A few days ago I stumbled across a documentary on the trials of movie makers in dealing with Hollywood’s rating association, the one that supplies ratings for filums. I didn’t watch it long, and what I did watch was kind of choppy because the raunchy clips required channel-switching, but still it was quite informative. The dilemma faced by these stalwart producers of gunk was how to make a foul movie without garnering an NC-17 rating, which is a kiss of death because theaters won’t carry those babies.
One scrawny guy they were interviewing had a little cookie-duster moustache, and looked just like a mousy little boy who heard his very first dirty joke in sixth grade, and had never gotten over it. I remember someone just like that — in sixth grade, actually — who went into spasms of suppressed giggling when our long-suffering teacher had tried to explain to us what made mammals mammals. The Eagles have a song on The Long Run that describes just this kind of movie guy. “You’d know it if you saw his stuff . . .”
At any rate, here is the thought that came out of this, and is related to something C.S. Lewis said somewhere, I think describing the oeuvre of D.H. Lawrence (oeuvre is a fancy French word to describe the work of self-important people). Lewis said that there is a common fallacy out and about that thinks that a long face is a moral disinfectant, that basic moral considerations do not come into play just so long as you take whatever it is you are doing seriously. According to this odd theory, the sin is not found in the sin itself, but rather in any frivolous response to it. What we need around here is a furrowed brow, intensity of purpose, a willingness to talk about how “Americans need to become more comfortable with our bodies,” the tapping of the front teeth with a thoughtful pencil, and a desire to tie sexual liberation in with justice concerns for coffee growers in Central America.
These movie producers were (or at any rate, wanted to be) serious artists. They were working with the contours of narrative (all rise!) and making art, you see.
The same thing happens with other professions too. This is why a blowhard like Bill O’Reilly can be waxing indignant about the moral degradation of (let’s make something up, but not far-fetched) having some pole dancer give a talk to a high school jobs fair assembly somewhere, and to prove his indignation is real, he shows us multiple clips of pole dancers prancing around in their skivvies. When Maude from Wisonsin writes in to say something along the lines of, “Hey!” he will respond that what he is doing is “just journalism, madam.” This is serious journalism, and it justifies what seriousness always justifies these days, which is whatever we have around here that needs some justifying.
Serious artists, serious journalists, serious athletes, serious sociologists, serious scientists, serious movie critics, serious bloggers . . . you name it. We have a serious problem.
On a related point, I just finished reading a book on the ribald aspects of many of Shakespeare’s plays, and the author makes a good case for some of her readings. Although she way overdoes it — sometimes a cigar is just a cigar — she does illustrate why Shakespeare’s plays had to be cleaned up, and how, since hardly anybody knows what the words mean anymore, the passage of time has cleaned up a bunch of the remaining Elizabethan raciness for us. I remember one time watching a Shakespeare production at Logos, and seeing a sweet young Christian girl say something at the upper registers of bawdy. Yikes was my sentiment, but for most of the assembled the whole thing sounded kind of King Jamesy, and they were filled with warm thoughts about classical education.
But the reason I bring this up is that when Shakespeare sins here (and boy, does he), he does so in a way that D.H. Lawrence would find incomprehensible. Shakespeare is sinning against decorum in a Christian world, in which ribald jokes are told because they are funny. He does this in the same kind of way that songwriters in Nashville do — “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body, Would You Hold It Against Me?” On the tragic side, Hamlet says savage things of a sexual nature to both his mother and Ophelia because the comments are savage, not because he wants to be Ibsen. He operates in a Christian world, depending on it constantly.
But modern purveyors of filth have no standards, no brakes, no sense, and worst of all, no humor. I’m serious.