Movie Reviews from
By John Ruch
© 2000 CM Media, Inc.
John Ruch’s Final
Say: Nothing’s “Just Entertainment” (column, 2000)
Well, kids, the moment you’ve all been waiting for is here: my final week at “The Other Paper.” Soon you won’t have me to kick you around anymore.
I believe that after seven years, three months and one day of writing about this city and its art, I have some wisdom to impart. Call it the privilege of a dying man—with the added privilege of not dying.
In that time, I have seen hundreds of movies, most of them bad. (Call me cynical, but I saw everything Disney released in 1995, 1996 and 1997. Did you?) I learned many things from this experience, but they can be summed up in two points:
“Pornographic movie” is redundant.
“Propaganda movie” is redundant.
Everything
else relating to
There is no such thing as “just entertainment.”
To enjoy a movie, you must subscribe to (or be stimulated by) the sociopolitical assumptions on which its drama is founded; every movie is propaganda for some such set of assumptions.
And once those assumptions have been accepted, every movie works pornographically by giving us vicarious, objectified thrills.
“Just entertainment” is actually a highly relative, subjective term (like its real-life counterpart “just the way things are”). There’s nothing wrong with that, either. Figuring out why a particular film appeals to you can give you great personal insight and deepen your enjoyment of old favorites—or cause you to question some long-held beliefs. The unexamined movie isn’t worth watching.
However, the know-nothingism of “just entertainment” is strong, and many movies do go unexamined. That’s scary, since mainstream film often contains many damaging sociopolitical assumptions, such as sexism and consumerism.
You can go to CAPA’s Summer Movie Series, which features old mainstream films, and hear the audience gasp at the “just-entertainments” of yesteryear, such as black-face comedy. Likewise, audiences of the future will gasp at many of the “just-entertainments” of today.
I like to save time by gasping now.
I’ve had lots of chances. The past decade has been a period of complacency and anti-intellectualism that was only to be expected as the middle class enjoyed unprecedented financial success.
Now that time is about to culminate in the election of governmental
censorship advocates Gore and Lieberman to the White House. (Not that
anyone should vote for George “Don’t Mess With Texas Or
I’ll Execute You” Bush and Dick “Autographed Bombs About To Be Dropped On
If some things are “just entertainment,” then it follows that some things are “just not entertainment”—and Gore and Lieberman would have us believe that “media violence” is one such thing.
While it isn’t clear what effect they think “media violence” has, or even how they define it (does it include getting a stadium full of people to chant “gore!”?), it’s impossible to deny that aggression is rampant in modern entertainment.
One might ask why that is. One might notice the energy of youth culture, the alienation of male culture, the hard-hitting rawness of blue-collar culture, the anger of leftist protesters.
But Gore and Lieberman don’t—they simply seek to ban it on the grounds that it is “uncivil” and inherently wrong. This is pure upper-class, old-fogey bigotry that denies people the right to be angry, and ignores the fact that pointing out problems in society is an inherently uncomfortable, “impolite” act.
That’s not to say that all “media violence” is sensible, but a lot of babies go out with that bath water. When Al Gore and wife Tipper were crusading against rock music in the 1980s, they unwittingly derided many songs whose contents agreed with their politics, but whose style (almost exclusively blue-collar metal and leftist punk rock) was too raw and loud for their ears.
Indeed, the single album prosecuted as a result of their efforts, the Dead Kennedys’ “Frankenchrist,” was filled with attacks on nuclear proliferation, homophobia, the low minimum wage, sexism, lack of art funding, Ronald Reagan and, yes, violent movies.
I’m not against challenges to media violence; I’ve issued dozens myself. But where are the challenges to equally damaging things like media romance and media consumerism? Gore and Lieberman are only concerned with “media violence” because it’s the only thing that counters their conception of art: a pleasant distraction with only the most remote sort of meaning.
And that conception is the real disease of which everything else is a mere symptom. There’s nothing inherently wrong with violence, romance or any other expression. Context is more important than content. And consumer capitalism is our culture’s main context; not surprisingly, most of our “art” is actually product, devoid of real meaning and full of cheap thrills and obvious lies.
Clearly, Gore and Lieberman view art as product. That’s why they naively expect it to be pleasant and tame. That’s also why they feel free to violate the Constitution and censor it—to them, it’s no different than regulating the quality of ground beef. What government agency does Lieberman want to turn into a censorship board? The Federal Trade Commission.
For culture warriors, Gore and Lieberman know very little about culture. (Heck, they don’t even realize that explicit movie violence is at a 30-year low.) But it’s hard to blame them—they’ve just been hoodwinked and turned into good little consumers like everybody else.
Still, I
think they’re about to lead
“Just entertainment” used to be the ultimate invalidation of any criticism about your favorite movie. Now Gore and Lieberman are turning that very claim of meaninglessness into the ultimate validation of their much more dangerous criticisms: If your art means nothing to you, why do you care if we chop it up, or even prevent you from seeing it at all?
I humbly suggest it’s time we realize that all art, good or bad, has the fundamental meaning for its fans of expressing their worldview. That expression is always up for criticism, but never for silencing (or governmental bullying that effectively results in silencing). Especially by leaders who are elected to serve everyone—the angry, loud, alienated and lower-class included.
On the home
front,
The city has strong, innovative art leaders. Immigration is starting to reduce the white-bread atmosphere. Pro sports have the potential to reduce the juvenile obsession with college sports.
However, I have a few modest proposals for the city and its citizens:
Lobby Magic
Johnson to buy and renovate one of the old theaters on the
File suit the next time the city censors an art exhibit; or file suit now over content-restrictive contracts for exhibiting in public spaces.
Read a non-fiction book more than 10 years old in a subject you know nothing about.
Take
suburban schoolkids on field trips to
Make a sophisticated program of media-criticism and art-appreciation courses part of the public schools’ core curriculum.
Free documentary idea: Rent a car and videotape cops speeding, running red lights and making U-turns. You’ll have enough footage for a feature within two days. Title it “Ticket Quota.”
Go to
Studio 35 and the Drexel at least once a month. Go to the
Create something.
Seek out
great (though not necessarily serious) art. You’re worthy of it.