GOING TO THE MOVIES : ARBITER OF OUTRAGE : HOLLYWOOD VS. AMERICA, <i> By Michael Medved (HarperCollins: $20; 416 pp.)</i>

I go to a few movies a week, but a month later I struggle to remember what I’ve seen. The endings are obvious 10 minutes in, or the jokes don’t work, or the horror isn’t scary, or there’s little that feels like life. When a great movie like “The Crying Game” comes along--something that’s surprising, political, romantic, scary and funny--the relief of having a film to love feels like getting out of prison. So when Michael Medved, in his book “Hollywood Vs. America,” says he’s sick of the movies, it’s easy to sympathize, even though he cites my own film work as part of the problem. But sometimes someone can be right for the wrong reasons, and then he’s wrong.

Medved begins with the hint of two theses that could have led to something significant, but they conflict, and in the end literally cancel themselves out.

The first of Medved’s battling theses holds that the entertainment industry is destroying American culture with sex, violence, contempt for religion and hatred of adult authority. The second is that the entertainment industry is failing because it’s out of touch with the market: those millions of patriotic, religious, unadulterous heart-landers who have abandoned a popular culture that reflects nothing but the depraved psyches of a few demonic liberals in the area-code hegemony of 213, 310 and 818.

The prophet keeps fighting the free-marketeer. It’s as though they alternated chapters, neither reading each other’s work, so that the free-marketeer offers Hollywood advice on how to make more money (fewer R ratings, more PG films) while the moralist, in a predictable assault on sex and violence, is unafraid to attack the wildly popular PG films “E.T.” and “Hook” for their sanctification of eternal childhood. The marketeer would have written a smaller book if every splatter film broke $100 million. For the moralist, box office is irrelevant and one of the few films cited for approval is “China Cry,” a $5 million Evangelical film about a young Chinese mother’s “religious conversion while suffering brutal persecution at the hands of the Chinese Communists.”

The moralist has all the best lines. He shows how CBS dismissed a $290,000, six-year study which found that “long-term exposure to violence increases the degree to which boys engage in violence of a serious kind,” while ABC played up another study in which its hired-gun experts declared that “the research does not support the conclusion that television significantly cultivates viewer attitudes and perceptions of social reality.”

Happily armed, Medved slays the hypocrites: “If the executives at ABC sincerely believe this nonsense and agree that their broadcasts fail to ‘cultivate viewer attitudes,’ then the network should prepare to refund all the billions of dollars of advertising revenues it has collected under false pretenses. . . . They have adopted the outrageously illogical assumption that a sixty-second commercial makes a more significant impression than a sixty-minute sitcom.”

The moralist’s occasional triumphs are betrayed by the absurdities and contradictions of the marketeer’s arguments. The marketeer, for one, is a bad historian. “In 1965,” Medved writes, “the Academy (honored) ‘The Sound of Music.’ Four years later, it chose the X-rated saga of a homeless hustler, ‘Midnight Cowboy’. . . . Between 1965 and 1969 the values of the entertainment industry changed, and audiences fled from the theaters in horror and disgust.”

Medved conveniently forgets that between 1965 and 1969 the war in Vietnam went out of control and Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. The generation that grew up on “Leave It To Beaver,” “The Donna Reed Show” and “Father Knows Best” (the kind of television Medved misses) came of age, discovered that only Beaver’s Eddie Haskell ever knew the score, and asked for--finally--a picture of reality.

And it’s against reality that Michael Medved finally crashes. All of his section headings in the chapter titled “The Urge to Offend”--from “The Lurid Freak Show” and “Incestuous Excesses” to “Interspecies Intercourse” and “Roaches and Maggots”--reflect something real, something that won’t be denied. He can cite 1939 and 1965 as good years for movies, but we had Democrats in the White House then, and after the past 12 years of lies and denial, something had to come bubbling back up the pipes.

Yes, the movies often are terrible, some of them evil, and too many producers are drug dealers with a legal recipe to push adrenaline, and all of Hollywood sometimes feels like a cultural Chernobyl. But Murphy Brown did not lie to Congress about an arms-for-hostages deal. “Silence of the Lambs” did not subsidize American businesses to relocate factories in Central America. “Hook,” did not, like Reagan, lay a wreath on the SS graves at Bitburg. These are the lies, these are the political frauds that cause the real nightmares on Elm Street.

Medved is scapegoating. He’s scapegoating like the worst of the movies of the Reagan-Bush years, where audiences were fused into lynch mobs cheering the frightful deaths of villains given no souls by their creators. But the audience demanded something interesting, demanded that the scapegoats not be denied their humanity, and so Freddy Krueger and the Terminator were made into heroes. The audience appropriated the villains in spite of the filmmakers’ intentions, and this drives Medved insane: He cannot stand the idea that a movie he hates is popular.

Now, he’s going to write a letter saying that the reason I’ve attacked his book is that he criticizes “The Rapture,” a film I made in 1991. It’s a film about religion, and he cites it as another example of Hollywood’s contempt for faith. “The only church you ever see in (‘The Rapture’) is a cultish congregation of leisure-suited losers who worship an eleven-year-old African-American ‘prophet’ who barks out weird metaphysical commands. . . .” In fact, the weird commands are from the Gospels, and it’s not the only church, and no one’s in a leisure suit, and to call people who work for the telephone company “losers” is the height of Republicanism. Medved complains that people who make films about religion never consult the faithful, but we did consult Christians when we made the movie, and Christian groups invited us to screen it and discuss it after the release.

I’m probably wasting my breath. This book favorably quotes Frank Capra: “The winds of change blew through the dream factories of make-believe, tore at its crinoline tatters. . . . The hedonists, the homosexuals, the hemophilic bleeding hearts. . . .” It’s an interesting quote because Medved could have cut out the homophobia to save the idea; it may be generous to say that his decision to include it shows the real measure of his judgment. Or does he know that with some readers, the worst of it will get the loudest applause?

Like any politician, cheap or expensive, Medved is mindful of his audience. “Hollywood Vs. America” is really written not for the industry but for the Quayle-in-’96 Campaign, and Medved gives them sensational fodder for a witch hunt.

Closer to Vine Street, he knows he’s playing to a different house. Consider the curious case of his review of “Wayne’s World”--that rare thing, a really funny comedy (I can’t wait for the next installment). You would expect that this vulgar story of two anarchic stooges and their quest for big-breasted women and electric guitars represents everything Medved hates, but in his review of the film, the champion of decency called it “inventive, outrageous and irresistible.”

Now, last year Michael Medved, our new arbiter of “outrage,” testified as an expert witness on behalf of Paramount Pictures and against Art Buchwald in his “Coming to America” plagiarism suit. For declaring that Buchwald’s idea was not present in the movie, Paramount paid him between $8,000 and $10,000.

I’m sure it’s just coincidence that “Wayne’s World” was made by Paramount.