FILM COMMENT : Turn On the <i> Zeitgeist </i> Juicers, But Strain the Pulp

In the vicious thriller “Unlawful Entry,” a deranged L.A. cop, played by Ray Liotta, fixates on the comfortably middle-class couple he is supposedly protecting--he terrorizes the husband and tries to make whoopee with the wife. In “Lethal Weapon 3,” Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are once again barreling through a crash-and-burn fest in gang-ridden L.A. In the Tom Clancy-derived “Patriot Games,” Annapolis history professor and CIA analyst Jack Ryan, played by Harrison Ford, goes mano a mano with a radical IRA splinter group.

These movies, as well as the recent “Basic Instinct” and “Cape Fear,” are ostensibly melodramas set in a thrill seeker’s fantasy land. Except that--darn the luck--the real world keeps intruding. L.A. cops, after all, aren’t cyborgs and the IRA isn’t composed of Klingons. These movies try to strong-arm us into a state of movie disbelief, but can we suspend disbelief so easily? More to the point, should we?

In pulp, the volatile subjects of drama--the conflicts of sex and race and class--are sensationalized and writ large. The question of how seriously we should take pulp is basic to our filmgoing experience right now, because, unavoidably, it constitutes just about everything we see. The disruptions these films provoke are routinely dismissed with the It’s Only a Movie defense. Political correctness, so the defense goes, is taking all the fun out of melodrama, the whole point of which is to pit heroes against villains. The more “incorrect” the villainy the better. Lighten up. It’s only a movie.

But sensationalistic material doesn’t exist in some value-free zone. Or is it OK to be racist or misogynist in pulp entertainment--which is presumably manufactured for the unthinking masses--but not in “serious” high-toned fare? Movies are supposed to be the great democratic art form, but the sick joke of films like “Basic Instinct” and “Cape Fear” and “Unlawful Entry” is that they stir us up by drawing on our most reactionary sexual and racial fears and assumptions. They unify us by playing into our prejudices. Some democracy.

More maddening than all this exploitation, perhaps, is the filmmakers’ indifference to social reality. The cartoon calisthenics of “Lethal Weapon 3,” for example, have no business being set amid the miseries of modern-day, crime-ridden L.A. By working in some heavy-duty gang-busting, the filmmakers are just camouflaging the buddy-buddy japery with a phony social consciousness--while continuing to juice the action.

What these filmmakers may not realize, or care about, is that we live at a time when it’s not even possible to stage these cartoon shoot-’em-ups in real locations without the foolery ringing false. You can’t use cities like New York and Los Angeles as cardboard cutout backdrops anymore because they’re too overpowering, too resonant with urban horror stories. (The days of “Dragnet” are definitely over.)

That pulp can seem brainless and yet still carry political content should be obvious--certainly the notion has been recognized, and exploited, by politicos both on the right and the left. So why does it come as a shock to many people that a movie that wasn’t directed by one of our two official hollerers, Oliver Stone or Spike Lee, can still plug into the political static? Not all movies with political content come on like manifestoes.

When a Variety reviewer, Joseph McBride, wrote last month that “Patriot Games” was “anti-Irish” and “fascistic,” prompting a highly publicized rebuke from his own editor, many who read the review were surprised to discover that anybody might take Tom Clancy’s pulp for anything more than a kick-back time-killer. Yet this film’s melodrama is greased by its hero-worship toward the CIA and the British ruling class. (Those attitudes are toned down from the book which, incidentally, carries a praiseworthy blurb from that noted literary critic Caspar W. Weinberger.) You don’t have to agree that “Patriot Games” is a fascistic movie to recognize that it’s gummy with political labeling.

We may not always be consciously aware of what these movies are proffering; nor, for that matter, are their makers. But surely on a deeper level we--literally--get the picture. Pulp movies carry a charge precisely because they don’t lay out all the meanings for us like the prestigious message movies do. They aren’t weighted down with high-flown inspirationalism like “Gandhi”; they don’t try to make you a better person. Instead, they deep-rub our prejudices and confusions, and this is often why the average thriller is more disturbing to us than its more “responsible” counterpart; it’s less polite about muscling in on our fears. When a great piece of pulp comes along, like Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry” or Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” it can really wipe you out because, from the first frame, your psyche is gripped in a submission hold that never lets up.

“Unlawful Entry” isn’t great pulp; it’s not even terrific. But it’s a good example of how a thriller can raid the Zeitgeist. We’ve seen this many times before, and with even more deliberation: “Dirty Harry,” with its tarnished knight battling a coddled-by-liberals psycho sporting a peace sign belt buckle, was a methodical reactionary fantasy; “Straw Dogs” was a take-no-prisoners demonstration of the territorial imperative. “Unlawful Entry” doesn’t lay its cards on the table quite so blatantly as those films, but it’s still dealing from a stacked deck.

On the surface, the film seems to be setting up Ray Liotta’s Officer Pete as the latest in a line of monomaniacal revengers: a man-in-blue variation on Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” or Rebecca De Mornay’s nanny in “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” As the film begins, Richard (Kurt Russell) and his wife Karen (Madeleine Stowe) are terrorized in their home by an intruder; as Richard watches helplessly, the intruder holds Karen at knife point before fleeing. When Pete and his partner arrive at the scene of the crime, we’re give a “meaningful” close-up of Pete as he drinks in Karen’s beauty. He supervises the installation of a security system; he takes Richard out on night patrol with him--macho buddies.

But Pete has a surprise: Alone in the squad car with Richard, he drives to a run-down apartment, bursts in on the intruder who terrorized Richard and his wife and then, when Richard refuses to do the honors, beats the suspect to a, well, pulp.

From this point on, Pete’s psychopathology insinuates itself into every aspect of the couple’s life, though, significantly, Karen is so mesmerized by Pete’s cuckoo cooing that it takes her most of the movie to finally heed her husband’s warnings.

The crack in this neat scenario is that Richard, not Pete, is the film’s real target. He’s portrayed as a species of wimp: A real estate developer of sorts--i.e. a yuppie softie--he’s all too anxious to partake of Pete’s derring-do. Until it gets too dangerous for him, that is--until it gets real. And the point is not very subtly made that he doesn’t really satisfy his languorous wife, either.

With all the current concern about L.A. police brutality, this film wants us to know that, if you’re white and middle-class, brutality is the price you pay for protection. If you’re white and well off, your comforts are bought at the expense of poor blacks. Is it just a coincidence that the intruder who breaks in on Richard and Karen is a very dark-skinned black? (Pete, of course, is given a black partner; in Hollywood, and not only in Hollywood, racism and integration go hand in hand.) Pete may be a bad apple but Richard and Karen planted the seed. In a way, “Unlawful Entry” is as much a letter bomb for liberals as “Dirty Harry” was.

We’ve just been through a cycle of recession-era movies where lawyers and doctors and profiteers jettison their corporate achiever ways for the blandishments of family. Now this cycle may be moving into thornier terrain. In “Cape Fear,” a well-to-do lawyer, complete with bad marriage and wayward daughter, clashes with a bugaboo sexual terrorist who scorches the protections of the middle class.

The “Cape Fear” side of “Unlawful Entry” reaches beyond political sniping and into the primeval muck. Richard can’t hold onto his woman because he’s been softened by the very middle-class comforts he is now in danger of losing. Karen is portrayed as femininity incarnate; she’s so maidenly that she seems perpetually in mid-swoon. Her trance-like (and unconsummated) confabs with Pete tell us that women really want the rough ‘n’ tough stuff and, what’s more, you can’t really blame them . Richard deserves to be terrorized. Only by besting Pete’s brutality can he regain his manhood. In pulp, what is sexually reactionary and what is politically reactionary usually go hand in hand. “Unlawful Entry” is quite a handshake.

It’s typical of pulp that it raises complicated concerns--the kind of concerns that are the stuff of real drama--and then uncomplicates them and makes them as easy to read as a tabloid headline. There’s no suggestion that Pete’s behavior is in any way connected to the practices of the Los Angeles police force; he’s simply the bogeyman. It’s a convenient demonization for audiences wary of the institutional abuses of the police. Just get rid of Pete and things will be fine.

Pulp has always been one of the preferred ways of transmitting “ideas” in American society; its crude vitality suits us even as it devalues debate. If the pulp that’s currently making it into the theaters these days seems particularly crude, well, that’s certainly in keeping with the national temper. The tone of political debate is itself pulped: The official solutions to urban despair are invariably of the law-and-order variety. The ways in which political candidates attempt to demonize each other is all-of-a-piece with the movie thrillers. The winning candidate is often the one who can co-opt from popular culture the most potent pulp symbols--stretching from Willie Horton to the yellow peril. Pulp movies have to be especially crude right now. They’ve got real competition.