killers is, yes, one big mess of a movie. But it actually supports Dole's argument. It says the tabloid media, obsessed with covering the ugliness of underclass American life, encourage emulative behavior among the brain-damaged.

True Romance, a terrific movie, is, in fact, a wicked-smart argument in favor of family values. Sustained by their passion for each other (their sex life is anything but "loveless"), a deliriously innocent couple defeats every form of contemporary corruption and emerges in that most blessed of American states-millionaires contentedly cavorting on a beach with their pretty blond baby. Their path to this paradisial state may be strewn with violence, but it is far from "mindless." Its excesses are brilliantly calculated satire.

Besides Schwarzenegger, Dole exempted from criticism the works of Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone. This, some have speculated, is because they are fellow Republicans. But that's not really the issue. All these guys appear in movies where the vast body count is composed entirely of anonymous victims. They are to other movies what assault weapons (another of the Senator's favorite products) are to the rest of gundom-instruments of totally affectless violence.

In the long history of moral posturing about the movies (you can find pols issuing Doleful denunciations of them as early as 1907), few have seriously criticized films of this kind. They're just "fun with a vengeance," to quote a review of the latest Willis effort. From The Public Enemy to Pulp Fiction, it has always been films that make us feel the shock, pain and absurdity of violent death-and put us in touch with the secret life burbling beneath the pious American surface-that cause people like Dole to spring a gas leak. But after almost a century of this twaddle, it's time to either shut up or get serious. That means, minimally, that everyone must now abide by the first, perhaps only, rule of movie reviewing: you have to sit through the damned things before you get to sound off on them.