荒诞者共和

All this right in my own room! On my TV screen. It's the 1991 made-for-TV movie, "The Pit and the Pendulum," a bloody gumbo of Edgar Allen Poe tales with mad churchmen as villains. And my TV/VCR had just logged onto it while I was rewinding "Hollywood vs. Religion," the Michael Medved video documentary, which WLAE-TV, the local diocesan-owned PBS station, has shown three times in August and which other PBS stations will be urged to feature throughout the coming months.

I had been watching Medved critically, cringing at what I considered his misjudgments and exaggerations; but here I was, 30 seconds later, face to face with a mad monk.

Medved and his partner, Jeffrey Lyons, have since 1985 done "Sneak Previews," the weekly movie-review TV show which Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert developed for PBS before moving to NBC. In Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (1992), which he summarizes in "Hollywood's Dirty Little Secrets," (Crisis, March 1993), and in his appearance at the Catholic Press Association last spring, Medved, a Jew active in his synagogue, has argued that the Hollywood elite, who don't go to church, have no idea that the American public overwhelmingly does believe in God, goes to church, loves America, doesn't want to hear the f-word in the theater or watch Michael Jackson zip and unzip his fly.

Last month, The New York Times (Aug. 20) offered partial corroboration of some of Medved's points: In a poll of 1,209 adults, a strong majority hold TV responsible for the rise in teenage sexual activity and violence. Nine of 10 surveyed had something bad to say about the influence of the popular culture -- although the average American continues to watch four hours of TV a day. Or worse, Medved says: By the time a child is 6 years old, she or he has spent more time watching TV, videos and movies than in talking to his father.

Anyone who adheres to some religious values and stays even marginally in touch with popular culture knows that several of Medved's points score. As he says, every detail in a film is crucial; filmmakers know exactly what they are doing in every scene. And one of the mass media's greatest powers is to determine our idea of what constitutes real behavior. Thus, if a string of TV dramas deal with teenagers losing their virginity at 14, it would not be surprising if 15-year-old viewers begin to feel there was something missing from their lives.

The people who produce MTV videos, afternoon TV talk shows, soap operas, slasher movies, explosion movies, Calvin Klein jeans and perfume ads will feed the public appetite for sexy and sensational material right up to that threshold where appetite moves through tolerance into repulsion, then into indignation. Then, like Michael Jackson with his anti-Semitic lyrics in a recent video, and Calvin Klein with his sultry teen-jean ads, they back off, saying they were "misunderstood."

In short, the people who feed our dreams are out to make money in any way they can and are not to be trusted as custodians of public mores. Thus, the critical analysis of popular culture is a Christian imperative in an era where media are not merely a diversion, a source of entertainment, but constitute the whole environment in which we move. However, whether or not church leaders should buy into Medved's ethical analysis is another question.

In the 1930s and '40s, he says, when moviegoers saw a Roman collar on the screen, it was wrapped around the neck of Spencer Tracy, Pat O'Brien or Bing -- "Dial 'O' for O'Malley" -- Crosby. Today, released from the constraints of the old Motion Picture Code, Hollywood portrays priests, ministers and rabbis as homicidal maniacs, hypocrites, seducers and bumbling fools.

For example, in the TV miniseries "The Thorn Birds," we always knew that the priest, because he was played by Richard Chamberlain, would end up in bed with someone beautiful; in the military courtroom drama "A Few Good Men," when an uptight marine declares himself a Christian, it's a sure sign he's going to turn out the villain.

Medved's credibility wobbles, however, when he talks about films I've seen.

As David Denby points out in his New Republic (Nov. 2, 1992) review of Hollywood vs. America -- which he calls the "stupidest book about popular culture that I have read to the end" -- Medved has little sense of the context in which his "antireligious" scenes appear.

If a priest is portrayed "favorably," he seems to conclude that this is a good film. If a film treats a shameful episode in American history, Stanley Kubrick's presentation of the Vietnam War in "Full Metal Jacket," for example, or if Hollywood declines to make an epic glorifying America's victory in the Gulf War, it must be because the Hollywood liberal elite are unpatriotic, not because our national policy in those wars was, to say the least, morally ambivalent.

Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ," he says, is a "miserable mess of a movie," because its Jesus, who is portrayed as a young carpenter who makes and carries crosses for Roman executions, "is not the Jesus of the New Testament." Perhaps he does not know that the film is not based on the New Testament but on Nikos Kazantzakis' popular novel, which is built around the idea that Jesus' whole life was a struggle to understand his own mission.

Perhaps it is outrageous for any artist -- Kazantzakis or Scorsese -- to suggest that Jesus, who in one scene holds down the feet of a condemned man as the soldier pounds in the spike, was capable of sin. But we give artists freedom to outrage us -- if that's what it takes to lead to a deeper truth.

If Jesus was fully human, it seems possible that he participated in some way in the most common failing of all mankind: collaboration -- that soft slackness when faced with moral responsibility, the failure to separate ourselves radically from evil, because evil is so deeply woven into the fabric of our political and economic lives.

The Medved video features the scene from "Godfather III" where a Vatican archbishop-financier works a multimillion dollar bank deal with Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), the not-quite-gone-legit mafia don who has just been made a papal knight.

Hollywood bigotry? Maybe. But is there anyone who has read the newspapers or reviews of David A. Yallop's "In God's Name" (1984) who does not recognize the movie plot as an operatic version of scandals that rocked the Vatican bank a few years ago? And did Medved sleep through the film's beautiful scene, where Corleone, overcome by a cardinal's goodness, confesses the murder of his own brother and is forgiven, even though the cardinal, who becomes Pope John Paul I, predicts that Corleone will never reform?

My wobbling faith in Medved crumbled when I endured "Rudy," Medved's idea of a good movie because it has a kindly priest. Free of sex, blasphemy and unpatriotic gore, "Rudy" does, however, indulge in another equally serious sin: idolatry. Its false god is Notre Dame football. It's the story of a sweet, little, dull-witted, bighearted boy who wants literally nothing else in life than to play for Notre Dame, and who slogs through a prep school, toils in a steel mill and slaves as a team servant to achieve one golden moment in a golden helmet in the shadow of the Golden Dome.

Surely those most offended by this film are the thousands of Notre Dame faculty, students and alumni who imagine that their university also has classrooms and a library. So what should the various dioceses and study groups and religious TV shows for whom this video was made do with it? Well, watch it, of course. But also watch "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988) and "Jesus of Montreal" (1989), a modern Canadian adaptation of the Passion play, which Medved seems not to have heard about.

Allow these works to challenge our understanding of the incarnation, of what it means to have God in flesh and on the tube. Then read and talk about what we have seen until we understand what it means.