Censorship Run Amok in ‘Pictures’

In the spring of 1990, a loose constellation of Cincinnati bluenoses, religious fanatics, gay-bashers, right-wing politicians up for reelection and assorted others among the citizenry began to circle around the director of a local art museum, where the notorious exhibition “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment” was scheduled to be shown in the fall. This was the show whose cancellation a year earlier at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art had exploded into a national firestorm. Thanks to the Cincinnatians’ diligent efforts, their local museum director was, within days of the exhibition’s opening, indicted on charges of criminal obscenity.

The arrest and subsequent trial were a first in the history of American art museums. A local grand jury claimed that seven of the late artist’s photographs were pornographic and that their public display was in violation of Cincinnati’s obscenity laws. Established legal precedent--the so-called Miller test, which in layman’s terms translates into “If it’s art it cannot be obscene, if it’s obscene it cannot be art”--got trampled under the heel.

The most chilling scene in “Dirty Pictures,” the Showtime movie dramatizing the affair that airs tonight at 9, is one in which uniformed policemen arrive at the downtown Contemporary Arts Center, issue a warrant for the arrest of director Dennis Barrie and begin to clear the galleries of curious visitors. Some resist and are summarily hauled away.

“Chilling” is the operative word here. The filmmakers have focused their story not just on a retelling of the familiar circumstances surrounding the outlandish trial, which was chronicled on the front pages of American newspapers from coast to coast a decade ago. More important, they have also made a dark, dispiriting and unfortunately convincing case that a profound chilling effect on American cultural life is an inevitable legacy of the shameful episode.

Which is to say, a chilling effect on American freedom. Barrie was found not guilty by a jury of his peers, but the cruelty, harassment and wreckage of personal lives suffered in the campaign against free speech chart a high cost that not everyone would be willing to pay. The movie asks: Who really won the culture war?

“Dirty Pictures” is at its best in conveying such nuanced questions. Director Frank Pierson, producer Michael Manheim and screenwriter Ilene Chaiken look at the constitutional protection of free speech from every imaginable angle, as if analyzing the brilliant yet elusive facets of a magnificent diamond. By the end, when a reptilian Cincinnati moralist smoothly drawls, “The 1st Amendment is all well and good, but . . .,” you see his coming qualifying claim for the insidiously dangerous foolishness it is.

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This is no small accomplishment for a TV movie. In part the filmmakers manage it by never hiding which side of the argument they’re on--and as artists, they’re right not to. The story of the tumultuous public trial and the hideous personal toll it took on the Barrie family is regularly interrupted with clips of documentary-style interviews, but only one of the 11 commentators (the patrician conservative William F. Buckley Jr.) speaks in favor of censorship as an appropriate means for maintaining civil order. Everyone else speaks against it.

A few of the 1st Amendment defenders are superfluous--glam art dealer Mary Boone, for example, who frankly hasn’t much to say; and Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman, whose recent censorship dust-up with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is further proof of the old dictum, first time tragedy, second time farce. Others, such as Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Manhattan wit Fran Lebowitz, offer devastating observations, while Jesse McBride, who was the subject of one of the seven “dirty” pictures, irrefutably dispenses with his accusers.

However, none makes a mark quite like Salman Rushdie, who is something of an authority on how the chilling effects of censorship might operate at the outer limits of social mayhem. More than one translator and editor of Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” has been stabbed, shot, killed.

“If you can’t defend what is unpalatable to you personally, then you don’t actually believe in free speech,” Rushdie dryly says. “You only believe in the free speech of those who agree with you.”

More than 200 Mapplethorpe photographs are shown during the Showtime movie, including all of the sometimes hair-raising images of sadomasochistic sex that were a focus of the obscenity charge. (If you want a closer look, go straight-away to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, where a re-creation of “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment” is on view through June 10.) Aside from the simple necessity of seeing the pictures to know what the uproar was about, putting them on a cable television show underscores the idiocy of an art museum trial.

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Oddly, the movie is at its weakest in relating the simple narrative of what happened during that trial. “Dirty Pictures” can’t resist a couple of creaky cliches from the dusty Hollywood playbook of courtroom drama--the eloquent testimonial from a key witness that seems to turn the trial around, or the cliffhanger deliberations among ordinary citizens on the jury who are torn between their own personal beliefs and the rule of law.

In fact, Barrie’s acquittal was at least as much the result of sheer ineptitude by the prosecution as it was a triumph of dazzling 1st Amendment argument. And the actual jury deliberated for barely two hours--within slam-dunk range.

Bungling lawyers and quick consensus don’t make for TV drama, though. The show’s most effective dramatic arc follows the emotional dissolution of Barrie’s wife, Dianne, compellingly played by Diana Scarwid. The slow-motion shattering of a confident wife and mother into fractured, jittery paranoia is critical to conveying the terrorizing power of the censorship gambit’s chilling effect. Scarwid makes it memorable.

James Woods, the Emmy-winning actor who plays the beleaguered museum director, is strangely bland. Somehow disconnected from the circus that swirls furiously around him, the sleepwalking performance might stem from a failure to connect with the movie’s potent theme.

In publicizing “Dirty Pictures,” Woods recently told a New York Times reporter, “One of the greatest things about this exhibit, I’m sure, had to be that any reasonable adult with children would walk in there and look at a picture of one man urinating in another man’s mouth and say: ‘You know what? Now I know I don’t want these guys teaching my kids.’ And I mean that. I don’t want these people teaching my children values.”

The homophobia inherent in the comment is, well, chilling.

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* “Dirty Pictures” airs tonight at 9 on Showtime. The network has rated it R (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).