Care to see the chief theater of operations in the culture wars? Just take a stroll through the Sherman Oaks Galleria, a twinkling mall in California's San Fernando Valley. This is where the great outpouring of pop culture comes to market, a market that caters to all the moods of the American disposition, from moonglow to bloodlust. At Sam Goody's, the chain record store, the CD bins are stuffed with amiable releases by Hootie and the Blowfish and Boyz II Men. But they also hold the gangsta rap of Bloods and Crips and Tupac Shakur. Nearby, at the Time Out video arcade, Jordan Trimas, 16, is playing Primal Rage, a game in which dinosaurs tear one another to pieces. "Sure, the violence influences kids," he shrugs. "But nobody can do anything about it."
At the Sherman Oaks multiplex, it's the same mixed bag. On the wide screens there's a face-off between the two top-grossing films of the week, Casper (the Friendly Ghost) offers his doe-eyed version of mortality against the merry bloodbath that is Die Hard with a Vengeance. But over at Taco Bell, 15-year-old Christopher Zahedi will tell you he prefers the rougher stuff. "I liked the part in Pulp Fiction where the guy points a gun and says a prayer from the Bible and then kills everybody," he offers. "You hear the gun go brrrr. It's cool."
In their worst nightmares a lot of parents can also hear that gun go brrrr. They aren't so sure it's cool, just as they aren't so sure it's cool when they come across the more stomach-turning specimens of pop music in their kids' CD collections. That's why, when Bob Dole went to Los Angeles last week to blast the entertainment industry, he touched a chord that transcended the party politics his remarks were shrewdly crafted to serve. Though popular culture has a long and proud history of offending the squares, during the current decade it has particularly kept its sharpest edges to the front. Whatever is scabrous and saw-toothed and in-your-face is probably brought to you by the major labels and the big studios. For parents, the pervasive electronic culture can start to look like some suspect stranger who hangs around their kids too much, acting loutish, rude, and drunk.
It was that anxiety Dole was speaking to when he accused the powers behind American movies, music and television of flooding the country with "nightmares of depravity." Warning that the more extreme products of pop culture threaten to undermine American kids, he called on the large media companies to swear off the hard stuff. "We must hold Hollywood and the entire entertainment industry accountable for putting profit ahead of common decency," Dole said, then raised the heat considerably by singling out one company, Time Warner, the media giant that includes the largest American music operation, the Warner film studio and a stable of magazines, including Time. One day after Dole's speech, William Bennett, the former Education secretary and drug czar, sent letters to Time Warner board members asking the company to stop distributing rap with objectionable lyrics.
Later in the week, Dole's wife Libby announced that she would be selling more than $15,000 in Walt Disney stock after learning that Disney, through its subsidiary Miramax, is the distributor of Priest. The controversial film, which her husband had already denounced several weeks ago, depicts a gay clergyman and a sexually active straight one. And coming soon from Miramax is Kids, a raw depiction of a sex-obsessed, drug-bleary day in the life of some New York City teens. It's the sort of thing Mickey Mouse would have to peek at through trembling white-gloved fingers.
To be sure, Dole's remarks were an unmistakable pitch to the culturally conservative wing of the Republican Party, which will have a lot to say about who becomes the next G.O.P. presidential candidate. Dan Quayle, their favorite son, never entered the race. Pat Buchanan, their guilty pleasure, is probably too extreme to be elected. Even before it turned out that he once invested in an R-rated film, Phil Gramm of Texas had left them cold. Until recently, so had Dole, who never showed much interest in the politics of virtue before the Christian right emerged as a power bloc in the party. In an effort to gain their attention, he has been sniping for months at Hollywood. Last week's salvo was like a proposal of marriage.
But Dole's attacks resonate beyond the party faithful, in all senses of the word. In a Time poll conducted at the end of last week by Yankelovich Partners, Inc., 77% of those questioned said that they were very concerned or fairly concerned about violence in the media; 70% said the same about media representations of sex. With numbers like those, it's a safe bet that Campaign '96 will also be Murphy Brown II, a further chapter of the conservative assault on Hollywood that Quayle launched in 1992.
"What we need is a national debate over the relationship of liberty to virtue," says Gary Bauer, the former Reagan White House aide who is president of the Family Research Council. "If you expose children to uplifting and noble material, you're more likely to have noble citizens. If children are wallowing in sexual images and violence, that is bound to have an impact on those who are most vulnerable."
In Hollywood, whose denizens have already been ridiculed for getting too close to the Clinton White House, the outraged response to Dole has been quick and complete. The speech was "a '90s form of McCarthyism," said Oliver Stone, whose Natural Born Killers was on Dole's hit list of objectionable films. "I don't think the public is that stupid," said Clint Eastwood. TV producer Norman Lear said he was "turned off by the excesses in some films" but insisted that Hollywood these days is making more pictures like The Lion King and A Little Princess.
In his attack on purveyors of offensive pop culture, Dole took pains, at least for now, not to hit some prominent Republicans. When he cited a list of recent family films that were also sizable box-office hits, Dole included not only The Lion King and Forrest Gump but also True Lies, a movie that reduced a small army of bad guys to blood-splattered pieces. Then again, it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, a G.O.P. muscleman. Another sometime Republican, Bruce Willis, is the star of Die Hard with a Vengeance, one of the many brutal-fun action pictures that escaped Dole's wrath. So did the gleefully smutty-minded Fox television network and its contributions to the history of crotch-grabbing, such as Married...With Children. Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a major contributor to conservative causes.
One day after the speech, which was written largely by Mari Maseng, wife of conservative columnist George Will, a Dole aide admitted that the Senator also had not seen most of the movies he talked about, nor had he heard most of the music. On Friday aboard his Gulfstream jet, Dole finally popped Natural Born Killers into the VCR. "Probably ought to take a look so I can say I've seen this thing," he joked to a Time reporter over the phone. "Then we can always throw it out the window."
Count on it to keep coming back. The violent and raunchy streak in civilization runs deep and long into the past. More teenage boys might by attracted to the classics if they knew about Homer's graphic descriptions of spear points ripping through flesh in The Iliad or the quarts of stage blood needed for any production of Titus Andronicus. As for sex, the lewd posturings in some paintings of Hieronymous Bosch would be rated NC-17 if they showed up at the multiplex.
But the rise of capitalism over the past two centuries has meant that all the resources of technology and free enterprise could at last be placed at the disposal of the enduring human fascination with grunt and groan. By the early decades of the present century, there had emerged in the U.S. an entertainment industry that would eventually prove to be all-pervasive and ever more given to decking out our base impulses with sweaty and imaginative detail. It awaited only the youth culture that began stirring and shaking in the 1950s to take full advantage of the possibilities in rock, films and TV. The result was a pop culture more pointed and grown up, but also more shameless and adolescent; sometimes both at the same time. The great skirmishes against the blue-nosed guardians of culture -- the Hays Office that policed movies in the '30s or the network censors who tormented the Smothers Brothers in the late '60s -- became the stuff of baby-boomer folklore.
The complications set in during the '90s, when the boomers who were once pop culture's most dedicated consumers became the decision makers at media companies -- but also the parents of the next generation. Pulled one way by their life-long instinct for whatever is sensational, unsanitized or unofficial, they find themselves dragged in the other direction by their emerging second thoughts as citizens and parents.
Dole says he's not interested in government censorship, which in any event hasn't worked very well in the past. In the best tradition of Patrick Henry, Americans generally don't have much patience with government interference in First Amendment rights of expression, even when they may not much like what's being expressed. In the most highly publicized attempt in recent years to set the law on pop music, three members of 2 Live Crew were arrested in Florida in 1990 after a live performance. It took a local jury just two hours to acquit them on obscenity charges.
But the First Amendment applies only to attempts by government to restrain expression. It says nothing about decisions made by private media companies, and it dies nothing to prevent them from choosing which songs or programs they will or will not promote. five years ago, Simon & Schuster canceled plans to publish American Psycho, the sado-chic novel by Bret Easton Ellis, after advance complaints about passages detailing the sexual torture and mutilation of women. (It was subsequently published by Knopf, a division of Random House.) "It's our responsibility," says Martin Davis, then chairman of Simon & Schuster's corporate parent Paramount. "You have to stand for something." This is just the sort of thing that Dole says he has in mind: self-restraint on the part of producers and distributors. "I'm just saying sometimes you have to have corporate responsibility and remember the impact on children."
Some media execs claim there isn't much that companies can do to restrain artists once they have them on their rosters. "Artists make records, not record companies," says David Geffen, the film and record producer who is now one-third of DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. "No record company tells them what to record."
But Geffen, whose label stopped distributing the Geto Boys in 1991 because he couldn't stomach their lyrics, also knows it's not so simple. Record companies routinely tell artists to remix their albums or record new tracks. Something like that happened two years ago at A&M Records. Its president, Al Cafaro, heard a track intended for an album by the rap artist Intelligent Hoodlum. Bullet in the Brain was about killing a police officer. In the wake of the uproar over Ice-T's song Cop Killer, record executives everywhere were thinking twice. "It was nothing that we could be party to," says Cafaro of the song. "I told him I couldn't release it." What did Intelligent Hoodlum do? "He took the song off the record."
Two weeks ago, in a conversation with Time editors and correspondents, House Speaker Newt Gingrich went one step further when he suggested that major radio advertisers band together to boycott stations that play "explicitly vicious" rap. "They could drive violent rap music off radio within weeks," he said. Talk like that makes record execs very nervous. They know their product can also be vulnerable to boycotts by record stores that are under pressure from consumer groups. "You can make waves, but you can't mess with retail," says Eric Brooks, president of Noo Tribe Records. "You need to have your album stocked in the store."
Though advertisers haven't banded together yet, some citizen groups are trying it. Dennis Walcott, president of the New York Urban League, organized a protest last week at radio station WQHT in New York to persuade the station to stop playing Shimmy Shimmy Ya, a rap song that the protesters say encourages sex without condoms. "I'm not asking for censorship," says Walcott. "I'm asking for corporations who make money from these things to think about content and message."
The prominence of African-American organizations as critics of gangsta rap is a new element in this year's version of the culture wars. In his new campaign against Tim Warner, Bill Bennett is allied with C. DeLores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women. After a woman working at radio station WBLS in New York complained last year about the lyrics of one rap song, management established a committee to screen the playlist. For station head Pierre Sutton, who is black, it's simply a matter of "not in my house you don't." Says Sutton: "Artists have the right to say what they want to, and we have the right to decide with regard to the playing of same." When 1993 statistics showed that violent crime in Kansas City, Missouri, had risen 200% in one year, FM station KPRS decided no longer to broadcast violent, sexually explicit, or misogynist rap. Under the new policy, KPRS rose from third to first place in the local ratings.
Though the cultural-pollution issue looks like an easy win for the Republicans, it's not a clean sweep. As the debate develops in weeks to come, the soft spots in their arguments are likely to become more apparent. For a party committed to free-market principles -- and which also wants to defund public television and end government oversight of the airwaves -- a problem is that pop culture represents the free market at its freest, meaning most able to make a profitable pitch to the grosser appetites. Some of the most violent American films, like the Stallone-Willis-Schwarzen-
egger action pictures, are also among the most successful American film exports because their bang-bang simplicities translate easily across cultural boundaries. Says Democratic Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey: "The free market that the economic conservatives champion undermines the moral character that the social conservatives desire."
In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, the conservatives are also stuck with their own problem of violence in the media -- and it's not just Schwarzenegger's body counts. "Jackbooted thugs," the description of federal law-enforcement agents in a fund-raising letter from the National Rifle Association, is a kind of cop-killer lyric in itself. So is "aim at the head" -- radio talk-show host G. Gordon Liddy's suggestion for greeting federal law-enforcement agents at your door.
Republicans who talk about the real-life consequences of pop-culture vulgarity still scream at the suggestion of any link between talk-show belligerence and Oklahoma City. Americans aren't so sure. In the Time poll, 52% of those questioned said they believe that strong antigovernment rhetoric inspires people to violence. And a lot of Americans are already suspicious of any attempt to use the culture issue as a way to evade discussion of everything else that contributes to the fraying of American life, from threadbare schools to the flood of guns. In the Time poll, 55% of those questioned agreed that if candidates want to improve the nation's moral climate, there are more important issues to concentrate on than sex and violence in the entertainment industry.
With those weak points in mind, Bill Clinton took a swipe at Dole last week at a town meeting in Billings, Montana. Without mentioning the Senator by name, Clinton observed pointedly that "there are some public officials in our country who are only too happy to criticize the culture of violence being promoted by the media but are stone-cold silent when those other folks are talking and making violence seem O.K."
For Democrats, criticizing Hollywood amounts to biting the hand that feeds them. Media-company executives and major stars contributed heavily to Clinton's 1992 campaign and to Democratic coffers generally in last year's congressional elections. Even so, the Democrats appreciate the potential power of the cultural-pollution issue and hope to position themselves prominently before Republicans get a lock on it.
They can point out, for example, that Tipper Gore was among the first crusaders against obscene rock lyrics. First Lady Hillary Clinton has made frequent, if muted, denunciations of media vulgarity, and now seems to be turning up the volume, most recently in her appearance on Oprah. And sandwiched into Bill Clinton's long State of the Union message in January was a plea to Hollywood "to assess the impact of your work and to understand the damage that comes from the incessant, repetitive, mindless violence that permeates our media all the time."
In an interview with Time last week, Vice President Gore stepped up the rhetoric. "Some of the decisions made by executives in the entertainment industry, the advertising industry, the creative community, have been obscene and atrocious." It was fine with him, Gore added, to try to shame corporate executives into reining in their product, though he rejected the notion that "shaming alone is a magic solution."
It's also not as easy as it sounds. Some decisions by media companies may seen like no-brainers. How many rap songs about slicing women's throats does the world really need? But most other judgments of taste are more difficult calls. Both of the films that Dole deplored, Natural Born Killers and True Romance, happen to have been written by Quentin Tarantino. He's also the explosively gifted director of Pulp Fiction, the great cockeyed movie where that guy quotes from the Bible and the gun goes brrrr and some younger viewers think it's cool -- lots of older viewers too. In the effort to achieve a kid-friendlier culture, do we want to end up with a sanitized one, free of the worst excesses of "death metal" but also purged of Tarantino? Or of sassy but not salacious rappers like Salt-N-Pepa? Or even, let it be said, deprived of the mixed bag of gifts and gas that is Oliver Stone?
The culture wars won't just be conducted in board rooms and at candidates' debates. For some time to come, they will surely be going on within our families and homes, and sometimes within ourselves as well.
-- transcribed by kate mccormack