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By Hollywood Possessed
| Article
# : |
20034 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
1,906 Words |
| Author
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Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlin, professor of sociology and director of the mass
communications program at the University of California,
Berkeley, is the author of Inside Prime Time (Pantheon), The
Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam), and the new
novel, The Murder of Albert Einstein (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux). |
Much of Michael Medved's jeremiad against Hollywood is right on, or against, the money. Since the studio system was dismantled in the 1940s and industry censorship was discontinued in the 1960s, moronic violence and automatic dirty words have become the common currency of the nation's (which means the world's) big screens. The most trivial thriller tries to differentiate itself from the common lot of the competition by simulating the ripping and rending of human flesh in such a way as to carry the skills of makeup artists to new planes of dreadfulness.
The body counts mount on the screen far faster than on the street. The world on the screen is amazingly vicious. Nice guys die first. Nice families do not happen. Heroes have vanished. Easy sex is the rule. Religion is taboo or worse--a cover for depredations. Businessmen are thugs.
One may quarrel here and there with Medved's general description of the movies of the last two decades. He relies too much on newspaper clippings and opinion polls. He ticks off the conclusions of various studies without even trying to analyze discrepancies between one study and another. He tends toward rhetorical overkill. At times he has a drastically truncated view of how movies are made. Taking exceptional examples like Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Schrader, he avers that directors decide for themselves what is going to go on the screen--as if there were no producers, executives, exhibitors, and other moneyed meddlers tailoring the final product.
Medved goes to the trouble of citing what he considers the "anti-American" political attitudes of the likes of the actress Susan Sarandon, as if the attitudes of an actress determine the attitudes of a movie. He has a tendency to regale the reader with plot summary after plot summary, by way of arguing that vast numbers of Hollywood movies (and secondarily, pop records) in recent years are a disgrace to humane ideals. In the process, he bulks out a useful book to inordinate length.
He has, moreover, at times, a disconcerting tendency toward paranoia in reading motives from movies. It is not conclusive enough to condemn what he calls "the ghoulish and shocking" contents of The Silence of the Lambs; but no, Medved goes further: "When the Academy chooses to anoint this particular picture, it is . . . not offering its applause in spite of its grotesque themes; it is doing so because of them." This grants too much mindfulness to a reckless industry. The sadism of moviemakers, their tendency to cannibalize decency, is not willful; it is mostly
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