8
Movies and Morality

The social and political dimension of eighties filmmaking had two components. The first, examined in chapter 7, involved the production of topical films that responded to key issues on the period's public agenda. From the new cold war and Vietnam to the symbolic transformations of dystopian science fiction, eighties filmmakers responded to their period with passion and imagination.

Their period also responded to them, with skirmishes and outright wars over the moral content of American film. While controversies about the appropriate content of motion pictures and their potential social effects are as old as the medium, the 1980s were a peak period for such activity. Arguments roiled within and outside the industry over portrayals of violence, sexuality, and religion; the horror genre; the burgeoning adult videotape industry, and such prominent studio pictures as Cruising (1980), Dressed to Kill (1980), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

These debates involved groups on both the political Right and Left and therefore do not easily reduce to a single agenda. They were, however, part of a major development during the Reagan years: the rise of a symbolic politics, that is, the waging of political conflicts on cultural terrain. As Charles Lyons has noted, "Debates over film censorship from 1980 to 1992 reflected a culture in conflict over sex, race, family values, and homosexuality. They also demonstrated that political struggles were being fought in a cultural arena."¹ The rise of a symbolic cultural politics was connected to the era's general ideological ferment. Of special significance in this regard were the activities of the New Right and its success in capitalizing on divisive ideological appeals in the wake of the collapse and general discrediting of liberalism. The New Right was an especially activist segment of the American electorate in the 1980s, successful at mobilizing its constituencies and with political ambitions, as John Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee put it, "to take control of the culture."²

An important caveat needs to be stressed here. The political Right, and conservatism in general, is not to be confused with the New Right. American conservatism was a heterodox coalition, including an old guard of traditional conservatives (e.g., William Buckley) who had been around for years and had watched their fortunes grow and decline but mostly lie fallow since the 1964 Goldwater defeat. It also comprised a neo-conservative wing of converted former liberals who enthusiastically embraced their new political identity.³ And it comprised as well the more extreme New Right coalition. This was a diffuse network of single-issue groups focused on (and generally opposing) such topics as busing, abortion, gun control, gay and women's rights, and school prayer (the New Right favored the latter). Direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie was a key player facilitating the growth of the New Right, using direct-mail campaigns to rouse opinion on hot-button issues. The extremism of the New Right made it both visible and troublesome for the Reagan administration. Many of these groups were too rabid to be permitted to have a close identification with the administration, but much of the impression that the country had swung to the Right during the 1980s was due to the high visibility of such groups and causes as Anita Bryant's crusade against gay rights, Phyllis Schafley's anti-ERA Eagle Forum, and Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority.

The growth of political action groups and their efforts to reach narrow segments of the electorate over highly emotional issues was a key factor in the rise of the era's symbolic politics. Such divisive issues as abortion, school prayer, pornography, and gay rights furnished effective bases around which to mobilize resources and constituents. Viguerie noted, "We never really won until we began stressing issues like busing, abortion, school prayer, and gun control. We talked about the sanctity of free enterprise, about the Communist onslaught until we were blue in the face."⁴ Effective methods for generating funds lay in making appeals to anger, fear, and hostility connected to symbolic issues perceived as threats to traditional family life. John Dolan admitted that the shriller the appeal, the more anger a direct mailing elicited, the easier it was to get money.⁵ A politics of cultural symbolism held special appeal for groups who felt marginalized by the movement and direction of society, disenfranchised and alienated by their perception that the predominant social values are inimical to their own. James McEvoy points out that "symbolic politics are the politics of groups that enjoy relatively greater representation than newly challenging groups but which are somewhat marginal with respect to their relations with the dominant segments of the society."⁶ Thus, New Right political activity during the 1980s expressed anxieties over the state of American culture and society, anxieties rooted in the perception of a growing adversarial culture whose constituents—radical students, women's libbers, gays, bohemian artists and intellectuals—were seen as threats to their own values and preferred norms of social authority.

The dominant symbolic motifs of the Reagan period portrayed a society under threat. America and the family were besieged by resurgent forces of chaos and disorder: communism, gay and women's rights, school busing, abortion. Twentieth-century America had gone astray, had been misled by the hitherto-prevailing liberal culture with its permissive and overly tolerant attitudes. Internationally, concern for human rights and a reluctance to use military force were aiding the Soviets' plans for world conquest. Domestically, society had lost its spiritual bearings, and homosexuality, abortion, and pornography threatened the body politic. President Reagan observed that "modern-day secularism [was] discarding the tried and time-tested values upon which our very civilization is based."⁷ All were threats to the nostalgic vision the administration offered of an America of small government, small business, and local communities organized around family and church. The Reagan "revolution" thus was an attempt to turn back the clock to a more pristine America, to a time when traditional authority was not challenged by oppositional racial, sexual, political, or economic interests. Stimulated by the bellicose rhetoric of the New Right, groups on the political Left, ranging from the women's movement to gay rights activists, joined in the era's divisive interpetations of cultural products and agendas for society. Hollywood films became a flashpoint in these battles, which targeted movie content while projecting more substantial and broader visions of what an appropriate American society should look like.

The struggles over movie censorship in the 1980s were stoked by a climate in which ideological battle lines were quickly drawn in culture and the arts. Though the reassertion of a more conservative national politics atop the corpse of liberalism helped fire the cultural battles of the period, and though the New Right's voice was among the most strident in this dialogue, groups of other political persuasions joined in the fray, at times to promote their own agendas, at times to respond to policy initiatives or campaigns that they deemed hostile to their interests. Efforts to adjudicate the terms of cinematic representation focused on disputed forms of visual symbolism and their potential social effects. Because a mix of groups from the Right and the Left entered the fray over movie content, this ideological range vividly demonstrated the volatility of the era's political symbolism and the extent to which the culture had become politicized and polarized. The issues that emerged in the debates over movie censorship do not reduce to a convenient ideological grouping. Instead, they were diverse (and divisive). Their volatility and persistence through the decade showed that the anxieties and hostilities that surround symbolic politics, once roused, are not easily extinguished. Indeed, the fracturing and splintering of American culture into divided, hostile encampments, so visible throughout the 1980s persists into the present era. In this sense, the battles that I now discuss, and the charged, antagonistic social atmosphere of which they were part, helped initiate a process of social disintegration that may be irreversible.

The Ratings Flap over Cruising

In early 1980, the nation's gay community mobilized to protest images of homosexuality in three new releases, Cruising, Windows, and American Gigolo. These protests, and the general controversy centered on Cruising, precipitated a crisis in the industry over the validity of its movie ratings code. Hollywood films had a long tradition of depicting gay sexuality as renegade and perverted, but in the 1980s the gay community had attained a degree of cultural visibility and political muscle that it had not previously possessed. It now exercised that muscle over these productions, which it deemed to contain unacceptably salacious and insulting depictions of homosexuality. Cruising, the most notorious of these pictures, luridly depicted gay sadomasochistic subcultures. Windows offered a homicidal lesbian, and American Gigolo depicted a (heterosexual) male prostitute against a backdrop of tawdry hetero- and homosexuality.

Of these pictures, Cruising was the most inflammatory, triggered the angriest community outbursts, and had the strongest social impact. Protests over this film were the opening act in a decade-long controversy over sex and violence in the movies, particularly in films where the sex and violence were conjoined with each other. Arguments over sexual violence in the movies, in society, and in potential connections between the two would focus on Cruising, the Penthouse production of Caligula (1980), Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984), the burgeoning cycle of violent horror films, and the expanding markets for video pornography. The cumulative effect of these productions, and the battles that surrounded them, helped feed public perceptions that the film industry was out of touch with grassroots America and was peddling lewd material to make a buck.

Furthermore, the sex-violence controversies revived long-standing concerns over the usefulness of the MPAA's single-letter ratings codes and eventually forced a revision of those codes. (In contrast with the imagery of Cruising and Windows, it should be noted that other Hollywood films of the period showed a new sensitivity and openness toward gay sexuality. Making Love [1980], which contained a then-daring on-screen kiss between two men, Personal Best [1982], Deathtrap [1982], Partners [1982], and Victor/Victoria [1982] were compassionate and matter-of-fact about their gay characters. Hollywood, though, had not embraced gay sexuality, and the industry remained timid and cautious in its treatments of the issue, as the exclusion of the gay subplots from The Color Purple [1986] and Fried Green Tomatoes [1989] demonstrated.)

Cruising offered perhaps the decade's ugliest and most unpleasant depiction of sexual extremism. Al Pacino plays a New York cop, Steve Burns, trying to catch a predator who is killing and mutilating gay men who frequent sadomasochistic clubs. Posing as a gay man, the cop goes undercover to infiltrate the somewhat secretive world of S&M fetishists. He studies the signals and codes practiced by initiates in this community, and he hangs out in the clubs the victims attended. During these visits, he begins to make some personal discoveries about his own sexuality that disturb him and cause problems in the relationship with his girlfriend. Burns becomes less sure of his own heterosexuality as the persona he has adopted in the clubs assumes an increasingly dominant place in his psyche. As the film progresses, the narrative becomes increasingly incoherent, but it suggests that Burns not only bears a physical likeness to the killer but may even be the killer. The denouement is confusing, and it is difficult to ascertain Burns's level of responsibility for the serial killings. But, however poorly plotted the film is, its lurid story line suggests that gay sexuality is part of a milieu of violence, exploitation, and perversity. Cruising's fascination with the S&M world goes beyond curiosity and becomes obsessively prurient. Burns's sojourns through the leather-and-chains domain provides the film with ample opportunities to take a leering look at exotic sexual practices. During the sequences in the S&M clubs, director William Friedkin fills his shots with shadowy figures groping and contorting in implied forms of extravagant sexual behavior. These lurid depictions are calculated to play to a straight audience's prejudices and to evoke from such viewers a punitive emotional response toward the characters. In this way, the film seems to imply that the killer's victims got what they deserved for their sexual transgressions and that, if Burns were the killer, his rage stemmed from self-loathing over his own sexual appetites.

The gay community was outraged by these depictions, and activists picketed the film during production and again during the picture's release, outside theaters in New York and San Francisco. Gay leaders denounced the film and asked why Friedkin felt compelled to make such a picture. The mayor of San Francisco requested that distributor United Artists reimburse the city $130,000 to cover the cost of providing police protection around a downtown theater on opening night. In the event, no violence occurred, but the mayor's request showed the level of concern felt by city officials and the level of animosity the film had aroused in the gay community. But reaction and antipathy toward this picture extended beyond the confines of this community. Cruising created problems for the industry in its relations with the public at large and with exhibitors. Beyond the explicit and nasty violence depicted in the killer's attacks on gays, the film's fascination with tabooed sexual practices, and the prurient attention it gave these, caused many within and outside the industry to openly question the validity of the picture's R rating. Variety raised this issue in its review of the film: "To put it bluntly, if an R allows the showing of one man greasing his fist followed by the rising ecstasy and pain of a second man held in chains by others, then there's only one close-up left for the X."⁸

Exhibitors were particularly uneasy about showing the film in their theaters, and some of the nation's biggest chains openly broke with the MPAA over its designation of Cruising as an R-rated picture. These exhibitors publicly declared that the picture should have been an X by virtue of its explicit, unsavory sex and violence. This rebellion precipitated a showdown with the MPAA over the integrity of its ratings system. General Cinema Corp., the nations biggest theater chain, booked Cruising into thirty-three of its theaters on a blind-bid basis (committing to show the picture in advance of seeing it). When they finally saw Cruising four months later, just before its national release, GCC executives were appalled and flatly refused to show the picture in any of their theaters, citing a policy against booking X-rated films. "We stand by our original opinion that Cruising was mis-rated, deserves an X and therefore won't play our houses as a matter of policy," GCC noted.⁹

The GCC decision undercut the economic stability of the industry, as that stability rested on cooperative relations between the major studios and exhibitors. GCC had in essence revoked an MPAA rating and asserted its own authority to determine a more appropriate designation for Cruising, invoking corporate policy over the disposition of X-rated pictures. For the MPAA and its head, Jack Valenti, GCC's actions threatened the validity of the whole ratings enterprise, which, lacking the force of law, depended on mutual cooperation and observance of the codes by all sectors of the movie industry. If MPAA ratings could be so questioned, then the agency's protective authority would be weakened. The organization operated as a buffer, shielding the majors from outside efforts to regulate its products and lobbying Washington to promote issues and bills favorable to the business. If the ratings system were undermined or its authority impeded, as it had been by the GCC decision, the industry could be more vulnerable to charges from outside groups that its films were unwholesome, unhealthy, or otherwise deserving of censure. To some extent, this is what occurred in the next few years, as attacks on the industry mounted and the MPAA scrambled to rebut the attacks and, in some instances, agreed to changes that it had earlier refused to carry out.

The MPAA's problems over Cruising worsened. A second major theater chain openly contested the picture's rating. United Artists Theater Circuit worried about the community criticism that it might arouse if it showed the film. UATC feared that this criticism might come from a multitude of sources, gay groups as well as more conservative critics angered by the film's relatively explicit depictions of sexuality. Unlike GCC, UATC did not cancel its bookings of the film, but it did assert its belief that the film was really an X-rated picture being marketed by its distributor as an R. UATC posted signs at all of its theaters showing Cruising that advised moviegoers, "In the opinion of management this picture should be rated X. No one under 18 will be admitted."¹⁰ UATC, therefore, would exhibit the film as if it were X-rated, enforcing the admissions restrictions appropriate for X-rated pictures. In addition to the responses of these chains, a San Diego exhibitor, the College Theatre, filed a civil suit in federal court charging that the filmmakers, production company (Lorimar), distributor (United Artists), and the MPAA's Classification and Rating Administration had misrepresented the nature of the film by virtue of its R rating.

In light of the heat the picture and the ratings flap generated, the MPAA responded slowly to the widespread criticism directed its way. After the picture's first-run release had ended, the MPAA ordered that all outstanding prints of the film be withdrawn from circulation. These would be replaced with a new, revised version of the film after the MPAA had reexamined it and certified that it was, in fact, an R-rated picture. The MPAA's failure to intervene until the first-run release had concluded is significant. To do otherwise, to withdraw the film from initial release, would damage the picture's earnings potential beyond the harm the controversy had already inflicted. That the MPAA acted conservatively, rather than in a proactive manner, is an important point in light of the degree to which public confidence in the industry fell during the decade. The industry's slow response was one of many factors that influenced public perception that Hollywood was out of touch with average America, that the industry was peddling sex and violence for profit, and that its regulatory agencies were toothless.

After the print recall, the history of the ratings dispute becomes tortuous and subject to contradictory accounts by the involved parties. In a maneuver that was perhaps intended to deflect criticism of lax MPAA ratings, the board stipulated that the film's original R designation was granted on condition that the filmmakers delete material from two scenes. The MPAA claimed, though, that the requested changes had not been made. In effect, the MPAA said that the picture they designated as an R and the version that went into national release were not the same, hence the directive that existing prints be recalled and swapped with the revised version that incorporated the requisite cuts. It is difficult to see what difference these alterations would have made because they were cosmetic rather than substantive. The changes involved using a longer editing transition out of a murder scene to soften its brutality and a masked frame bar in another scene to conceal some implied sexual activity in one of the S&M bars. These minimal changes are typical of the compromises that filmmakers negotiate with the MPAA. The problem in every case involves the practical necessity of specifying thresholds for the different rating categories. At what point does an R become an X? How many offending frames must be removed to reduce an X to an R?

In their cut of a picture initially submitted for a rating, filmmakers routinely include more sex and violence than they in fact want the picture to have. Thus, in the negotiations that follow, filmmakers have wiggle room, an ability to make trims requested by the MPAA that do not result in a substantially different film from what was intended. This strategem requires that the MPAA specify exactly what shots, editing devices, or frames must be deleted to move the film from one ratings category to another. In practice, it often comes down to an offending shot or image whose excision or alteration everyone agrees will mark the difference between R and X. A major problem with this approach is that it trivializes the distinctions between ratings categories. In other words, it fails to address such intangibles as the overall spirit of a work. This eludes negotiation. Certainly, the spirit of Cruising is unrelievedly nasty and ugly, and a few shot trims cannot address this ugliness or ameliorate it. It was this spirit, as much as the content of any individual shot or scene, that outraged the gay groups that picketed the film. Rut the MPAA could operate only in terms of the negotiating points that define its prerelease transactions with filmmakers, who are under contract to deliver a cut of a film that will satisfy the rating that the distributor has agreed the picture will carry. Achieving the rating means that everyone involved must agree on the designated trims.

Thus, in defending its rating of Cruising, the MPAA cited failure by the filmmakers to make the cuts required to earn the R rating. This line of argument contained an implicit defense of the integrity of the picture's original rating (and of the ratings system as a whole). Jack Valenti suggested that Friedkin's failure to make the trims specified by the MPAA was an honest mistake, an oversight, but Friedkin and the film's producer, Jerry Weintraub, claimed they had made all the cuts the MPAA originally required before the picture went into national release.¹¹ The net result of this confusing turn of events and these competing claims was that the MPAA could publicly distance itself from the version of Cruising that had aroused such ire upon its national release.

However, there was also a new problem. The MPAA's position that the film had not been properly edited to qualify for its R rating seemed to acknowledge that the first version of Cruising was what its detractors had claimed all along, an X-rated picture. To be sure, Jack Valenti denied that it was, and he claimed that the ratings system was stronger than ever. He maintained that the controversy proved the board was responsive to the public and was capable of taking action to enforce its stipulations about what cuts were required for a particular ratings designation. But the MPAA was on losing ground here, as subsequent events would confirm. It had effectively admitted that an X-rated film went into national release with an R rating.

Sex and Violence Continued: The Case of Caligula

While Cruising was in release, eliciting angry controversy over its R rating and its depictions of outré sexuality, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione was pushing Caligula, a hardcore sex- and violence-spattered portrait of ancient Rome. Guccione's Penthouse-Rneaiced production was distributed by Analysis Film Releasing on a four-wall basis, whereby the distributor rented a theater rather than leasing a print to an exhibitor. This distribution strategy was canny. Guccione and Analysis targeted art cinemas, and by four-walling these prestigious houses, they kept the film out of the grind houses that catered to the sex trade, effectively avoiding the pornography exhibition circuit. Thus, Caligula would be screened in theaters that specialized in foreign and art films and thereby retain its aura as a prestige (i.e., expensively budgeted) sex film (though there was far more violence than sex in the picture), untainted by an association with porno houses. Guccione was targeting a more upscale audience, and he was on the cusp of a wave of mass-marketed pornography that was about to break nationwide, courtesy of the video revolution. Caligula heralded the big marketing push that sex films would soon enjoy in the middle and late 1980s. Thus, the battles over Caligula were harbingers of a brewing storm over sex films, and, in tandem with Cruising, Guccione's picture roused the specter for many social watchdog groups of an immoral media industry thrusting its products on an unwilling public.

From the start, and as Guccione expected and indeed wanted, Caligula was engulfed by protest over its salacious content and by legal challenges from groups seeking to have it declared an obscenity. The antipornography organization Morality in Media unsuccessfully tried to sue federal officials for failing to declare the film obscene after it was seized by U.S. Customs in 1979 when Guccione brought the film into the country. Morality in Media's legal effort was assisted by a Memphis attorney who had prosecuted Deep Throat cases in Tennessee, and the objective was to have the film destroyed after it was judged obscene.

Morality in Media lost its challenge in February 1980, but Guccione anticipated further efforts and was willing to commit sizable resources to the film's legal defense. He had plenty of opportunities. On 17 June 1980, when the film was playing nationally in forty theaters, Caligula was banned in Boston, and police seized prints of the picture. Guccione responded, "We always felt that somewhere down the line we would have to mount a massive legal defense of the film to clear up any doubts about its non-obscenity. Boston is giving us that opportunity."¹² Guccione's willingness to spend money defending the film, of course, was not solely a function of First Amendment principles. The legal challenges and moral controversies generated by the film provided excellent marketing opportunities, what Guccione termed "the kind of coverage money can never buy."¹³

Penthouse won its Boston case. On 1 August, a Boston municipal court ruled that Caligula was not obscene by virtue of passing the Miller test. A legal finding of obscenity had to use the guidelines established by the Supreme Courts 1973 Miller ruling. To be judged obscene under Miller, a work must fail a tripartite test. It must (1) lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value; (2) contain patently offensive depictions of sexual acts; and (3) appeal on the whole to a prurient interest (with prurience assessed by "the average person, applying contemporary community standards"). If a work failed to meet any one of these standards, then it could not be found legally obscene. The Miller test, as it was interpreted in the early 1980s, made obscenity convictions difficult to obtain. The standards to be applied under Miller contained multiple exclusionary conditions. A book or film might portray graphic sexual activity, deemed of prurient appeal, offensive to some or all viewers, but might still be salvageable by virtue of its literary, political, or scientific value. Pornographers in the late 1970s and early 1980s gleefully lampooned the notion of redeeming value in the Miller test. While it offered them protection, they found it an irresistable target for satire. Sex films of those years periodically interrupted the hormonal activities so that a character might briefly expound on world political issues. Then, having gotten the redeeming social value out of the way, the sexual carousing could begin again.

The Boston judge decided that, while the film contained offensive depictions of sex, appealed to prurient interests, and lacked artistic and scientific value, its depiction of ancient Rome contained political values that enabled it to pass the Miller test.¹⁴ According to the judge, the film's depiction of corruption in ancient Rome dramatized the political theme that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." Caligula thus escaped an obscenity finding based on Miller's provision for political content. But there was yet another problem faced by local prosecutors who attempted to suppress the film from regional exhibition. In its depictions of Roman decadence, Guccione's film was preponderantly violent rather than sexual, and Miller said nothing about violence as a basis for obscenity prosecution. Obscenity was a matter of sex, not violence, a factor noted by a Madison, Wisconsin, district attorney in his decision to decline a local antiporn crusader's request that Caligula be prosecuted. "I note particularly in this regard that the most offensive portions of the film are those explicitly depicting violent, and not sexual, conduct, which is not in any way prohibited by the criminal law."¹⁵ Guccione acknowledged that the film was preponderantly violent and that its violence tended to counteract and contradict the prurient appeal of the few sex scenes. "I maintain the film is actually anti-erotic … in every one of its scenes you'll find a mixture of gore or violence or some other rather ugly things."¹⁶

Penthouse did not win an unbroken string of legal victories in its efforts to distribute Caligula. Faced with a civil suit in Fairlawn, Ohio, seeking to prevent the film's exhibition on the grounds that it would be a "public nuisance," Penthouse withdrew the film from exhibition there rather than go to trial. The alliance of forces behind the Ohio complaint was symptomatic of the cultural politics of the early 1980s. The complaint was organized and prepared by Citizens for Decency through Law, a private watchdog group ready to mobilize against films it deemed immoral. The CDL attorney advised the city against trying to prosecute Penthouse criminally (i.e., for obscenity), recommended a civil proceeding instead because it would be quicker and would not run up against the Miller test, and offered to represent Fairlawn in the case. With Penthouse pulling the film, CDL effectively won its case without having to go to trial. The Penthouse attorney viewed the Fairlawn events as symptoms of the new cultural alignments represented, and reinforced, by Ronald Reagan's presidential victory: "Apparently, these extremists have interpreted a change by administration to mean a clarion call for a mandate to shackle the public's mind again."¹⁷

Despite its major victories in Boston and New York, Penthouse also moved more cautiously when packaging the film for video distribution in the Western Hemisphere. So that the picture might gain clearance by some of the regions more conservative regimes, Penthouse arranged with Vestron Video to release a softer, R-rated version of the picture rather the X-rated version distributed to theaters.

The legal challenges that surrounded the release of Caligula demonstrated two factors of increasing importance as the decade progressed. First, grassroots opposition to works deemed pornographic was substantial; in the years to come, the antipomography movement would grow in scope and power. Many groups such as the CDL and Morality in Media would organize efforts to suppress sex films and to alter what they regarded as Hollywood's propensity to manufacture immoral pictures. These efforts helped intensify the culture wars of the period. Second, the Miller test as traditionally interpreted did not give prosecutors or antiporn forces an especially effective weapon to use in going after the distribution of sex books or films. As a result, antiporn groups sought greater legal power and won it, and Miller itself was reconsidered in new strategies of prosecution. I will turn to these developments later in this chapter.

The Pornography of Horror

Caligula was an independent production financed and distributed outside the Hollywood system. As such and unlike Cruising, it drew little fire directly at the Hollywood industry. By contrast, Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill, also a 1980 release, and Body Double (1984), revived long-standing feminist criticisms of sexual violence in the media, aroused calls that pornography was seeping into mainstream movies, and once more showed Hollywood for its cultural critics as an industry manufacturing decadent products that conjoined sex and violence.

The De Palma films were big-budget, prestige examples of a general shift toward explicit gore throughout the horror genre. In the 1980s horror mutated into an especially vicious brand of filmmaking that offered viewers unsparingly graphic violence. As noted in chapter 7, the horror genre saw a spike in production during 1980-81 (ninetythree pictures in 1980 alone). In 1980, horror and science fiction films accounted for nearly 40 percent of domestic film rentals.¹⁸ The horror films included a large number of blood-spattered slaughter fests like Blood Beach, Maniac, and Prom Night. The "slasher films" took over the genre as horror became synonymous with narratives about serial killers slaughtering promiscuous teenagers. The killings were rendered in lurid detail and with imaginative glee by an emerging new group of effects artists. These included Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead [1978], Maniac [1980], Friday the 13th [1980], Eyes of a Stranger [1981]), Rick Baker (The Funhouse [1981], The Thing [1982]), and Rob Bottin (The Howling [1981], The Thing). Not all of the pictures on which they worked were slasher films, but they all showcased the splatter effects that prosthetics and latex had brought to cinema.

It was the slasher films, though, that aroused the greatest outcry, both within and without the industry. The imagery of impaled, broken, and mutilated bodies seemed to demonstrate a rampant sadism in popular culture, promulgated by filmmakers and elicited with force in audiences who thrilled to each new audacious screen killing. Faced with the profusion of such bloodfests at the international film markets in 1980, distributors and studio sales reps expressed revulsion at the products and dismay at the decay and decadence of a once artful genre. "All they want is blood pouring off the screen. I question the mental balance of the people making and buying this stuff," noted one Carolco executive.¹⁹ Imagery of victims dismembered by spikes, axes, chain saws, and power drills or run through meat grinders evoked a swift and stern backlash from the critical community and from feminist scholars who pointed out that a basic slasher film premise was a male killer stalking and slaughtering a bevy of young and attractive female victims.

Particularly troubling was a stylistic feature that quickly became cliché—the use of a subjective camera to represent the killer's point of view as he stalked his victims. This optical device appeared in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) and in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) before John Carpenter elaborated it throughout Halloween 1978) and established its effectiveness in the slasher cycle (for which Halloween was the key filmic model). The extended subjective camerawork made the viewer share the killer's visual perspective during the elaborate stalking scenes that preceded the killings. The camerawork seemed to invite viewers to accompany the killers and to participate in their rituals. Many critics found this, and the genre as a whole, to be morally objectionable and to appeal to pruriently sadistic impulses. Prominent film reviewers Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert used their newspaper columns and weekly public TV review show to attack the proliferation of slasher films. Calling the films "gruesome and despicable," they argued that the pictures expressed a hatred of women and were a kind of backlash against women's liberation, offering stories that suggested that women should stay in their places or be cruelly killed. Ebert noted his personal discomfort watching the films in public with an audience. "Audiences are cheering the killers on. It's a scary experience."²⁰

Following Ebert and Siskel, the Chicago Tribune in 1980 attacked the film industry, challenging the MPAA to give the slasher pictures an X rating. As in the controversies that surrounded Cruising, the horror films were regarded as having been improperly rated. The Tribune pointed to the double standard about sex and violence that prevailed in the policy of the MPAA's Classification and Ratings Administration (CARA): "X ratings are generally reserved for movies with explicit, anatomical sex. Lacking that, all kinds of bloody cruelty and sadism can be shown in a movie that is classified as R."Agreeing with Siskel and Ebert about the antifemale attitude of the pictures, the Tribune continued, "The public would not tolerate this kind of eye-ball gouging sadism if it were directed against animals instead of women. But in these new films, the fact that the horror is inflicted on women appears to be the very point."²¹

As a result of the sustained outcry and protest surrounding the slasher films, major distributors curtailed press screenings for the pictures, and many national publications stopped reviewing them. By 1983, the market glut that had prevailed over the past two years resulted in a 50 percent drop in horror production and a 50 percent falloff in rentals.²² The decline in rentals also reflected the shift from theatrical to a straight-to-video release for many of the low-budget pictures. This trend continued, as did the manufacture of slasher pictures despite the social criticism they enge²³ Thus, video proved to be an amenable forum for the distribution of stigmatized cultural products. In the latter 1980s the blood epics, like sex films, shifted to video and the private home as the preferred site for consumption. The resulting decentralization of consumption, as compared with theatrical viewing, assisted in the distribution of renegade material. The huge shelves of gory horror titles in video stores (including those that, like Blockbuster, will not stock sex films) demonstrates the continued viability of splatter films. Moreover, the popular fascination with their serial-killer heroes that so alarmed critics in the early 1980s has continued to thrive, as the Web pages devoted in cyberspace to Jason, Freddy Krueger, and other filmic butchers demonstrate today.

Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill and Body Double epitomized for many feminists the violent misogyny that seemed to proliferate throughout eighties horror. In contrast to low-budget quickies like Maniac, De Palma's films gained high visibility from major studio advertising campaigns, and Dressed to Kill did very respectable box office in 1980. It focused on a cross-dressing psychiatrist (played by Michael Came) who commits a series of razor murders, most prominantly a brutal slashing attack on a woman, Kate Miller (played by Angie Dickinson), in an elevator. This killing was modeled on the shower murder of Marion Crane in Hitchcock's Psycho, as much of De Palma's work patterned itself on Hitchcock films. Yet whereas the sequence in Psycho is clinical and dispassionate (and terrifies because of this), the attack in the elevator is more graphic, more prolonged, and more attentive to the anxiety and struggles of the victim to survive. Of key importance, the graphic violence is visited upon a character whose intimate sexual desires and responses the viewer has witnessed. Marion Crane, too, was conducting an adulterous affair in Psycho, but the film's action begins after her lunchtime tryst with Sam Loomis has ended. By contrast, Dressed to Kill opens with a sensuous, sexual episode with Kate in the shower, and the scene's relative explicitness invites the (male) viewer to enjoy the voyeuristic pleasures that it offers. After evoking Kate's sensuality, the narrative then punishes her for this. She learns that her lover may have given her a sexually transmitted disease, and subsequently she is attacked in the elevator. The escalating severity of her punishments follows directly upon the expression of her sexual pleasure in the opening scene. Thus, Dressed to Kill is more graphically violent and more explicitly sexual than Psycho, and it conjoins the violence and the sex more intensively and punitively than had Hitchcock, who, by contrast, merely pointed to both conditions.

More audacious yet in its linking of sex and violence, Body Double went beyond the previous film's razor killing to offer the decade's ghastliest sequence of sexual slaughter in a mainstream film. The film's plot was modeled on Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), but it lacks their sophistication and elegance. Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), an unemployed actor in need of a place to stay, meets a fellow actor, Sam, who offers to let Jake tend the apartment of a friend who is out of town. The place is huge, with a wall of windows on one side that looks down on another apartment complex below. Using a telescope, Jake watches an attractive woman, Gloria Revelle, in the other apartment as she does a nightly seminude dance before her window. Like Jeffries in Rear Window, Jake is emotionally drawn to this character, whom he watches with a long-focus lens, and, like Scotty Ferguson in Vertigo, he begins to follow her as she journeys about on her daily routines. Jake grows alarmed when he repeatedly spies another man, apparently an Indian, also following Gloria and grows to feel that this character means her harm. Indeed, he does, but unknown to Jake, the Indian is really Sam in a mask, and Sam is really Alex Revelle, Glorias husband, who is plotting her murder. Alex sets Jake up as a witness to the murder, a witness who will say that an Indian did the killing.

The murder scene is extremely gruesome and horrific. It begins with Jake watching Gloria through the telescope when he sees the Indian elsewhere in her apartment, carrying a huge power drill. Alarmed, Jake rushes out, trying to reach Gloria in time to warn her, but of course, he cannot. As Gloria confronts the Indian in her bedroom, the viewer realizes with horror that the drill will be the implement of murder. What follows is drawn out at great and sadistic length, the better to prolong Gloria's torment and the viewer's shock. The Indian tries several times to impale her, but she manages to wrest free, though not without being bloodied in the attempt. When, finally, the killing occurs, De Palma shows Gloria's frenzied face, wide-eyed in terror, as she falls backward to the floor. The ensuing action is blocked from view by a sofa in the foreground, but the viewer can see the drill vibrating in the killer's hands as it makes contact, and, in the next shots from the floor below, the drill end punches through the ceiling, accompanied by a torrent of blood. De Palma then shows the impaled body.

This appalling sequence has sexualized its violence so that it becomes difficult to find an acceptably moral point of view on the carnage. As in Dressed to Kill, the violence becomes a punitive response directed at a woman because of her sexuality. Gloria's window dancing establishes her as a sensual and sexually expressive character, and (improbable as this is) she responds erotically to Jake after he retrieves her purse from a thief. The murder scene occurs in Gloria's bedroom with her partially dressed in a robe and panties. In their struggles at one point, she and the killer both fall onto the bed. Moreover, while the oversized drill is patently absurd as a murder weapon, it functions quite vividly as a phallic image, and this association is accentuated by De Palma's lowangle camera positions. As a phallic emblem, the drill makes the killing into a kind of perverted sexual act, a veritable rape, which expresses contempt and loathing for the woman and her softness before the steel and rage of the man. The chain saw killing in Scarface was a horrendous scene as well, but what differentiates the two is precisely the sexualized aspects of the drill murder. The gangland killing was sadistic but nonsexual; Glorias death is sexually sadistic. Thus, as a male filmmaker who had choreographed and orchestrated Gloria's end, there was no way for De Palma to evade the charges of feminists that it was a scene redolent of misogyny.

Subsequent narrative events in Body Double intensified the film's tawdry aura. To solve the mystery of Gloria's death, Jake enters the world of pornographic filmmaking when he sees a porn actress, Holly Body (Melanie Griffith in an endearing performance), performing the same dance routine as Gloria. While there is no explicit sex associated with these scenes, De Palma's inclusion of the porn industry in the film's narrative seemed gratuitous and without structural foundation or requirement. Moreover, it encouraged the film's critics to tie the misogyny of the drill killing to the pornography sequences as evidence of both De Palma's outlook and the social values embodied by pornography in general. The commingling of graphic violence against women with the narrative setting of pornographic filmmaking epitomized for many of the film's feminist critics their charges that pornography was really an expression of violence against women and that Hollywood was now manufacturing such material.

Dressed to Kill and Body Double outraged antipornography feminists who were organizing in the early 1980s around the issue of violent pornography. For them, the De Palma films represented the mainstreaming of pornography by the film industry. Janella Miller, for example, an antipornography attorney, wrote that Body Double was "the latest movie in the stream of Hollywood offerings in which women are brutally murdered."²⁴ Their charges were echoed by some nationally prominent film critics. Andrew Sarris called Dressed to Kill "soft-core porn and hard-edged horror."²⁵ Antipornography feminists staged protests in front of theaters showing Dressed to Kill in major cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston, and Women against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM) issued a printed statement objecting, "From the insidious combination of violence and sexuality in its promotional material to scene after scene of women raped, killed, or nearly killed, Dressed to Kill is a master work of misogyny."²⁶ The protests, though, seemed to add to the film's box-office appeal, as its revenues continued to rise, and Doreen Leidholdt, of Women against Pornography (WAP), noted that the tactics of protest and demonstration had been counterproductive. "After Dressed to Kill, we realized that protesting the eroticizing of violence in Hollywood films was not effective. We had been especially scared about Dressed to Kill and wanted to educate the public that these movies were doing exactly what so much of violent pornography is doing."²⁷ Thereafter, WAP discontinued its practice of mounting protests in front of theaters.

De Palma's own pronouncements about his films helped inflame the atmosphere. After the production of Scarface (1983), he baited his critics by announcing, "I'm going to go out and make an X-rated suspense porn picture…. They wanna see sus pense, they wanna see terror, they wanna see SEX—I'm the person for the job."²⁸ Though his next film, Body Double, carried an R rating, in other respects, mainly its conjoining of violence with the narrative's world of pornographic filmmaking, De Palma seemed to have carried out his threat. In the wake of the critical animus roused by Body Double, De Palma defended his right as a filmmaker to shape images and narratives as he saw fit. He claimed that he thought of using the power drill because more ordinary implements of murder had been used in stories so often they were no longer exciting. "I do a lot of murder mysteries; after a while you get tired of the instruments. Agatha Christie must've dealt with this day in and day out. You can use a knife, a rope, but now we have electrical instruments—which are truly terrifying." He noted that while people might discuss the social or political implications of a film, "those making the form should not be bound by these things." He added, "I'd hate to live in a world where art is left in the hands of the political people. I'd leave the country if it came to that—sounds like Russia." He maintained that political control of the arts quickly dissipates them: "In politically restricted societies where politicians control artists, you don't get interesting works of art." Countering the arguments of Body Double's critics, De Palma disagreed with the view that watching sex and violence in movies makes some viewers want to go out and imitate what they had seen on screen. People aren't so easily influenced, he maintained: "If you have a misogynist outlook a sexist film could strike a chord in you, but I don't think it engenders sexism. I don't think women are beaten or raped because the rapist has been affected by the entertainment industry. If there were statistics to prove that, they'd be on the front page of every newspaper in the country."²⁹

De Palma's attempt to define and stand behind First Amendment rights as a filmmaker was, of course, inadequate to defuse the controversy engulfing his work. It was inadequate partly because of his own inflammatory statements and because of the sensationalism of the films. But it also failed because the issues evoked by his work—the coupling of sex with violence in the media and with expressions of violence against women—transcended their incarnation in a single film or filmmaker. Those issues were now on the cultural agenda of the period. De Palma's work had helped put them there, but they were bigger than he or his films. Moreover, they intersected with the escalating offensive against film pornography, of which De Palma's works were regarded as mainstream variants. Feminist critics, as we have seen, attacked De Palma's films, but they also went after what they regarded as the source fueling Hollywood's recent glamorization of sexual violence.

The Offensive against Pornographic Films

The reaction against De Palma's films was especially heated because a concerted feminist attack on pornography had gathered considerable momentum in the early 1980s. The criticism of De Palma's work was, in significant ways, an offshoot of this more extended and broad-based initiative. Graphic sexual violence in mainstream movies and the increasing prevalence of pornographic materials in society came to be regarded as twin symptoms of one problem, namely expressions of misogyny in contemporary visual culture. An unusual alliance had emerged between antipornography feminists and rightwing Christian fundamentalists over the perceived threat that pornography posed to women and the family. Groups like WAVPM and WAP organized against pornography and argued that it was a form of violence against women, as some feminist scholars had been suggesting in print since the 1970s. These included Kathleen Barry, Susan Brownmiller, Susan Griffin, Laura Lederer, Gloria Steinem, and Andrea Dworkin.³⁰ These scholars argued that pornographic films, books, and magazines expressed a hatred of women, dehumanizing them as sex objects for the camera and for the male viewer or reader. Understood in these terms, pornography turned women into things and, by doing so, helped sustain a cultural atmosphere engendering misogynistic violence. Extending this analysis of pornography to legal principle, Dworkin and law professor Catharine A. MacKinnon crafted a legal strategy charging that pornography was a civil offense infringing on the rights of women to lead safe, secure lives. This approach became the basis for antiporn ordinances passed in Minneapolis and Indianapolis in 1983.

The Moral Majority supported the efforts of the antiporn feminists, and the Reagan administration backed the antiporn drive, convening an Attorney Generals Commission on Pornography, headed by Edwin Meese, that opened hearings in 1985 into the social effects of pornographic films and other media. In 1980, Morality in Media had called for a task force of antiporn prosecutors, and the attorney general's commission aimed to furnish sufficient evidence of social harm to motivate a national crackdown on pornography. Thus, the byzantine cultural politics of the Reagan period produced the unlikely alliance of right-wing fundamentalists and antipornography feminists joined by a national, political, and legal effort to quash adult films, books, and magazines.

Because this seemed an alliance in support of censorship, it split the feminist movement. Prominent feminist scholars criticized the campaign against pornography by pointing out that pornography was not a single entity, but, like sexuality, was complex and differentiated, and they questioned the reflexive equation of porn with violence.³¹ Moreover, they suggested that the antiporn movement risked reproducing the dominant gender ideologies that feminism had historically battled. "The anti-pornography movement in a sense restates the main premises of the old gender system: the dominant cultural ideology elaborates the threat of sexual danger, so the anti-pornography movement responds by pushing for sexual safety via the control of public expression of male sexuality."³² Furthermore, feminists outside the antiporn movement regarded its alliance with the political Right as dangerous. Ellen Carol DuBois and Linda Gordon noted that the "feminist attack on pornography and sexual 'perversion' in our time … fails to distinguish its politics from a conservative and antifeminist version of social purity, the Moral Majority and 'family protection movement.' "³³ The Christian political Right was hostile to feminism, so that by joining with it, antiporn feminists risked advancing the cultural agenda of groups whose censorship activities wouldn't stop with pornography. Lawyer Alan Dershowitz noted, "The short-sightedness here is evidenced when you scratch just a bit below the surface of the alliance and discover that the very next group—after pornographers—on the Moral Majority's hit list are feminists."³⁴

The unusual grouping of allies notwithstanding, the antipornography alliance achieved significant cultural power and an official governmental backing in the attorney general's commission. The key point for film history is that this offensive against pornography coincided with the entry of adult films into mainstream popular culture. The vehicle for this entry was the videocassette, which brought sex films out of tawdry theaters and into the nation's living rooms and bedrooms. Before this, pornographic films were available in a small number of urban theaters and as 8mm shorts sold in adult bookstores. This, though, was a restrictive set of outlets, and to get these materials a customer had to make a special trip to these locations. By contrast, video outlets nationwide maintained special adult sections of porn videos, making this class of material far more accessible and widely distributed than ever before. Porn films, of course, had already come "aboveground" before the advent of video. In 1972, Deep Throat, The Devil and Miss Jones, and Behind the Green Door were shrewdly marketed to attract segments of the mainstream audience as well as porn devotees. The widespread publicity these films received was a significant initial step in the expansion of the porn film domain. The era of the porn feature film had begun.

It would be video, though, that reconfigured the porn industry. The shift to video enabled the adult industry to expand its output, reach a bigger slice of audience, and enjoy skyrocketing revenues. These transformations gave porn films an unprecedented cultural visibility in the 1980s and helped to trigger the antiporn backlash. The changeover to video from theatrical distribution of sex films was rapid, and it was assisted by zoning regulations designed to combat pornography. In 1980, the spread of zoning ordinances confining adult theaters to "red light" districts had resulted in the closure of approximately thirty to fifty theaters, and by 1983, though some seven hundred adult theaters continued to operate, vidéocassettes had begun to bite significantly into their business, which fell by 20 percent after another decrease the year before. While a given adult feature in 1983 might earn, at most, $200,000 from theater distribution (this from distribution of a mere twenty-four prints), video sales could easily net another $50,000.³⁵

The move toward made-for-video pornography was therefore inexorable. High School Memories (1980), Debbie Does Dallas (1978), and Babylon Pink(1979) helped initiate the made-for-video trend, while the adult industry failed to protect its theatrical market by sequencing ancillary releases after theatrical, like the Hollywood industry did. A former president of the Adult Film Association of America noted, "Instead of first liquidating theatrical release, then, in order, videos, videocassette, cable-TV and regular TV, the last not really appropriate, adult films are released dayand-date in theaters and cassettes…. This has seriously hurt the theatrical attendance."³⁶ As attendance fell, some theaters responded by increasing their house nut (the portion of box-office receipts they retained), further eroding industry revenues from the theatrical sector. By 1986, the number of surviving adult theaters was estimated at two hundred and the revenue share from video and cable at 80 percent of the industry's total earnings.³⁷ Shooting a direct-to-video picture offered extraordinary sav ings on production expenses, from the $125,000 to $150,000 needed for a ten-day film production to as little as $25,000 for a one-hour video.³⁸ As we have seen in chart 3.8, 1984 and 1985 were the take-off years for adult video, with huge increases in the number of videos in general release. Revenues from the sale of adult tapes also climbed steadily in these years (chart 3.9). Thus, the years 1984 and 1985, which saw the explosive growth of adult video (and its accompanying cultural presence), correspond as well to the critical period during which the antipornography movement attained visibility and then strategic power with the convening of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography.

Issuing its report in 1986, the commission concluded that pornography containing violent or degrading behavior was the most prevalent type of material currently available and, furthermore, that violent pornography caused crimes of violence against women.³⁹ This was a strikingly different conclusion from the one reached earlier by the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which in 1971 had found no evidence of harmful effects and declined to recommend legal restrictions on adult access to sexually explicit materials. The Meese reports findings and recommendations resulted in the formation of a National Obscenity Enforcement Unit, a team of federal prosecutors to assist local authorities, and a program of stepped-up prosecution of obscenity cases using RICO provisions for the seizure of assets at the time of indictment and the Miller decision's provision for violation of local community standards. This was a different and more effective application of Miller. Because a plethora of local communities existed nationwide, distributors of adult material, shipping across state lines or exhibiting their wares in different regions, risked incurring obscenity charges based on the stipulation that they were in violation of local community standards. Thus interpreted, obscenity became a highly fluid designation. The same film could be legally obscene in one locale and not in another. Using this approach, the Obscenity Enforcement Unit embarked on a series of sting operations, ordering sex materials from conservative communities and then prosecuting mail order distributors for shipping obscene materials in violation of the local standards.

Using another strategy, the unit brought multiple prosecutions, concurrently or consecutively, against an offender. These originated from different regions of the country and were designed to exhaust or bankrupt the legal defense resources of the targeted business. National distributors of pornography faced a new vulnerability to economic and legal attack and a substantial increase in legal risk incurred by the distribution of sex films and videos. During this renewed offensive against porn, investigations of adult pornography rose from 81 in 1981-85 to 222 in i987-g1.⁴⁰ But the industry, as we saw in chapter 3, remained robust through this period. The Reagan administration had won its legal war against pornography, but the traffic continued to flourish.

The efflorescence of the antiporn movement in the early and mid-1980s demonstrated the heat that symbolic cultural politics could generate and the effect on these cultural struggles of the new media of film distribution and their ancillary markets. Videotape did not merely revolutionize adult filmmaking. It transformed porn films from the enterprise of scattered, outlaw producer-filmmakers to an industry (albeit a stigmatized one) of substantial cultural reach (a truism in that in the early years of video rentals, most of a retailers revenue came from the adult titles in the back room) and with its own festivals, stars, auteur directors, trade shows, and awards ceremonies. The fight over film, and then video, pornography was the decade's most heated, bitter, and fiercely-waged film controversy. It affected the debates over the sexual politics of violent horror films and mainstream Hollywood product (De Palmas work in particular), and it helped erode the cultural capital of Hollywood filmmaking when it assumed explicitly violent or sexual forms. Moreover, the popularity of film and video pornography helped efface the distinctions between images of explicit sexuality in Hollywood film and in graphic porn films, with sex in Hollywood films becoming ever more explicit, direct and sustained. Pictures like Body Heat (1981), Crimes of Passion (1984), 91/2 Weeks (1986), and Body of Evidence (1993) demonstrate this influence.

Religious Outrage over The Last Temptation of Christ

The sex, violence, and pornography controversy raged for more than half of the decade, and while it posed the most extended and powerful challenge to business as usual in the American cinema, it was not the last such significant challenge of the 1980s. Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) aroused the enmity of the Christian Right, which aimed a powerful volley of threats and protests at Universal/MCA, the picture's distributor, at Scorsese, and at exhibitors who contemplated booking the film. The picture was based on Nikos Kazantzákis's novel, which explored the human side of Christ, presenting him as subject to doubts, sexual urges, and other human vulnerabilities that constitute his last temptation.

Willem Dafoe plays Jesus in the film, and not only does he give an impassioned performance, but his face, hair, and beard strikingly resemble Christ as he is pictured in contemporary iconography. (Two years earlier, Dafoe had played the Christ-like Elias in Platoon.) AS the film begins, Jesus is tormented by voices and visions that cause him exquisite physical and psychic pain, and he is not sure if they come from God or Satan. In one of the film's fictional embellishments, he works at making crosses for the Romans, who are crucifying Jewish rebels; by doing so he hopes to make God hate him enough to stop the voices in his head. This anguished portrait of a humanly suffering Christ connects him, and the film, to Scorsese's other portraits of such lacerated characters as Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta. Their psychological suffering and physical punishment achieve such intensity as to imply, and disclose, a spiritual dimension within their fleshly and otherwise secular ordeals. This confluence, and contest, of the fleshly and the spiritual is precisely what The Last Temptation studies. Considered within the corpus of Scorsese's work, therefore, it is a logical outcome of the director's interest in the spiritual components of worldly existence. Scorsese had again partnered with screenwriter Paul Schrader, who scripted Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) and whose interest in rituals of physical ordeal and spiritual transcendence is a matter of record.

It would, however, be exactly this focus on the human dimensions of Christ's suffering that generated the critical response from sectors of the Christian community. The film takes Christ quite seriously and deals sincerely with issues of faith and spirituality, and it vividly portrays the celebrated events that transpire along Christ's passage toward the cross: the changing of water into wine, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the conflict with the moneylenders in the temple. But unlike the tradition established by Hollywood's Bible pictures, the ancient world depicted here is not clean and sanitized. It is hot, dirty, and oppressive, with sand that abrades the skin. The depiction of Mary Magdalene's prostitution shows it as tawdry and unpleasant. It is not something alluded to in a parable but is shown as a physical act and thereby made tangible. Christ is shown as a social revolutionary, opposed to the Roman Empire and cognizant that his Gospel will cause its downfall. These are the political issues that precipitated Rome's response, and the film's depiction of these differentiates it from other Hollywood productions, which do not show the social conditions in which the Christ story is imbricated.

But of all these unorthodox depictions, the most significant for producing the film's controversy is the titular last temptation. As Christ hangs on the cross, Satan comes to him one final time in an effort to dissuade him from completing the sacrifice. Assuming the form of a bucolic child, the Devil pretends to be Christ's guardian angel, and he tempts Jesus' human side into forsaking its divinity. The angelic child removes the nails from Jesus' feet and hands and leads him away from the cross, promising that God has relented and no longer requires his sacrifice. Jesus then embarks upon a life of ordinary human pleasure. He lives as a man, marries, fathers many children (with several women), and grows old. On his deathbed, the disciples visit, and conversing with them, he realizes that without his sacrifice, there is no salvation for any. Moreover, he realizes that his life as a man has been the Devil's seduction, renounces that temptation, and reclaims his place on the cross and with God. The film ends here, with Jesus on the cross, comforted by the knowledge that he has, at last, fulfilled his holy purpose. (Considered in strict narrative terms, the last temptation episode makes little sense. Why, if the Devil is orchestrating this final temptation, would one of the disciples point out to Jesus that the child angel is really Satan? Surely Satan would have arranged events so as to exclude this possibility. It would be more convincing for Christ to make the discovery unaided and unprompted.)

For many Christians, the last temptation was an inflammatory sacrilige because it visualized a Jesus engaged in profane behavior (the sex and the siring of many children) and one who had renounced his Father and who had come to believe that the stories of his death and transfiguration were lies. (Other scenes in the film, as well, were controversial, such as one wherein Jesus watches Mary Magdalene having sex with a procession of customers.) The Jesus depicted here suffers a momentary but telling failure of nerve before the prospect of torturous death, and he willingly embraces his fleshly existence. Making matters worse in this regard, the film opened with a title card acknowledging that it was not based on the Gospels but was a fictional exploration of the conflict between spirit and flesh, and for many this fictional embellishment of the Gospels was tantamount to an attack upon them. But an alternative case can be made that, without temptation, there is no salvation, and that the film aimed to show the magnitude of Christ's sacrifice by exploring the implications and the agonies it posed for his human side.

Scorsese's Catholic heritage prompted him to take this premise quite literally and to make the picture as a portrait of these tensions between Christ's human and divine aspects. Reports of a sacriligious Hollywood film, though, circulated among the Christian Right, which commenced its protests well before the picture was completed and ready for release. In a public statement responding to the film's growing prerelease controversy, Scorsese said, "I believe it is a religious film about suffering and the struggle to find God. It was made with conviction and love and so I believe it is an affirmation of faith, not a denial. Further, I feel strongly that people everywhere will be able to identify with the human side of Jesus as well as his divine side."⁴¹ He closed by asking people not to prejudge the picture before it was released.

Despite Scorsese's plea, reaction to the upcoming release was swift and bitter. Bill Bright, founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ, publicly offered Universal $10 million dollars for the negative and prints of the film so they could be destroyed. The Reverend Donald Wildman, head of the American Family Association, threatened Universal with economic ruin if it released the picture: "AFA will begin a boycott that will bankrupt MCA. You have my word on it."⁴² The Reverend Jerry Falwell also threatened a boycott of MCA, and the Reverend R. L. Haymers, whose Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle actively demonstrated against the film, seemed to threaten violence, saying "If they're going to leave the sex scene during the dream sequence in, they can probably expect violence."⁴³ The furor took a nasty anti-Semitic turn. Universal head Sidney Scheinberg and MCA head Lew Wasserman were Jewish. Several activist groups implied that the picture was a Jewish plot to smear Christianity. The Los Angeles-based Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle picketed the studio with signs and banners reading "Wasserman Endangers Israel" and "Wasserman Fans Jew Hatred with 'Temptation.'"⁴⁴ Director Franco Zefferelli referred in remarks broadcast on radio to "that Jewish cultural scum of Los Angeles, which is always spoiling for a chance to attack the Christian world."⁴⁵

The protests sought to effect precensorship of the film by persuading exhibitors to refuse bookings and by intimidating Universal from releasing the picture. The MPAA issued a statement condemning censorship and affirming free expession, and the statement was signed on behalf of all the major studios. Prior to undertaking the production, Universal sought, and received, cofinancing from Cineplex Odeon, then the nation's second-biggest theater chain, thereby guaranteeing some playoff sites. Universal head Tom Pollock said that without the participation of Cineplex, the production could not have been approved. "I doubt we would have made the picture if we had not been a partner with Cineplex. … The fact that they co-invested in the movie with us assured us of exhibition."⁴⁶ The coventure with Cineplex was a wise move because the controversy persuaded several prominent exhibition chains from booking the film. These included General Cinema, Carmike Cinemas, Wometco Theaters, Luxury Theaters, and Edwards Theaters, accounting for more than two thousand screens.

The picture opened 12 August on nine screens, one each in New York; Los Angeles; Toronto; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Seattle; and Minneapolis. Stimulated by the controversy, public curiosity was strong, and the picture's initial business was robust. The first three days' rental from the nine screens showing the film was $400,000. When the film went into a wider release one week later, however, business began to slacken. By year's end, Universal-Cineplex saw $3.7 million in rental returns, which equaled the picture's $3 million production budget.

The Christian Right had not succeeded in shutting the picture down or in intimidating Universal or the MPAA, which took strong First Amendment stands. But the controversy reinforced the widespread perception of Hollywood among the political Right as a godless industry whose products were corrosive to the spiritual health and values of the nation. The Christian Right, in particular, felt emboldened during the Reagan years to engage in skirmishes over political and artistic issues because President Reagan courted this voter bloc. Speaking at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, for example, Reagan told his audience that modern secularism was hostile to the fundamental values of civilization.⁴⁷ Coming from president of the United States, this could be construed as an encouragment to police the nation's culture. Cognizant of these political currents and their cultural effects, the film's screenwriter, Paul Schrader, pointed out that Hollywood made a convenient target for political organizing because it was perceived by the Right as a morally corrupt community:

A lot of the protest about The Last Temptation of Christ was really from an anti-intellectual wing of social and political Christianity. It doesn't have much to do with Christianity itself. They preempted the debate for a number of reasons. It didn't even matter whether they had seen the film, that was irrelevant to what was in it for them. They preempted the debate by saying Hollywood is seeking to defame our Lord, we are seeking to defend our Lord, please send us money, help us in this fight. Well, when couched in those terms, mainstream Christianity has to ally itself with fundamentalism—it's not going to ally itself with Hollywood.⁴⁸

The fallout over The Last Temptation of Christ underscored the deepening alienation between Hollywood and large segments of the public, and it was intensified by the fact that the American film tradition was a thoroughly secular one. Outside of Hollywood Bible epics (The Ten Commandments [1956], Ben-Hur [1959]), there is no tradition of religious-themed filmmaking in the American cinema and certainly no exploration of spiritual issues within a religious context. This estrangement in American film from matters of spirit and religion helped make Scorsese's picture more conspicuous than it otherwise would have been. Without counter-examples to prove its good intentions and respect for spiritual issues, Hollywood was forced to rely on a First Amendment defense, which, as far as Christians upset over The Last Temptation were concerned, was a lame maneuver. For them, the issue was not whether Universal/MCA had the right to make such a film, but that it would have made this film about religion in the absence of others. People are intensely serious about matters of religion and faith. This being so, it is difficult not to sense an element of arrogance in the industry's First Amendment claims. Coupled with its demonstrable lack of interest in religion as a subject for filmmaking, the industry's free speech defense seemed to embody a disregard for the Christian community the film had provoked and little recognition that this might be a legitimately sensitive topic. While it is commendable on principle that the industry took a First Amendment stance, this position hardly addressed the issues and conflicts at hand, and it served to further polarize the sides involved in the dispute. The Last Temptation fracas illuminated the problems and dangers that can result when a secular industry makes a rare and unconventional foray into religious territory.

The Effect of the Moral Controversies on the MPAA

How did the MPAA, as the film industry's representative, react to the protracted, decade-long period of agitation over the representational content of American film? The MPAA's historic mission had been to serve as a watchdog advancing the industry's interests and protecting it from meddling by outside governmental or public groups. As in the 1930s, when the Production Code Administration was created, the 1980s was a period of great agitation over the moral content of American film. It was therefore a time of potential crisis for the industry during which the buffer function the MPAA would be expected to play would be of vital importance.

The MPAA knew which way the political winds were blowing. It threatened, for example, to give Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill an X rating unless he trimmed some of the film's violence. De Palma protested the cuts (but made them nevertheless), and Jack Valenti situated the conflict over the cuts in Dressed to Kill within the reigning sociopolitical context. The country's temperament had shifted. It was now more conservative, Valenti acknowledged, and the MPAA would be responsive to these changes. "The political climate in this country is shifting to the right, and that means more conservative attitudes toward sex and violence. But a lot of creative people are still living in the world of revolution."⁴⁹ De Palma charged that the MPAA was taking a tougher line with his film because of the bruising fight it had suffered over Cruising and the accusations that it had misrated that picture. Doubtless it was, as the agency assumed its traditional role as mediator and buffer between the industry and its public. If it had not done so with Cruising, it would act preemptively to minimize the bloodshed and nastiness of Dressed to Kill. But this film, too, became a flashpoint for criticism and demonstrated, for many of its critics, that the MPAA was still failing to police the industry effectively.

The Cruising debacle put the MPAA on the defensive regarding the credibility of its ratings system, and the next few years intensified the debate over the usefulness of the CARA ratings. During the big horror film boom of 1980-81, some of the grisliest of the batch (Zombie, Maniac) were released without ratings because their distributors anticipated that, were the films submitted to CARA, they would receive an X rating (which was by then identified with porn films). Thus, the CARA system was of no help in alerting viewers to the content of these ultraviolent pictures. Furthermore, CARA had long been accused of being more permissive about violence in films than about sex, and in 1981 the National Coalition on Television Violence charged that Hollywood was responsible for unleashing a tidal wave of violent films. An NCTV official raised the (for the industry) dread specter of outside intervention. "Given its history—that the film industry has been allowed to self-regulate and it's failed—I prefer a civilian or government board."⁵⁰ The CARA ratings, then, were proving to be an ineffective way of informing the public about potentially objectionable material in films and of shielding viewers from the worst excesses of the resurgence of graphic violence in early eighties horror.

During this period the MPAA also faced an erosion of CARA's authority in terms of the video releases of CARA-rated theatrical films. Through mutual agreement of distributors and exhibitors, the CARA ratings had been implemented successfully in the area of theatrical exhibition, but what now of video, which provided an alternative outlet for distribution? Distributors could forgo theatrical entirely, releasing straight to video. Doing so, they could bypass CARA, and they could even release alternative versions of a film on video. These circumstances threatened the integrity of the ratings system. In 1984, the MPAA filed a trademark infringement suit against the theatrical and home video distributors of I Spit on Your Grave, a low-budget horror film that had been rated X by the MPAA in 1978 under the title Day of the Woman. (While the filmmaking is exceptionally crude, the picture is nevertheless noteworthy for the way it reverses the sexual politics of slasher films and other graphically violent thrillers. The killer here is a woman exacting revenge on the gang of men who raped her, and the narrative point of view throughout is aligned with this character and her experiences. Rather than offering a sexually appealing female victim, as in De Palma's films, I Spit on Your Grave has a resourceful female hero and enlists the viewer's approval as she punishes her transgressors.) Cinemagic, the production company, then reedited the picture for theatrical distribution, toning down its violence, and the MPAA revised its initial rating, awarding it an R. The subsequent video release, however, contained the originally deleted seventeen minutes of violent footage (deletions that had shifted the theatrical version from X to R) even though the video, as distributed by Wizard Video, still carried CARA's R rating in its trademark boxed-R format.

The MPAA pointed out that this rating pertained to the revised 1978 cut of the picture, not to what was now being released on video. The MPAA's suit cited "irreparable damage to the MPAA and the credibility of its rating system" through such attempts to circumvent CARA's authority. The MPAA filed its suit in January 1984 and by August had reached agreements with all major video distributors to implement a universal procedure for use of MPAA ratings, which hereafter would designate versions of a film on videotape and disc that are identical to that released in theaters. Agreeing to the uniform policy were CBS/Fox Video, Embassy Home Entertainment, Independent United Distributors, Key Video, MCA Home Video, Media Home Entertainment, MGM/UA Home Video, MTA Home Entertainment, Paramount Home Video, RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, Thorn EMI, Vestron Video, Walt Disney Home Video, and Warner Home Video.⁵¹

With this agreement, the MPAA safeguarded the implementation of the CARA ratings in the ancillary video markets. Those ratings, however, had just undergone a significant alteration. Stung by heated criticism of the PG rating awarded to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), which shows a pulsating heart ripped from a man's chest, and by criticism of the violence in Gremlins (1984, also PG), the MPAA reluctantly agreed to revise its rating categories by adding a new designation, PG-13, that would be an intermediate between PG and R. For years, Jack Valenti had been resisting suggestions that the MPAA revise its categories, but that changed on 27 July 1984 when PG-13 became official. The new category was a direct response to charges that the MPAA was soft on violence and that the violent content of some PG films was inappropriate for children.

PG-13, therefore, designated a film about which "parents are strongly cautioned to give special guidance for attendance of children under 13. Some material may be inappropriate for young children." The U.S. Catholic Conference charged that the new rating would dilute the usefulness of the R—that it would, in effect, label as PG-13 some films that previously would have been R. The boundaries between the ratings categories remained as fluid and problematic as ever, but PG-13 offered a new means for designating product that may have been too soft for an R but inappropriate for young children. Denying that PG-13 would substitute for the old R, Valenti said, "If the violence is real tough, if it is persistent, it still will go into R. What we have now and didn't have before is a way station between R and PG. If there are any doubts about a picture being a little tough for a PG, it will be a PG-13."⁵²

Revision of the ratings categories demonstrated the MPAA's flexibility and shrewdness in maneuvering to respond to the tides of public and critical opinion that had been running against its ratings designations since the beginning of the decade. While the MPAA might still take a firm stand in support of First Amendment rights, as it did during the Last Temptation of Christ fracas, it also worked, in its protective role, to mitigate public fallout over perceived excesses of violence and sex in the industry's products, recognizing, in Valenti's terms, that the national mood and culture had shifted rightward during the decade. Furthermore, it stayed out of battles it perceived as peripheral to its members' interests. The legislative investigations and prosecutions of the adult film business, for example, drew little MPAA comment and no involvement.

Despite the MPAA's efforts to protect the legitimate film industry, though, by defending and then altering its ratings categories, the long-term consequences of the 1980s battles over movies and morality have been momentous. The double standard over permissible levels of sex and violence in American film still prevails, and the cumulative effect of so many films perceived as inappropriately rated has served to undermine the authority and validity of the CARA system. (An additional symptom of this was the 1990 revision that created an NC-17 designation to substitute for the old X on the theory that it would escape X's stigma and permit serious, nonexploitative adult-themed filmmaking. Almost instantly, though, NC-17 was labeled and rejected by the public and critics as X in a different costume, and the Hollywood majors avoided funding or distributing NC-17 pictures.)

In larger terms, the expansion of graphic sex and violence in eighties cinema helped produce a substantial moral estrangement between the industry and its public that continued and intensified in the 1990s when political struggles and culture wars over the arts reached new levels of acrimony. Summarizing the alienation from Hollywood experienced by what he regarded as a sizable segment of the public, critic Michael Medved wrote, "Few of us view the show business capital as a magical source of uplifting entertainment, romantic aspiration, or even harmless fun. Instead, tens of millions of Americans now see the entertainment industry as an all-powerful enemy, an alien force that assaults our most cherished values and corrupts our children. The dream factory has become the poison factory."⁵³ Whether or not Medved spoke for as large a public as he claimed, there is no disputing that an imposing community of viewers and citizens had come to find Hollywood a source for many of the nation's most enduring problems afflicting familes and children. While the Hollywood industry had long been subject to such criticism, it was unusually intense in the 1980s. Moreover, the volatility of the moral climate surrounding American film saw no resolution during that decade. Instead, a sustained and unabated period of crisis prevailed, and the Hollywood industry saw its cultural capital substantially eroded. That erosion has not been stopped; it continues into the present period. Thus, as the 1980s closed, the industry confronted its continuing and unresolved economic problems and an accumulating moral tarnish that it was unwilling to address in a substantive way. Neither of those conditions augured well for its future.