Attacks on Hollywood Find Values a Movable Target

Like parents nationwide, Pamela Osborne is concerned about the state of the world unfolding each day before her young children’s eyes. In fact, frightened might not be too strong a word.

“We’re all worried about violence, drugs, sex--unwanted pregnancy, sexual diseases. . . ,” says the mother of children ages 1, 4, and 7.

With parents like Osborne becoming increasingly vocal about their fears, the once-academic question of how art affects culture has become a bipartisan battlefield. First former Vice President Dan Quayle took on television character Murphy Brown. Then Atty. Gen. Janet Reno threatened government intervention if television didn’t clean up its violent act. Now Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) boosts his presidential bid by accusing entertainment executives of “marketing evil through commerce.”

Yet when the focus shifts from the sharp-edged rhetoric of politicians and the apologetics of industry executives to the realities of daily life, the issues suddenly seem more complex.

As they stand beneath the marquee at South Pasadena’s Rialto Theatre, Osborne, 37, and her husband, Val, 42, see truth in Dole’s comment that “a line has been crossed--not just of taste, but of human dignity and decency.” But like many baby boomers, they find that putting a finger on precisely how and where that line should be drawn is a tricky task.

Osborne, for example, studied theater before becoming a self-described “suburban housewife” and has no interest in regressing to less sophisticated artistic tastes. Her husband, who once performed with punk bands called the Flying Lizards and Lords of the New Church, remains devoted to the belief that even shocking art can be cathartic and uplifting.

“We want our kids to experience a wide range of things,” he says. “But there’s still a little worry--even about things you’ve been through yourself.”

Pamela Osborne nods. “Every parent thinks, ‘I took a few drugs and I didn’t OD,’ or ‘I had promiscuous sex and survived.’ But you worry for the kids. The dangers are more concentrated now,” she says.

So the Osbornes are protective. Yet they have driven all the way from Claremont this evening to see the documentary “Crumb,” a film biography of a man who has arguably done more than any musical group to--in Dole’s words--”mainstream deviancy.”

Illustrator Robert Crumb’s contributions to the culture include such notorious cretins as Fritz the Cat and the underground comic books Zap, Freak and Weirdo. Examining the spectrum of his creativity, the film ranges from the amusing to the deeply disturbing, from nose-picking adolescents to an animated strip in which a man rapes a woman whose head had been shoved into her neck and replaced with a cork.

“I don’t know how,” Pamela Osborne says, “to reconcile this paradox of my own distaste for violence [and degrading sex] with wanting to see this kind of film--an intricate study of what most people would consider perversion.”

Even Crumb’s hand wobbles a bit in drawing the fine lines between decency and decadence. The artist recoils in the film, for instance, at the pervasive and aggressive boom-boom-boom of rap. His eyebrows shoot up when he sees that his young artistic progeny now pen such titles as “Puke and Explode.”

And, Crumb says, he turned off the television while his young daughter was watching Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed but violent film “Goodfellas.”

Children, he explains, need to be shielded from life’s “harsh realities.”

Crumb’s conflict may well be universal.

Newt Gingrich echoes Dole’s criticisms, even as the Georgia congressman and House Speaker’s own novel featuring a “pouting sex kitten” circulates in publishing circles.

Oliver Stone joined the predictable backlash after Dole singled out the filmmaker’s “Natural Born Killers” as an example of entertainment that smothers society’s instinct for outrage. Dole’s attack, Stone said, is “a ‘90s form of McCarthyism.”

But before this latest partisan skirmish, Stone’s loyalties in the culture war seemed to waver.

“The cynicism has gone too far,” Stone said in New Perspectives Quarterly’s spring issue. “We are becoming what the history books tell us late Rome was like: mired in decadent self-absorption and lacking virtue.”

A parent himself, Stone acknowledged television’s pervasive influence. “I notice, with my own two children, that, because of television, my authority is very limited,” he said.

Stone’s main objection, though, is not so much to sex and violence as to the sanitized, mythologized views of American family life that baby boomers absorbed, he says. Indeed, for many parents, sorting negative from positive influences in entertainment is a much more complicated task than producers and polemicists may grasp.

Mischa Conn and her 9-year-old daughter, Kara, emerged from a screening of “A Little Princess” smiling. But even this widely praised family film caused Conn’s taste detectors to click on.

One question Conn always asks, she says, is will her child leave the theater with her self-image intact? “A Little Princess,” which depicts a black servant girl who is befriended by the title character, didn’t quite cross the line of inappropriateness Conn has drawn.

But she was less satisfied with how “Princess” handled the issue of class. The film’s happy ending comes when the title character is returned to her father, who in turn is returned to his lost fortune.

“It wasn’t just love that saved them, it wasn’t just ‘Dad’s back.’ It was ‘Dad’s back and the money’s back too,’ ” Conn says. “The bottom line was money.”

But many of the people who will take children to that movie--and to the many other movies where cash is salvation, riches happiness--will return to lives that aren’t likely to be fixed by a magical shower of wealth.

A social worker, Conn says she knows firsthand that even the most impoverished homes have a television and radio. “Hollywood damn well has to assume some responsibility,” she says.

What’s missing from Hollywood is reality, injects Conn’s friend Betty Bogar, as her 7-year-old son somersaults down the cineplex’s hallway. Bogar mentions the television show “Under One Roof,” starring James Earl Jones.

“There is reality--it says that families are living together to survive,” she says, adding: “They took that” off the air.

Darrell Asberry has similar frustrations.

“People don’t like reality--especially politicians,” he says, stepping out of his Chevy Malibu in the Tower Records parking lot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

Asberry, 27, roared into the lot bumping “gangsta” rapper Mac-10 so loud that patrons cast nervous glances. He blames that reaction on the bad image that people such as Dole give his preferred type of music.

“A lot of it I don’t condone: all the killing stuff, the ‘bitch this and ‘ho that.’ But, he says, “rap is what I grew up on. It changed my life.”

And not in the ways the genre’s critics assume, says Asberry, who is a supervisor at a court reporting service. “Say you’re in a situation and you have a problem, you feel like you’re the only person in the world that’s got this problem--Your rent’s due, your woman’s mad at you, you ain’t got no job. . . . All of the sudden you throw on your favorite tune, and this fool’s talkin’ the same thing. You start feeling, ‘It ain’t that bad, ‘cause he has the same problem I got.’ ”

For boomers who found solace or release in the Temptations or Sex Pistols, such devotion to a musical genre is bound to stir empathy. Which may be why discussions about media influence tend to be less polemical, less polarized than politicians’ speeches.

At UCLA last Tuesday, a long-scheduled symposium sponsored by Century Cable tackled the question of media violence. Titled “Violence in Television--Does Television Kill?” the event opened with a quick-cut video montage of America’s visual diet:

A schoolboy guns down another point-blank; Mighty Morphin Power Rangers karate-chop bad guys into oblivion; video game heroes blast and bash; Uzis rat-a-tat; Dennis the Menace fires a napalm-hot flaming arrow into Mr. Wilson’s forehead, and Elmer Fudd shotguns Bugs Bunny to smithereens.

A second video clip begins with a “60 Minutes” television segment in which Andy Rooney narrates a montage of movie clips: Bridges disintegrate in flames, cars explode, fireballs engulf homes and human skulls go off like big cherry bombs.

In his laconic drone, Rooney concludes: “If kids imitate what they see their heroes doing in the movies, it isn’t hard to understand how Oklahoma City happened.”

Dole, in his speech, said: “There once was a time when parents felt the community of adults was on their side. Now they feel surrounded by forces assaulting their children and their code of values.”

The problem is that few adults, either at the symposium or at the local theater, can agree where the assault is coming from or how best to respond. Which is why the issue promises to keep slopping over partisan boundaries.

Panelist Dick Wolf, for example, bristled at Dole’s speech. A television producer responsible for such shows as “Miami Vice” and “Law and Order,” Wolf said he is “extremely disappointed” that Dole seems to be labeling him a moral degenerate for working in Hollywood.

Yet, he said he is concerned that his 10-year-old daughter seems to be hurtling toward adolescence much faster than he did as a child.

Such worries, he said, are part of being a parent in a society in which stimuli come faster and with a patina of “fake sophistication.”

Yet Wolf is hard-pressed to say where the solution lies.

Grimacing, and adding the caveat that he does not want to be taken for a “reactionary,” he talks about people “taking responsibility” and reluctantly utters the phrase that was considered an epithet in some circles just one political campaign ago:

“I think it comes down to family values.”