THE CULTURE WARS : A Huge Mainstream That Feeds on Fringe Thrills

Later this week, movie director Paul Verhoeven, best known for giving us a peek at Sharon Stone’s private parts in “Basic Instinct,” will make history of a sort. His new film “Showgirls,” about competing lap dancers at a Las Vegas strip club, promises to be the most sexually explicit film ever released by a major studio and the first big-budget film in years to receive an NC-17 rating, barring everyone under 17. What Verhoeven evidently hopes to do is take hard-core pornography from the noxious marshes to the mainstream with high production values and the imprimatur of a studio. In the process, however, he is also demonstrating just how wide the mainstream is in America--wide enough to sweep up everything in its current.

Once upon a simpler time, there seemed to be a rigid cultural hierarchy in this country: a small, rarefied stratum of the high arts and avant-garde for the upper classes; a larger, more mundane stratum given to unthreatening popular entertainments for the middle class, and a subterranean stratum of the dangerous, subversive and ostracized for the more adventurous members of the working class. This last was the province, among other things, of crime pamphlets, scandal sheets, novels of perversion and pornography--like “Showgirls.”

Whether they were ever as impregnable as they purported to be, no one much disputes that those old hierarchical boundaries are crumbling. With the exception of child pornography, just about anything goes. But while most responsibility for the demise of the boundaries has been laid to the so-called media elite, the truth may have less to do with a conspiracy to subvert our values than with an inexorable law of culture: The cultural margins of the past invariably become the mainstream of the present.

The margins have always been the id of American culture to mainstream’s superego. They were not only the site of the exciting and the forbidden; they were often intended to antagonize the more refined sensibilities of the elites and the middle class--who defined mainstream.

Thus, the scandal-mongering penny press of the 1830s arose largely to aggravate the wealthy and satisfy the hoi polloi . The concert saloons of the mid-19th Century were invented to provide cheap, bawdy entertainment for the working class that their social betters would have disdained. Movies found their first audiences in urban-immigrant pockets where film could provide a democratic alternative to higher arts. And rock ‘n’ roll, erupting out of black rhythm and blues and appealing primarily to blacks and teen-agers, was created partly as a threat to more genteel Americans and their more subdued music.

Each of these things was pointedly out of the mainstream, out of what was socially and morally acceptable to the middle class. Nonetheless, each, sooner or later, was granted admission, though largely because each reconstituted itself until it no longer seemed to threaten middle-class values. The penny press became increasingly staid, especially after editor Horace Greeley’s Tribune entered the competition. The concert saloon was co-opted by vaudeville, which was far more sedate and cosmopolitan. Movies moved from storefront nickelodeons to lavish palaces. And Elvis Presley, rock’s first king, played Las Vegas.

What happened to tame these savage beasts? One answer is that the middle class came to realize how much fun it was missing if it couldn’t find a way to avoid the stigma of watching a movie or listening to rock ‘n’ roll. At the same time, the entrepreneurs of these rebel forms realized how much more money they could make, and how much more status they could achieve, if they could effect some kind of rapprochement with the offended middle class.

So the two struck a bargain. The entrepreneurs agreed to modify slightly the more repugnant elements of their wares, while the middle class agreed to lower its resistance slightly. The result was a safer, mainstream form of the old subterranean culture--the thrills without the savagery, and so without the guilt.

But if this process of domestication has existed for more than 150 years, it has certainly accelerated in the last 25. Where once it took several decades for the mainstream to subsume the margins, now the margins get subsumed in a matter of years, sometimes months. Our culture is in warp speed. We live on novelty, with new forms, new subversions generated daily. So the new frontiers of the culture keep getting pushed farther and farther as the old frontiers get washed into the mainstream. Now, frontiers move so quickly we don’t even know what the cutting edge is anymore. Even Madonna is part of the mainstream.

More significantly, the degree of domestication has changed. The penny press, the movies and rock ‘n’ roll had to undergo a relatively severe denaturing before the middle class could feel secure in enjoying them and thus admitting them into mainstream culture. Today, the margins of culture enter the mainstream nearly intact and without ever really having been marginalized to begin with.

Grunge rocker Kurt Cobain’s suicide got him the cover of a mainstream magazine like People, and one doubts readers were asking, “Who’s Cobain?” (At any rate, Nirvana didn’t have to play Vegas to reach the center.) Similarly, Madonna’s “Sex” was a best-seller. And mainstream TV exploitalk programs such as “Jenny Jones” and “Ricki Lake” routinely trade in their guests’ most intimate secrets in a manner that just a few years ago would have been restricted to Playboy’s “Adviser.”

The main reason everything can go directly to the mainstream without undergoing much in the way of domestication is that middle-class gatekeepers are no longer on the watch. The old cultural barriers were maintained by class distinctions and by a strong sense of moral disapprobation that made one feel sullied if one patronized anything from the subterranean. Today, no one recognizes class distinctions and, despite the best efforts of the Christian Coalition, morality has gradually been disengaged from aesthetics. It is now possible to go to church every Sunday and still enjoy reading a risque novel or listening to Madonna. Millions of Americans probably do.

The force of mass culture, and even some forces in high culture, worked to separate moral judgments from aesthetic ones, one’s own sense of rectitude from one’s sense of recreational pleasure. There was both a great deal of money to be made and fun to be had by doing so.

But it may also be that the conservatives’ drumhead moralizing over our cultural margins has contributed to the separation and the consequent expansion of the mainstream. After years of hearing movies would destroy us, no one but the most devout pays much attention anymore. “Showgirls” may be a new benchmark in mainstream explicitness, but one suspects it won’t kill us, either.

The result is that without any authoritative monitors to decry the alleged “danger” of the cultural margins, we have produced one single, vast, voracious culture: an all-engulfing mainstream. Nothing can resist it and it resists nothing. It just keeps rolling along.*