The Great Freedoms

By RICHARD CORLISS

Late-night TV used to offer a simple choice: Johnny Carson or old movies. These days, the indiscriminating viewer gets Midnight Blue on Manhattan Cable's Channel J. One night this month, for instance, you could see sadomasochists play whipsie at the Hellfire Club. You could videotape a pornographic cartoon starring a trio of unflaggingly avid barnyard animals. You could catch perhaps a dozen commercials for call-girl "escort services" and for Steve, a gaunt guy who poses in his undies, gives his pertinent measurements and phone number and caters to all comers. You could hear the show's executive producer, Al Goldstein, mouth off on any subject that grazed his mind: Gloria Steinem ("great legs"), a play he'd seen in London ("Skip it. Miss it. Crud"), health violations at local restaurants. On Midnight Blue and other sex shows, for the basic cable subscription price, you could watch all this and more.

Or not. Your call.

That is the argument often made under the First Amendment by civil libertarians, and never more urgently than today. If you don't like it, they say, don't watch it, read it, listen to it or buy it. But also, don't bother people whose tastes differ from yours. In a less toxic age, Thomas Jefferson rhetorically asked, "Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?" Today Comic George Carlin puts it this way: "On the radio there are two knobs. One turns it off; the other changes the station. This is called freedom of expression. As Ronald Reagan would say, 'Let the free market handle it.' "

On the subject of unpleasant expression, Reagan has said no such thing. Indeed, he has exerted all his political suasion to put the Humpty-Dumpty of traditional morality back together again. His Administration has aligned itself with Fundamentalist vigilantes, and it created a commission that studied and in 1986 condemned pornography. To hard-core Reaganites, Carlin's freedom of expression must translate as "air pollution." After all, the comedian's monologue about the "seven dirty words" provoked a 1978 Supreme Court case after a child heard those words on the radio 14 years ago. Had that boy earned the freedom to get his ears scorched as his father idly twisted the dial? (The court ruled that "patently offensive" language could be regulated on radio and TV.) Do other boys and girls have the freedom to tune in Midnight Blue, or to rent "documentary" snuff films like Faces of Death at their local video stores? Does any jerk with a movie camera have the freedom to exploit and profit from the weaknesses of his performers, his audience and the law?

Since 1980 movie theaters specializing in pornographic fare have been shuttering -- down to about 250 from 700. But porn video is booming. It now accounts for $1 billion in rentals and sales. Indeed, most porn "movies" today are not films but tapes made directly for the bedroom market. From this view, the Reagan counterrevolution in morality looks to be a roaring success: sex is back in the home, where it belongs. The twist is that a lot of it is on TV.

It began at the peep show. One of the first movies -- an 1890s record of the belly dancer Fatima's dance -- stoked demands for its suppression. As the American cinema grew from fairground fad to worldwide obsession, it seasoned its content for the broadest tastes: no nudity, no naughty words, no violence. And, until the case of The Miracle in 1952, no constitutional cloak. In that year, ruling on Roberto Rossellini's parable of a peasant woman (Anna Magnani) impregnated by a bearded stranger (Federico Fellini) whom she believes to be St. Joseph, the Supreme Court ruled that films were a form of expression deserving of the First Amendment shield.

The court's decision came at the dawn of a new era in public morality and popular art. TV was becoming the mass medium of the middle class, yoked to the old restrictions, made timid by its new power. And other media -- film, radio, music -- were freed or forced to retool their products for narrower, more intense audiences. Pop culture was now as fragmented as modern art, and movies were boutique items in the great mall of contradictory American tastes. Movies for kids: I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). Movies for mature adults: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). And finally, in 1969, movies for immature adults: porno went public. That same year the Supreme Court recognized that entertainment -- home entertainment, at least -- was not legally required to please the bland majority palate. In Stanley v. Georgia, Thurgood Marshall declared, "If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch."

Since then, the court has refined its definition of actionable obscenity. To be declared obscene, a work must "appeal to prurient interest," be "patently offensive" and have no "serious artistic, literary, political or scientific value when taken as a whole." If only through the vague wording of that definition, the Justices have helped slow government involvement in the porn-busting business, which hardly means the case is closed. As Editorialist Phil Kerby once quipped, "Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature. Sex is a weak second." Some Fundamentalists have focused their sects' drive on getting Playboy and Penthouse removed from the shelves of 7- Eleven stores. Pressure groups have successfully lobbied the FCC to slap down Howard Stern and the other risk jockeys of raunch radio. In 1984 feminists won passage of an Indianapolis ordinance that defined pornography as the "graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/ or words" -- thereby implicitly condoning gay S-M porn (in which men may subordinate men) and much S-M heterosexual porn (in which men are bent, spindled or mutilated by very bossy women). Pornographers and civil libertarians, however, took out an injunction against the ordinance within hours of its becoming law. Finally, the Supreme Court tossed out the law, affirming a lower court ruling that the ordinance was "thought control."

Why ban porn? What harm does it do? According to the moral right wing, lots. "Erotic material is addictive, like drugs or alcohol," says Paul McGeady, general counsel for the watchdog lobby Morality in Media. "A husband says he wants to see what all this is about and buys a porn videocassette. But he is not satisfied with one that shows ordinary intercourse. Then he fantasizes that he is doing what he sees on the tape. Finally, he turns to his wife and wants to act out kinky sex. She says, 'Get lost!,' and the marriage breaks up." Nor is porn the only villain, in the opinion of Dr. Thomas Radecki, chairman of the National Coalition on Television Violence. He contends that 25% to 50% of violence in society is due to the culture of violence established on TV and in the movies.

Violence is done in movies; violence is done to movies. At one stage or another, Hollywood films are censored by just about everybody. The studio bosses decide whether, and then how, a film should be made. The industry's ratings board has slapped proscriptive X ratings on the original versions of such seriously intended films as Taxi Driver, Cruising, Scarface and Angel Heart until the sex and violence were trimmed. The big theater chains and most pay cable services show no X-rated films. Most newspapers and TV stations, making no distinction between pornography and a serious film for adult tastes, refuse all advertising for X's. To Director Adrian Lyne, whose 9 1/2 Weeks was truncated to avoid the toxic X, self-censorship is as bad as the government variety: "People are avoiding making certain types of movies, and that's real unhealthy." Instead of intense eroticism, Hollywood peddles giggle-and-jiggle movies: sex with a smirk.

And the consumers of these R-rated sex comedies are often teenagers who, theoretically, must be accompanied to R-rated films by an adult. Rock Musician Frank Zappa, a formidable foe of those who would censor rock lyrics, gets the movie industry's inside joke: "Is there any kid who hasn't seen an R-rated movie ((without his parents))? What was supposed to be a warning has turned into a marketing tool." Teens who stay up past 8 p.m. can watch R-rated films on pay cable, and at midnight, Manhattan minors can watch Robin Byrd, the G- stringed host and self-described "X-rated Ed Sullivan" of Manhattan's lube tube. "My show is for adults," she says. "If children watch it, it's because parents aren't doing their job." So it would seem. In 1985 Manhattan Cable (a subsidiary of Time Inc.) offered its 228,000 subscribers the option of a "lock box" so parents could scramble Channel J. Only 19 boxes were installed.

Traditionally, the left arm of the law wants to regulate economics but not morality; the right wants to regulate morality but not economics. And most people can cite some affront to public morality -- heavy metal lyrics or sick jokes on drive-time radio; Miami Vice, R-rated teen splatter films, soft-core sex on cable or hard-core sex in the video stores -- that they would like to see prohibited, at least to the young. Nobody denies that art packs danger and that trash can numb the soul. "Porn is like fast food," Goldstein says. "It's fast sex, and that's its limitation." Even he, a civil libertarian, can be moved to censor. "I'm a First Amendment absolutist," he declares, "except when it comes to pedophilia." And Zappa admits to prejudices: "I would rather have my children watch a quadruple-X film than one minute of Jimmy Swaggart." But Zappa adds that he would not censor the swaggering evangelist or anyone else. "The less access you have to facts," he says, "the more you must live by rumor and rhetoric."

In 1670 Benedict de Spinoza wrote, "In a free state everyone may think what he pleases, and say what he thinks." Modern translation: in a free state everyone may see what pleases him, and offer for public consumption what will please -- or outrage -- others. New York University Journalism Professor Lois Sheinfeld updates Spinoza: "It's difficult to live in a democracy. Sometimes we have to recognize that there will be neo-Nazis marching down the street." And sometimes there will be Faces of Death, Midnight Blue and Howard Stern. "But First Amendment rights," says Sheinfeld, "are placed beyond the reach of the majority. Their reason is to protect the speech of all. Without total protection no speech is free, all speech is at risk." Without free speech, even in its most rancid forms, we may have nothing to choose at night but old movies and "Heeeeeeeere's Johnny!"

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles and Jeanne McDowell/New York