Paul Schrader's new film Auto Focus tells the story of Bob Crane, the 1960s TV actor whose star dimmed rapidly as he descended into a netherworld of indiscriminate sex and homemade pornography. Crane's is a fascinating tale, that of a seemingly average middle American who traded his family sedan and suburban comforts, his starring role on Hogan's Heroes, for a life that ended with his murder in a motel room in 1978.
For Schrader, though, Crane is a means to an end; his life story enables the director to make a series of points about male sexuality and, more broadly, American morality.
To oversimplify, Auto Focus is about a man who is killed because he has too much sex and leads an altogether unconventional life. This much is made clear by the film's final image - a wall splattered with Crane's blood. As medics attend to the body, Crane (as played by Greg Kinnear) can be heard in a voiceover justifying his debauchery with the axiomatic declaration, "Men need to have fun." As a viewer, you're left thinking: This is what "fun" gets you?
At the movies and in popular music, in bookstores and in magazines, these are strange days indeed. As Americans are asked to be better citizens to help the Pentagon get ready for war, a host of filmmakers, writers, editors and artists have seen to it that a renewed sense of morality - albeit one that is used to turn a profit - plays a role in the arts and the culture at large.
This is not an entirely new phenomenon. America is a nation founded in part on a Puritan spirit; look hard enough, and evidence of this can be found in any segment of the culture. But it's been some time since the broader culture has been permeated with such fervent and far-reaching moralism.
"The need to seem morally right has become something of a national obsession in the last year or so," says Curtis White, the author of several books and editor of Context, a quarterly arts and culture journal.
This, as White and others point out, is most obvious in the nation's "war on terrorism." As many of our leaders seem to see it, it is Us (the good) vs. Them (the evil) - no gray area, no nuance, no time for measured debate.
In this way, we're as much a bunch of hand-wringing moralists as ever, says Richard Slotkin, a Wesleyan University cultural historian and author. "George Bush's rap against the Axis of Evil is not a big advance over [17th century minister] Cotton Mather's fulminations against the French and Indians, who, he said, were in league with Satan and waging an 'invisible' attack on America - i.e. sponsoring witchcraft and other abominations."
Evolving morals
It's fascinating to view contemporary movies, magazines and books, even advertising through this new moral prism.
Take the new ad campaign for Jockey underwear which, as an effort to sell boxer shorts and T-shirts, one would expect to be devoid of subtext. That's not the case, though.
The ads, which have been appearing in major national magazines, show a very young - and very married - couple. Readers know that these two models are "married" because their wedding rings are prominently displayed in the ads. In one image, the backlit woman's left hand is haloed in light, the diamond of her engagement ring glistening for the camera.
Since the Sexual Revolution of the '60s, generations of kids of have been weaned on premarital sex, but the implication of this ad is clear: Life is good if you're young and attractive, but it's even better if you're happily married.
Millions of American young people seem to agree. According to new census figures, the number of teens who married during the 1990s increased by 50 percent over the previous decade. Many of those unions will end in divorce, but the moral idealism that informs a decision to marry so young is clearly more than a passing notion.
One of those young divorces - Eminem - had the top-grossing film for much of November. 8 Mile is, more or less, a screen biography of the hip-hop artist, but as directed by Curtis Hanson, it's a whitewash of any moral ambiguity in Eminem's past. Playing his doppelganger, Jimmy Smith, the rapper is recast as a champion of women and gay people. It's as if his first three albums - records filled with threats leveled at all manner of perceived foes (homosexuals, his mother, his now ex-wife, etc.) - never existed.
Clearly, it is easier for Hanson to create a screen hero in this fashion, and, as he has said all along, his film is fiction, not fact. But aren't his real and invented sociopathic tendencies what made Eminem interesting in the first place? Wasn't it at once creepy and fascinating to hear a handsome and marketable young man tell a nation of record buyers that he intended to murder his own mother?
John Seabrook, the author of Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture, says many of the music industry executives he's been interviewing for a New Yorker article about online record piracy long for a return to music with cultural (read: moral) imperatives.
Why? Well, many of these industry leaders came of age in the 1960s, so they're hard-wired for idealism. But there's also a belief that records with cultural meaning and real ideas sell better over a longer period of time than pop music with ephemeral themes.
And doesn't that make perfect sense? After all, what's more American than moralism for commercialism's sake?
Kevin Canfield is a reporter for The Hartford Courant, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.