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Millions of Americans hire baby sitters, ingest stale popcorn and stand in line to pay $7.50 a head at the nearest octoplex cinema, and millions more rent videos nightly so they can watch movies at home. So it seems odd that someone trying to curry favor with the masses -- i.e., someone seeking the presidency -- would bash something as popular as Hollywood.
Wouldn't it make for better standings in the polls to criticize unpopular things that affect few Americans? Say, reading books that were actually written by their putative authors, rather than ghosted for a celebrity, or riding public transportation, or attending parent-teacher conferences? Why not go after those worthless scumbags, rather than the vast majority of Americans who are movie-watchers?
Perhaps we are seeing some courage in our politicians. About six months ago, President Clinton berated Hollywood -- the source of much of his campaign money -- for its recent spate of carnage. That took some fortitude; for comparison, just try to imagine Roy Romer telling the Colorado Education Association that it's time to shape up.
Kansas Sen. Robert Dole lambasted Hollywood last week on
much the same grounds. Granted, Dole doesn't need Hollywood
money, not as long as there are insurance companies and
defense contractors, but on the other hand, he didn't cloak
his speech in vague generalities. Dole named names like
Natural Born Killers
and Time-Warner.
Right away, I wondered why Dole pointed his finger at an
Oliver Stone film while ignoring other disgusting, sleazy,
violent stuff like True Lies
and
Predator.
But a moment's thought revealed why True Lies
is
wholesome family fare while Natural Born Killers
is
eating away at the moral foundations of the republic.
Arnold Schwartzenegger is the star of True Lies,
and he's a Republican in good standing; a campaign asset,
in fact. Further, in that film, as in most other
Schartzenegger epics I've seen, the main action scene goes
like this: Muscular representative of the master race
arrives on Third World island populated by swarthy little
terrorists, who get then blown away wholesale by the great
Aryan hero.
Natural Born Killers
is nowise that gory, so it
can't be mere cinematic violence that bothers Bob Dole.
What must really perturb him is that white people get
killed.
Dole probably has the same problem with the Time-Warner
gangsta rap
he deplores. It's one thing if a country
song talks about a white redneck greeting the revenuers
with a scattergun, but quite another if black urban kids
deal with a similar topic.
Clinton and Dole aren't the only people complaining.
Michael Medved hit the best-seller lists with a book called
Hollywood vs. America,
as though there was something
unamerican about an industry which devoutly follows H.L.
Mencken's dictum that No one ever went broke
underestimating the taste of the American public.
There were also Second Lady Tipper Gore, back when she was a mere senator's wife, attacking the lascivious lyrics in some recorded music, and James D. Quayle, then only a heartbeat away from the presidency, attacking the Murphy Brown situation comedy for promoting bastardy.
In the face of all that bi-partisan firepower, American society must act. Flat-out censorship would be tricky, so the best solution might be an expansion of the current rating systems applied to movies (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17) and recorded music (Parental Discretion Advised).
DEA-OK: Approved by the American drug czar as meeting
the condition that no one involved in the production was,
in any way, involved with any currently controlled
substance or with glamorizing the producers, sellers or
users thereof. To date, no opus, including Jefferson in
Paris
(our third president knowingly and willfully
cultivated hemp on his Virginia plantation) has managed to
achieve this coveted rating.
CD-13: This is primarily for multimedia CD-ROM disks that run in a home computer, and it means that no one over the age of 13 can figure out how to run the program. Most VCRs also carry this sticker.
LL: The term comes from the initials to Louie,
Louie,
and it means that the movie or recording may
contain racy words, but the sound quality is so mushy that
no one can be sure.
NATAS: This is satan
spelled backward, and it's
the rating that goes on songs which are rumored to contain
demonic messages if played backward at 16 rpm. Believe it
or not, we Coloradans twice elected a U.S. senator who
cared about such things. Now that hardly anything appears
on vinyl, somebody is going to have to modify a CD player
so that it will run in reverse at the wrong speed, or else
the minders of our morals will have to find a new
target.
GOP-18: Certified to give potential voters the proper
Dole message about violence -- it's permissible if employed
by white males, but forbidden to other folks. As explained
above, all Schartzenegger and Chuck Norris movies receive
this rating, while films like Thelma and Louise
and
Milagro Beanfield War
will never be approved.
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