Hollywood vs. America

By Michael Medved

Reviewed by Alex Hall
On 5/15/2006

Harper Perennial, 1992. Paperback:
386 pages.
ISBN: 0-06016-882-X
Suggested retail price: $14.95 (US)

Here is my short take: this is not a Mormon-related book, you might say. I'd say otherwise - it shares and defends some very strong core values with Mormons, with Judeo-Christian religions, and with traditional America - if not many other strongholds of morality. Medved calls for renewal and enriching of art traditions which corruption has set to destroy! There are many things in this book which made me reel, or laugh, or sit in a speechless aghast, or - best of all - made me want to make some good art.

Here is my long take: I'll begin with Medved's very insightful, and I think confounding though also ultimately uplifting arguments - and then I'll move to explore how this book has some strong philosophical alliances with Mormonism, and I will make no pretensions that I moralize.

This book was published, as I write this, 14 years ago. I've only just read it and am beginning to look into the effect it must have had, and what follow-ups there might be to it. I think it must have had an enormous impact. Reading other reviews of this book, it seems as if it might have introduced various original arguments and points into the cultural (and I think really, religious) debate.

Here is a sampling of some of the myths the book explodes through statistical observations and reasoning:

Medved may have been the first to widely denounce the myth that Hollywood produces what America demands; because filthy films sell better than wholesome films. But G and PG-rated, family-oriented films continue to be by a wide margin the audience and profit winners.

The notion that the moral and cultural atmosphere which Hollywood depicts reflects the larger American society is false. A simple example: many a film execute would tell you Americans don't go to church much. At the book's writing, the vast majority of Americans were very religiously active, according to numerous polls - attending church weekly and praying daily.

The idea that audience sizes swelled to record highs in the mid-eighties is false. Since the mid-1960's ticket prices have skyrocketed while actual admissions have plummeted; if you divide film grosses by average ticket prices the actual patron admissions have been much lower - and they have never recovered since the 60's - never mind that the separate hard statistic just on admissions is usually overlooked - and is usually pathetic compared to Hollywood's Golden Age.

The book confounds the idea that entertainment has no negative effect on human behavior. Not even minding the very vast data and studies that throw down the idea - including many that have followed control vs. non-control groups of media exposure over the years, finding that young children repeatedly exposed to violent media are much more likely to commit violent crimes than those who have not been exposed - but many in the entertainment business are blatantly hypocritical in their stance over it. On one hand they will gobble up praise and pontificate on the virtue of films which move people to save the rain forests, so that their films are revered as moving people to save the ecosystem, while on the other hand they say with a straight face that violent depictions do not incline anyone to violence. The logic is impossible: film has the power to move for good, but not the power to move for bad. To this observation I would add: executive and film makers receive praise when their films promote positive behavior is proof that films influence behavior. To praise something moves toward a behavior, and to condemn something moves away from it. Unfortunately, Hollywood can be very powerful in silencing condemnations of their work on moral ground -

It is common for an artist to say a critic who stands against his work on moral ground is attempting to remove his right of free expression. This is disingenuous. The issue is not about free expression - or if a critic makes it so, Medved urges him not to - the issue should be responsibility for the very powerful influence on behavior which art wields. One should not argue for amoral art to be illegal, (although I take issue with the National Endowment for the Arts funding an instillation artwork of a crucifix in a jar of piss), one should argue that it violates decency and is destructive to society.

Going back to art influencing behavior; from an LDS standpoint I think the idea that it does not influence behavior is further ludicrous. The Book of Mormon mentions that the word had more power to move people than the sword. What more power is there in the word when it is mixed with music and images? A great deal of power - for good or evil.

Expanding more on the false idea that Hollywood puts out amoral garbage because America demands it (expressly not so!) - large studios routinely throw millions of dollars away on relatively smaller film projects that they know have no wide appeal and will very probably have no return on investment, only to impress themselves, their peers, and the critics. And the films they do this for are often notoriously and repugnant amoral, showing what a lot of people in Hollywood love and would do exclusively if there were never money considerations. Regrettably, in coming out and saying this, I'm framing an "us vs. them" mentality - which I declaim. There are a lot of people turning genuine good out of Hollywood. There are also a lot (and sadly, I think many more) who aren't. These should be educated by mobs of forthright and confounding letters.

To a final glib dismissal from defenders of vile art: don't buy it and don't go see it - Medved answers that filthy art is an unavoidable fact of the American environment and culture. An artist who makes it can't control where it goes, and Medved argued this before media reached further into every corner of life, as it does now. It goes back to the responsibility issue. If you make it, someone who shouldn't see it, read it, or hear it will.

This book defends values, trenchantly, which Mormons share with it, and Section and Chapter titles bear this out:

PART II: The Attack on Religion

PART III: The Assault on the Family

Chapter 14: Bashing America

Now, I'll make a comparison to the quintessential Mormon Letter - and because such comparisons can be ridiculous and dangerous if taken too far, hopefully I won't go too far. But where have Mormons read similar things? - In an account of a brave captain stirring his people to defense, in a very literal battle, at real danger of death:

"..he rent his coat; and he took a piece thereof, and wrote upon it- In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children-and he fastened it upon the end of a pole." - THE BOOK OF MORMON, Alma 46:12

I read this as a statement that such things are the most worth defending - and which evil most heavily attacks. Hollywood vs. America never says so much; to my view it simply demonstrates it. Also, the book title, bearing the word "America" - to my mind an exemplar of "freedom" - and the general scope in which the book explores American popular culture - also bears this relationship of shared defense of values, while all of the negative things the book exposes go back, in my opinion, to the abandonment of religion, or at the least, respect for religion. Meanwhile, my comparison to a literal war implicitly states that the cultural war is truly just that - a war. Blammo! That is exactly what I am saying. But here is the danger of my comparison; while the scripture-recorded war was literally fighting enemies to the death, the battle over values is a spiritual battle. Literal war must be literally destructive of a foe, but spiritual wars are only won if they are constructive. So it is not helpful to think of opponents to Mormon beliefs as people who must be emotionally and intellectually destroyed, isolated, neutralized, marginalized, beaten down etc. as frankly in my view the Mormon mindset can be prone, confessing this for myself at least - through means (among others) like taking comparisons and analogies too far. But wars of ideas have always been elemental to Mormon thinking, with something built, ennobled, or created as a result. In the war of ideas over values in art, I find a great ally in Medved, who surely obliterates the defenses of values he opposes - and how! - but part of the book's closing is a heartening look of admiration at the very people whose ideas he opposes, with some exploration of organizations that are working to counteract the negative moral tides in Hollywood from within. That is constructive. It identifies those he disagrees with as fellow human beings, with value and passion and idealism, instead of demonizing them. Medved could not praise those he disagrees with on any level unless he recognized, as he rightly does, that they simply believe differently and feel their endeavors are either right or harmless.

It is apparently not a novel point, if it used to be, that there is major friction in America over values - so perhaps I have not been so aware of that friction as this book made me - or maybe I am aware of it and the book was just a wake-up call, as it might be for anyone.

Simply on that emotional level, of exposing friction, this book was wrenching. It is an account of a rapidly declining moral atmosphere in the arts communities, a decline which Americans have witnessed and are witnessing transpire in just a few generations. It argues that this has a negative effect on the wider culture. In that connection, the book discloses matters which are appalling, often enraging, and unbelievably and even laughably hypocritical. Medved has a penchant for amusing alliteration and also turns some pretty funny phrases. The book's only weakness, I thought, was that it sometimes makes its case a bit too strongly - but taken as a whole, it makes an astounding, overwhelming, inarguable, dumbfounding, confounding, and condemning case; but as I say the ultimate aim is very positive.

A closing chapter explores when things really started falling apart in Hollywood. In 1960, the Oscar for Best Picture went to The Sound of Music. By 1964, the Oscar went to Midnight Cowboy - an unresolved fictional biopic of a sexcapading homeless drunkard. That could be all neat and dandy - if there was a point. And Medved refreshingly points out that there is a place for the dark in art. But in his lists of films, thematically arranged in laughably gross galleries of the grotesque obsessions of Hollywood, it becomes very clear that for Hollywood, illicit sex, violence, aggression, destruction, shock, horror, vomit, piss, abuse, familial and religious dysfunction and breakdown, contempt for patriotism, contempt for and befouling of religion, and everything bad you can imagine has become the all-consuming, end-all, be-all point. Meanwhile, trends and obsessions that are rediculous dare I say wordly trifles alongside the religious traditions of millennia have been elavated to a level above religion. One alarming and laughable analasys illustrated how Santa Claus has become more sacred in Hollywood than Christ. Dolphins, too. But to cut back to the grotesque - skinned and eaten!? Hot damn, let's Oscar that! The devolution of the arts apparently originated in other arts and in the wider culture, but remained strong in the arts long after the transformation faded from the wider culture: hence Hollywood vs. America.

Medved's final words in this book are poignant and further rending, but I don't want to spoil them, and I think the whole book should be read before them.

To reflect in closing on the Mormon cinema movement - if there is not (at this writing) money in Mormon film, there can certainly be morality. Though I still believe there can be money. This is an ethnocentric statement, and certainly divides against morally corrupt art, but the Mormon film dream minus money considerations would be uplifting, inspiring, and beg for a closer examination of life, and in contrast not distorting or avoiding life - I would hope. What is the Mormon reality? There is an awful lot of goodness to be had in life - here and in the next life - and an awful lot that is to be lost through wickedness. If there is one people on this planet who should be motivated to counter the tide of filth, by making films just to impress one another, all money considerations aside, that people should be the Mormons.


Copyright © 2006 Richard Alexander Hall