Movies, morality and conservative complaints.

• Author: Sherrett, Christopher

There has been renewed discourse lately about Hollywood's moral obligations to the public and the extent to which the sex and violence of feature films does violence to existing social mores. The most notable feature of the largely unremarkable debate is its lack of timeliness. Had it occurred at the heyday of Reaganism, when Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and their ilk were riding high in the media spectacle (and the nation was enjoying a bizarre somnambulism), these condemnations would be of a piece with the reaction of the 1980s. Neoconservative culture has not left the scene with the closing of the Reagan/Bush era, but the recent complaints about Hollywood's sins, particularly given the forward-looking Clinton moment, seem hopelessly anachronistic.

The renewed hand-wringing about movie morality has at its base a theory of communication enunciated more than 50 years ago by Harold Lasswell, who suggested a "hypodermic" notion of media, wherein communication processes are seen as something an individual or agency does to someone else. Like "impact" theories of art, this idea proceeds on the assumption that the public is a kind of tabula rasa (clean slate) upon which is inscribed all social, cultural, economic, political, and moral ideas. Such theories pay little attention to the role media have in reflecting ideas already circulating in society. According to this notion, "Hill Street Blues" and "Miami Vice" were different from "Dragnet" not because 1980s television necessarily reflected 1980s culture, but because TV producers decided to sabotage the time-honored and unshakable style and ideology of Jack Webb.

When John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, a few critics immediately seized on the assailant's preoccupation with the film "Taxi Driver." Such a focus exempts us from a more complex discourse about the root causes of violence or other anti-social conduct. When Ted Bundy blamed horror movies and pornography for his crimes, the New Right jumped on a bandwagon that a sociopath and pathological liar propped up for them, failing to notice that horror films and porn were rather tame when Bundy began his murderous career, and those things that impact a sociopath, abused from childhood, might have negligible effect on the rest of society.

The conservative criticism of cinema is and always has been involved in the pursuit of scapegoats. This criticism is little interested in systemic issues that very well may be involved in both the dominant...