OF RAUNCH AND YOUNG FILMGOERS

I’d never heard raunch used as a verb until the other night when, after a screening on campus, a USC student asked the producer whether the distributor had demanded that he “raunch” up his film.

The producer took a deep breath and said yes, but that he’d fought against showing bare breasts in one scene and a glimpse of a porno film in another. He’d had to put in some cuss words to get the R the company insisted on, he said, instead of the PG the film should and could have had. But, as the saying goes, two out of three isn’t bad, and the film he made, the producer said, is essentially the one he wanted to make.

The 300 students burst into applause, startling the platform considerably. You could argue, I suppose, that this cheering for raunch rejected is another sign of a new conservatism on campus. (USC had a reputation for conservatism before it was fashionable.) But I don’t think so.

It seemed to me that the applause could also be heard as a way of saying “enough, already” to the cynical pandering to the presumably jaded tastes of the young audience that has been the industry’s response to its own demographics.

The movie is still the great American date. (If it weren’t, Hollywood would be in abysmal trouble.) Accordingly, something like 75% of the tickets are bought by those under 25. Accordingly, movies are aimed at young people, which mostly means that movies are made about young people.

As I’ve had occasion to complain before, the trouble is that the young people--on the screen or in front of it--are too often conceived of as rutting delinquents, burdened with a concupiscence beyond their years and denied intelligence, discernment, wit, ambition, values, romantic idealism, a sense of the past or a concern for the future, and saddled with the attention span of diseased gnats.

The cinematic mixes of destruction derby, underage orgy and minor insurrection, enough to give honest vulgarity a bad name, are somebody’s fantasies acted out. It’s just not clear whose deformed dreams they are, but I’ve never thought they truly reflected the young audience.

What the films do, in the absence of a countervailing vision, is imply that this is the way things are, suggesting that the steamy fantastical abnorm has become the norm. It is a mischief, not redeemed by a quick curtsy to a traditional happy clinch in the last reel.

If the films do business, and they do, it may not be because they are good or even especially liked, but because they are the only game in town, and because they cater to the oldest curiosities and urges we encounter on the rocky road through teen-age to maturity.

What seems inevitable--or what you have to hope is inevitable--is that eventually the cynical manipulative material has to beget an impatient cynicism in the audience--that cry of “enough, already”--and with it a demand for movies that speak instead to the slower gratifications of life, possibly including love, achievement and friends.

It seemed to me that the applause the other evening might be a gratifying hint that instant gratification is beginning to lose some of its appeal as a staple of the movie diet.

As a matter of fact, there are a few films just out or due out that, though they are unequal in quality and consistency, seem to have caught the change in signals from the audience and deal with young people who are far more recognizable and more deeply rooted in reality than the creeps we’ve grown used to.

These young people, high schoolers mostly, are flawed, foolish, angry, abused, defeated (temporarily), mischievous, spoiled, and, ah yes, occasionally sex-obsessed, but in ways that recall Booth Tarkington (or Salinger) rather than Moll Flanders or the Marquis de Sade.

You have no doubt that Charles Purpura, who wrote the excellent “Heaven Help Us,” went to a Catholic boys school much like St. Basil’s in Brooklyn, circa 1965, knew these boys (as Barry Levinson knew and recalled the old gang in “Diner”), knew the gags, the loneliness, the minor tyrannies and major cruelties, the innocence and the faith. The rage and the tenderness both resonate with truth.

It may well prove that “Son of Porky’s VII” will still outgross, so to speak, this and other quieter, more earnest films. So be it; the raucous comedies have their place.

What matters is that an alternate vision of young life should have its time on the screen. It may well even have a shot at commercial viability; “Heaven Help Us” is a very affecting and entertaining movie. This other way to present young people, closer to the way things really are, even in a riddled and scratchy time, may not make a fortune, but it can restore a balance and contradict that demeaning collective portrait of a generation of premature wastrels and bawds.

It might even get an unexpected round of applause from an audience weary of being played down to.