Pop Goes the Culture?

America has its favorite M&M. It's called Movies & Morality. It is playing -- if that's the word -- at a multiplex near you. Hollywood is inadvertently doing its best to disarm critics by unfurling a record number of films marked by stupefying degrees of dullness or triviality, or both.

Who can seriously argue that the foundations of the Republic are being shattered by such would-be taboo-busters and hot-button-pushers as "Eyes Wide Shut," "American Pie" and "South Park"? Certainly not anyone who has seen the films, which have grossed millions and grossed out at least thousands, in the case of the last two, and anesthetized thousands more, in the case of the first.

Still, critics of post-Littleton Hollywood are taking aim, an easier thing to do than ever, given that nothing significant has happened on the gun-control front, or is likely to. Movies have always been an easier target than the National Rifle Association, especially in a culture born of violence, expanded through systematized violence toward indigenous peoples, cozy with the idea of gun-barrel diplomacy long before movies were invented. The take-the-spotlight-off-guns-and-shine-it-on-movies argument might be rephrased as: Guns don't kill people, movies kill people. So clamp down on movies and don't worry about guns. Never mind that more than 60,000 people have been killed by firearms in the United States since 1997, more than the U.S. death total in the Vietnam War.

In 1996, according to the Chicago Tribune, there were 10,744 murders by firearms in the United States. People in other countries mostly see the same violent movies we do. But in New Zealand there were two gun murders in 1996. In Japan, 15. In Britain, 30. In Canada, 106. In Germany, 213. And so on. The Tribune article concludes that the numbers are directly proportional to the level of gun regulation. Makes sense, unless you prefer to believe that we are not all brothers and sisters under the skin, that human DNA is subject to nationalism. The figures underline the irony of the plot motor in "South Park," which has outraged American parents declaring war on Canada when a Colorado town's elementary and preschool youngsters start talking dirty after seeing a Canadian movie.

Goin' 'South'

"South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" -- the double-entendre-laden title somehow got by the ratings board -- has been hailed in some quarters for what one critic called its "inspired comic rudeness." My own enthusiasm for "South Park" was considerably more muted. I laughed at some of its envelope pushing, but I found its selling point -- kids talking dirty while pursuing the usual parent-bashing stereotyping of authority figures as hypocritical, puritanical fools -- became boringly juvenile and as blatantly manipulative as the usual Hollywood factory products the film's enthusiastic critics regularly scorn on principle. "South Park" is nothing but rejiggered "Ubu Roi." It puts the id back in kid.

Like most films aimed at younger ticket buyers, it sets up a situation of authority figures trying to keep the lid on while kids try to keep it off. I'm more for than against it because it's less objectionable than any governmental controlling mechanism would be. I write this knowing that a number of parents cringe at the language in "South Park" and aren't comfortable watching it with their kids, especially preteens. I also can't get too worked up about artists' rights in this context. Art exists to push the envelope, to make us confront aspects of being human, to express a deeply held personal view, whatever that view may be. By this definition, most Hollywood films are not art.

Hollywood films are big, expensive manufactured objects sent out into the world to make money. They do contribute to a pervasive coarsening of life. "South Park" easily falls into this category. Granted, it doesn't have the budget of "Armageddon." Still, it's a mercantile object, designed to drag a sagging TV show around the track a few more times by injecting it with material that can't be shown on the small screen. Which would be OK if it passed the test of comedy, which is to make us laugh. But I spent as much time wondering if "South Park" wasn't at least as much about baiting the ratings board as about anything else. I found it more cynical than liberating.

Not that "South Park" is alone in this depressing summer in which most of the energies on most of the screens seem to be chasing the gross-out bonanza of last summer's "There's Something About Mary." The Farrelly brothers' film worked because it was offset by the sunny sweetness of Cameron Diaz's Mary. If ever a film could do with fewer flatulence and toilet jokes it's "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me." But again, it's redeemed as much by the sweetness that comes through in Mike Myers alongside the zaniness of his Austin and Dr. Evil's alter ego, Mini-Me. The trick this summer obviously is to find some way to make the poop, or the pee, or (to borrow a phrase from a filmmaker we'll get to in a moment) the precious bodily fluids palatable.

Adam and 'American'

Adam Sandler doesn't bring it off in "Big Daddy," currently courting immortality with its urinating-on-a-wall scene. Partly it's because he placates audiences with sentimentality, partly because the sentimentality doesn't work. It's hard to reconcile the I'm-the-boss-here look in his eyes with what's supposed to be the shleppiness of the loser he's playing. And shleppiness is the avenue for the bid for sympathy made by "American Pie," this summer's apparent front-runner in the precious-bodily-fluids sweepstakes. Its will to dumbness is relentless, but it takes the sting out of the two-dimensionality of its story about four high school buddies who turn their desire to lose their virginity by prom night into a competition.

The four guys are orchestrated types, but they're brothers in shleppiness, awkward, anxious, and vulnerable underneath their locker-room bravado and big talk that doesn't fool anyone. They and the script would get tedious pretty fast if it weren't for a couple of pleasant surprises. For one thing, a few of the young women are depicted as sexually autonomous, although it's funny that the one woman who frankly and openly enjoys sex isn't American. She's an exchange student from Eastern Europe who's hustled back home on a plane -- the slut! -- when she acts out what the guys would love to but are too scared and inept to. The usual absence of parents and other adult authority figures is diligently observed, except for one boy's dad -- here's where "American Pie" pushes the envelope -- who isn't a complete fool to be totally despised.

One of the reasons "American Pie" is finding such favor, I suspect, is that it's so unthreatening beneath its surface unruliness, so reassuringly old-fashioned. It's a rite-of-passage film that differs only from the old "Andy Hardy" films in that it takes place in a time of greater openness and frankness about bodily functions. Even its bid for pop-culture deathlessness, the sex-with-an-apple-pie scene, isn't the breakthrough that some of its easy-to-impress devotees claim. As the New York Observer pointed out, a generation ago it was raw liver in "Portnoy's Complaint." The thing about raw liver or apple pie, one supposes, is that while the conversational level may never sparkle, you don't have to look your best.

'Eyes' doesn't have it

While it is often observed that violence is as American as apple pie we now may be trembling on the brink of a millennium when sex may be, too. If, that is, Stanley Kubrick's unintended valedictory, "Eyes Wide Shut," doesn't shut sex down entirely for a while. While I can't claim anything like expertise on the subject of orgies, I can say I've attended wakes that were sexier than the glum orgy into which Tom Cruise's character is plunged in a fit of self-induced ego bolstering in "Eyes Wide Shut." It's unfair (but who said life was fair?) to freight with an undue weight of expectation what Kubrick thought was going to be only his next film. But not only does "Eyes Wide Shut" fail to seem anything like a climax to Kubrick's career, it's an outright disappointment.

The great thing about Kubrick's work was that it was spectacularly uneven. This is a compliment. It means he didn't just try to keep making the same film. What's surprising about "Eyes Wide Shut" isn't that it unsparingly exposes the limits of the acting abilities of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (that was to be expected), but that it seems so out of touch with the times. To some degree this was inevitable, given the film's source in a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, the fin-de-siecle Viennese who wrote it in part to rationalize and think positively of his own womanizing.

"Eyes Wide Shut" is surprisingly sexist. The men go off and have sex. The women either stay home and dream about it, such as the frustrated wife Kidman plays, or go out and play the game as the men do, and die for it, while the guys walk away unscathed. Worse, the film oscillates between tinny hysteria and lugubrious lethargy. There's no sexual energy, no sexual impulse, perhaps inevitable in retrospect when you consider that sex is the most ungovernable impulse and Kubrick was the most controlling of filmmakers. To sit through "Eyes Wide Shut" and reflect that Kubrick thought he had a dangerous film here is what's saddest.

Every 'Witch' way

The summer's biggest sense of danger, as it happens, comes from its smallest, least expensive film. "The Blair Witch Project" is the latest example of film's ability to renew itself. With minimal resources, it tells us we're watching footage shot by three filmmakers who disappeared in the woods when they went to get the story on a mythical witch. Borrowing pages from Lang and Hitchcock and Jacques Tourneur, it scares us not with buckets of gore and special effects, but with dread. It makes us afraid of what we don't see, but seems lurking nearby.

In doing so, the film makes us its collaborators in a time when most other films distance us by throwing at us stuff we know is contrived. When horror movies, especially the ones starring teenagers, were about to dissolve in irony and self-referential artifice, "The Blair Witch Project" yanks us back to the genre's primal beginnings. It makes most of what passes for hot stuff in Hollywood seem jaded and laughable -- for example, because it's closest at hand, the overblown reaction to the so-called sex in "Eyes Wide Shut."

To get an NC-17 rating changed to an R, Kubrick had to come up with what amounted to 65 seconds of, in effect, digital fig leaves. Kubrick inserted computerized caped figures to mask background sex acts in the orgy scene. Given the deadliness of the scene and the film, it hardly mattered. Ultimately, it's not "Eyes Wide Shut" that is making this a summer where the films are cruder than the ratings system. Clearly, the system we have doesn't give people enough information in a time when filmmakers are growing ever more adept at blurring the line between R and PG-13. Why did "American Pie" get an R while the no-less-crude "Austin Powers" got a PG-13? Search me.

It's not getting any easier for parents to do their traditional job of setting limits. One thing that might help is adding to ratings a variety of numbers, say 12 or 16 or 17, not just 13. But then someone 12 years old may be more mature than someone 16. Perhaps the R rating, so vague as to be useless, could be replaced by V (for violence) or L (for language) or S (for sex), or any combination of those. It would give parents more to work with in a day when policing movies has grown more difficult, too.

When I was young and underage, it was easy enough to find an adult to buy me tickets to movies I wasn't allowed to see. Today it's even easier given multiplexes. Kids can buy a ticket to one movie, then, once inside, see another. How many kids buying tickets to, say, "Tarzan," actually see "Tarzan"? The pressure to have movie theater owners police kids won't work, especially when the policing comes down to ushers scarcely older than the kids they're supposed to be policing. Asking theaters to police moviegoing is like asking the NRA to regulate guns. Besides, while movies may contribute (just how much is debatable) to an overall desensitizing, they aren't the cause. Ask me the cause of the devaluing of human life, and I'd reply "Runaway materialism."

But that's another story.

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