Let’s cut straight to the chase: “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge” is probably no “Last Tango in Paris.”
“Pirates” is the $10 million, triple-X “blockbuster” of a porn film that was supposed to be shown at the Stamp Student Union building on the University of Maryland College Park campus Saturday night.
That was before Maryland legislators got wind of the showing and, I’m sure civil liberties absolutists will claim, went all jackboot and arm twisted university officials into yanking the film.
“Last Tango” is a 1973 Bernardo Bertolucci film that, while featuring some raunchy sex scenes and dialogue, still had some superb directing, screenwriting and acting to give it some redeeming social value. A brilliant jazz soundtrack by Gato Barbieri didn’t hurt the film’s artistic creds either.
Some critics noted that Marlon Brando, who played the lead role, gave a better performance in “Last Tango” than he did in “The Godfather,” for which he won an Oscar.
Had “Last Tango” been slated to run Saturday night, UMCP honchos would have been justified in their claim that screening the film would have been, as some news reports claim they said in justification, a “fun alternative to off-campus drinking.” Instead, university officials gave their endorsement to a student programming committee that went for lowbrow.
A word of caution: If UMCP administrators leave screening selections to students, they might wind up with Jenna Jameson movies being shown in the Stamp Student Union.
Jameson at one time had the reputation as the world’s greatest porn star, a distinction that I suspect did not make her parents very proud. It probably didn’t make Jameson proud, either. She’s on record as saying she’ll never appear on-screen in another porno.
Heather Hunter, arguably the world’s greatest black porn star, has also rejected the business. She’s into writing books and making rap videos these days, and is trying to break into mainstream acting.
When I interviewed her at a bookstore in a Prince George’s County mall two years ago, she even expressed shock – and a bit of dismay – that her rap video was the cleanest thing on the now-not-so-dearly-departed Black Entertainment Television show “Uncut,” which featured rap videos that were mini-pornos.
“Uncut” was an attempt to sneak pornos into the mainstream, but here’s the problem: Porn isn’t mainstream. It has no place on a college or university campus, no matter what civil liberties absolutists claim.
That’s why David Rocah, the staff attorney for the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, was completely wrong when he said that yanking “Pirates” was “an incredibly dangerous and disturbing precedent,” according to news reports.
What is “incredibly dangerous and disturbing” is the notion that the First Amendment is some kind of “anything goes” law. It most certainly is not. The Supreme Court has already ruled on this issue of obscenity and pornography.
In the 1973 decision Miller v. California, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for the 5-4 majority that obscene material has no First Amendment protection. Burger then used three criteria to define obscene material:
- Anything that an “average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find…appeals to the prurient interest.
- Anything that “depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law” and
- Anything that “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
“Pirates” no doubt meets all or one of those criteria. And there’s the matter of “compelling state interest” to consider: Does the state of Maryland have such an interest in seeing that its flagship public university doesn’t show pornos?
Liberals love the compelling state interest argument to justify racial diversity and argue that whites have no 14th Amendment rights to speak of, but they’ll no doubt take a powder on compelling state interest in this matter. But UMCP officials should have been more worried about this than legislators.
Would you want your kid going to college at a school known as Porn U, which UMCP would have become if it had shown “Pirates”?
Or would you send him or her 40 miles up the road to the University of Maryland Baltimore County, which some observers feel is the better school anyway?
Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is an award-winning journalist who lives in Baltimore.
