It is axiomatic to many people that the movies, to take one medium, are more questionable today than ever; that they feature more sex and violence than ever before, and that the values they preach are not values at all, but narcissistic hedonism in disguise.
But is it true that things are worse than ever? Consider this: We are celebrating the 30th anniversary of 1979, the disastrous twelvemonth when everything seemed to go wrong at once-Iran and Nicaragua fell, American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, just to name a few of the horrors of the year. In the fall of that year, United Artists, then the most prestigious studio in Hollywood, released two films. Both are about the habits and misbehavior of high-toned and well-to-do New Yorkers. One is considered a classic; one has fallen into obscurity. They are both works of evil, and I use the word advisedly. And hardly anyone at the time seemed to recognize it.
The false classic is Woody Allen’s Manhattan, a movie about a comedy writer named Ike who lives in a grand Fifth Avenue apartment. He spends his evenings with intellectual friends at Elaine’s. He is 42 years old. And he is sleeping with a 17-year-old girl named Tracy.
Tracy is a senior in high school. We see him lurking across the street from the Dalton School as he waits for her to emerge at 3:00 P.M. She joins him at dinner with his intellectual friends, and they do not bat an eye. Rather, they praise her, and, by inference, Ike for choosing her.
It is clear from the context of Manhattan that we are never to question Ike’s character. In fact, the movie suggests he is a person of vastly better character than his friend Yale, because later on in the movie, after Ike has dumped Tracy and broken her heart, Yale steals a girlfriend from him. “You think you’re God,” Yale says when Ike upbraids him. “Well,” says Ike, “I’ve got to model myself after somebody.”
In the end, Ike returns to Tracy. He is upset that she is going to Paris for a few weeks. She tells him not to worry, she will be true: “You have to have a little faith in people.”
It is inconceivable that such a movie could be made today, in which a middle-aged man commits statutory rape-and is considered a moral exemplar to boot. And yet there was not a peep in 1979.
Rich Kids is perhaps an even more interesting case. It is a movie about divorce, in which the parents behave in ludicrous, embarrassing, and appalling ways-and leave their confused children to their own devices. Having lived through many such divorces with New York kids exactly like these, I can testify to the brilliance of the movie’s depiction of them.
But Rich Kids is, like Manhattan, evil. The movie climaxes, sorry to say, with the consummation of a sexual relationship between its two 12-year-old protagonists-an act that is greeted with horror by the parents, who, the movie makes clear, have no standing whatever to judge the lovely, innocent, and altogether delightful behavior of their children. In the words of Steven Bach, the studio executive who supervised the film, it was
According to Bach, only one official at United Artists objected-its head of distribution, a man named Al Fitter. In his classic Hollywood memoir, Final Cut, Bach writes:
The fact that it never found an audience would really seem to be beside the point. The point is that $2.5 million was spent by a major American cultural producer on a piece of entertainment that glorified a sexual encounter between two barely pubescent children.
It was an example of how degraded the culture had become by 1979: that there was only one person at a major Hollywood studio to object to this astonishing moral lapse-and that person was, in Bach’s words, “forever after viewed as subliterate” for speaking up. Whatever we are today, we are not this. Whatever Hollywood is today, it is not as it was in 1979. And thank God.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
