H aving seen the trailers, one walks into Milos Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt expecting a fearless assault on one of liberty's most difficult issues: whether First Amendment protections should extend to cover the sleaziest pornography. The movie follows the life story of Larry Flynt, founder and publisher of Hustler magazine, as he rises up from poverty by playing to the nation's baser desires--only to face repeated challenges from some who would rather keep those desires at bay. Forman has referred to the film as his "love letter to the Supreme Court," and to hear the director and his studio tell it, Flynt is the great American epic, an homage to a freedom great enough to allow even crotch shots.
The public response has been tremendous. The film was critically acclaimed on release, and it picked up two Golden Globes. On the flip side, a critical column by Gloria Steinem in The New York Times has inspired boycotts, theater pickets, and a paid advertisement in Daily Variety asking the Academy not to nominate Flynt for any Oscars. Yet, this negativity has not deterred the national media from giving the film heaps of free publicity: newsmagazines, papers, talk shows, and even the IOP have become a forum for discussion of the movie's implications.
The only point of agreement among these diverse media members is that Flynt does indeed address pornography's problematic relation to the First Amendment. Given this billing, it strikes a viewer as a little strange that the climactic courtroom scene of Flynt actually has nothing to do with pornography. Although the plaintiff in the case before the Supreme Court is self-appointed leader of the Moral Majority Jerry Falwell, his complaint is not that Flynt's publication has been obscene. Rather, Falwell seeks damages for "emotional distress" caused by a satirical Hustler ad in which he admits to committing incest with his mama. The unanimity of the high court's decision for Flynt hints that, on a Constitutional level, the case is far from controversial, and one is left with a feeling that Flynt has not lived up to its billing.
Despite its straightforward outcome, the question put before the court is an intriguing one: does the desire to express an (albeit ill-defined) point of political criticism justify an obviously fabricated representation of a public figure? One might ask the same question about Flynt itself. For if any of the testimonials (including those of some of his closer friends) published in the wake of Flynt 's release are to be believed, the film's portrayal of the porn icon is about as much of a joke as his Falwell ad. Factual omissions abound: an early Flynt Supreme Court appearance during which he shouted obscenities and was forcibly removed from the court is left out, as are the three wives and five children Flynt had before the love affair with stripper Althea Leasure that occupies much of the film.
Yet Flynt's brand of factual reconstruction is not new to Hollywood; the media has usually found better things to do than go around fact-checking screenplays. Though completely unreliable historically, Forman's Oscar-winner Amadeus inspired no picket lines or negative ads. Oliver Stone, Flynt 's producer, has made a wildly successful career out of molding the lives of historical figures to fit his political views. Forman advertises Flynt not as a biography but as a drama, and he hardly places himself outside the mainstream when he expresses his view that, "When you make a history lesson, you have to be faithful to the facts. But when you make a drama, all you have to do is be faithful to the spirit of the facts."
What is more problematic than Flynt 's portrayal of the facts is the portrayal of its central character and his magazine. Harrelson's Flynt is by no means an attractive character and his story is by no means pretty; one certainly doesn't exit the theater bemoaning the ill fortune of not having been born Larry Flynt. But he and his magazine do come out much more appealingly in the film than they are in real life. Flynt's notorious crassness comes off as almost cute when done by Harrelson, while darker sides of his character such as allegations that he sexually abused two of his daughters are ignored by the film entirely. The pornographer looks even better when contrasted with his opposition: Falwell is the usual overdone font of Bible Belt prudishness, while his ally Charles Keating loses all credibility with the revelation of his responsibility for the Savings and Loan debacle.
Further, as Steinem's editorial points out, Flynt suppresses Hustler 's more violent and degrading pictorials, such as a story concerning "a naked woman in handcuffs who is shaved, raped and apparently killed by guards in a concentration camp-like setting." Also overlooked are the racist and anti-Semitic overtones of Flynt's publication, such as a cartoon showing a black man reaching for a watermelon on a giant mousetrap. The real-life Flynt's response that Steinem is "an ancient, worn-out old relic whose only claim to fame is urging some ugly women to march" only reinforces the image of a man undeserving of what good press he gets.
Still, there must to be something more to the Flynt controversy than a desire for judiciously applied character assassination. The real trouble is that, in his choice of subjects for hero-making, Forman has touched a nerve in the American polity. The permissibility of pornography is something about which many Americans feel very deeply and yet the nation as a whole remains ambivalent. Members of both the right and left have fought long and hard on each side of the issue without the nation achieving any long-term resolution.
On the anti-pornography side, right-wing traditionalists and religious advocates urge the application of community standards to issues of obscenity. Unfortunately for them, this idea has failed to pass Constitutional muster. But a newer left-wing claim has recently made headway in the national imagination even if not yet in the courts. Backed by feminists such as Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Steinem, this position holds that pornography not only degrades women and thus holds them back from true gender equality; it also inspires sexual violence against women in the men who see it. On this view, pornography becomes an inexcusable invitation to do the inexcusable. Steinem notes in her Times piece that a Hustler feature depicting a fictional gang-rape of a woman on a pool table was followed closely by just such a gang-rape in the New Bedford, Massachusetts of real life. (Hustler 's response? To publish a postcard of yet another naked woman on a pool table with the caption "Greetings from New Bedford, Mass. The Portuguese Gang-Rape Capital of America.")
Opposing the feminists stand the stricter guardians of our First Amendment rights. Joining right-wing libertarians in this group are liberals who trace their heritage back to the free speech movements in the sixties and thus instinctively dread any restrictions whatsoever on free expression. There is good reason to cultivate this instinct: the First Amendment has had a historical tendency to be trodden upon when not guarded closely. Forman points out that the censorship of both the Nazis and Soviet communists began with the elimination of what they considered smut.
The American populace, bombarded from both sides by such impassioned and compelling arguments, remains deeply ambivalent towards pornography's First Amendment status. The cast of Flynt make a good case in point. Courtney Love, who plays Leasure, went so far as to admit at a post-Globe party "I'm a little torn, because I'm a feminist, so I would agree with Steinem on a lot of levels" before being cut off by her publicist. Harrelson, though he claims to be a Steinem fan, is a notorious First-Amendment fanatic--he was recently arrested in San Francisco for joining a group of environmental activists to climb the Golden Gate Bridge and drop a banner protesting deforestation. Ironically it is also in San Francisco, symbolic home to free-speechers everywhere, that picketers have lined up in the greatest numbers to protest Flynt screenings.
It is this deep-seated ambivalence that has motivated all the fuss over Flynt . The movie's creators haven't just done something for the First Amendment; they've done something with the First Amendment by using their freedom of expression to spur public discussion of an important and meaningful question. Some would say that, for this service, those creators (at least as much as anyone else in Hollywood) deserve whatever media attention, box office revenue, and award nominations they get.
There ought, however, to be a higher standard. A filmmaker or any trader in ideas should not be handed credit for simply referring to an important dialogue; rather, she ought to have to earn our respect by contributing to it. And it is in contributing to the ongoing dialogue about pornography and the First Amendment that Flynt fails most miserably. To begin with, the forceful feminist criticisms of pornography never get even the cameo afforded the real-life Flynt. Harrelson's main antagonists in the film are the aforementioned Falwell and Keating and their attendant salvo of hopelessly caricatured Midwestern lawyers. The only manifestation of the "people" referred to in the title is an anonymous stalker who paralyzes Flynt in an assassination attempt. In short, there is hardly any treatment, much less a fair one, of the opposition to Flynt's side of the issue.
Even more embarrassing, though, is the movie's inability to present a convincing case for Flynt's side. Flynt is indicted three times in the film; of those three, two have nothing to do with pornography. One, as already noted, involves the right to satirize a public figure, while the other involves Flynt's refusal to reveal his source of a set of shady videotapes implicating the FBI in drug trafficking. Only the first of the indictments is on an indecency charge leveled at Hustler magazine. Flynt is convicted in his first trial on this charge, then released after a successful appeal. Though the audience never gets to see any of the appeal, the implication in the film is that Flynt's appeal is successful on account of the thick-headed ineptitude of the judge in the earlier trial (incidentally, the role is played by the real-life Flynt) and the fact that Hustler 's treatment of women is no more lewd than that of many competing porno mags. In none of these trials is a defense of the whole pornography industry attempted; rather, Flynt gets off because it would be unfair for one purveyor of pornography to be convicted in light of the "social standards" set by the others.
Outside of the courtroom, there are two occasions on which Flynt offers an argument for the permissibility of pornography. At one point, Flynt stands in front of a movie screen alternating images of scantily-clad women and of the horrors of war. Posed before the crowd which he has paid to have assembled, Flynt protests his image as a man of violence. Pointing to the screen, he asks the crowd which is more obscene: sex or war.
As an argument in Flynt's defense, such demagoguery hardly stands up to a moment's reflection. The pictures Flynt displays of nudes calmly reclining are a far cry from his magazine's trade in gang rapes and women in meat-grinders. Such violence certainly ranks up there with the obscenity of war. Further, while pictures of war tend to discourage people from engaging in it, pictures of sex of any kind have, if anything, the opposite effect.
The second occasion results from a point made in the climactic court scene. In his impassioned speech before the Supreme Court, Flynt's lawyer argues that the Falwell satire is one of a long line of political satires in our nation's tradition, including such recent American staples as Doonsebury . The only difference, the young Harvard Law grad continues, is one of taste, and as "Justice Scalia himself" has pointed out in an earlier decision, one cannot legislate on the basis of taste. Flynt's earlier assertion "All I'm guilty of is bad taste" now becomes an argument by extension: we are meant to extend Scalia's reasoning to apply to the broader case of pornography. The only difference between Doonesbury , Flynt's Falwell satire, and the raunchiest pornography ever produced is a matter of degree, a question of taste.
Again, this is patently absurd. There are fundamental differences between a Sunday strip of Doonesbury and a layout of a woman on a pool table being raped. Besides the considerable disparity in taste, there is the fact that the former adds to our public life by serving up pointed social critiques, while the latter only detracts from it by conveying threats and ill intentions. While there may still be a legitimate First-Amendment case for protecting pornography, neither Harrelson's Flynt nor Forman's film ever makes it.
It turns out, then, that the smoke of media controversy around Flynt does not conceal a fire. Having provoked an ambivalent public and then basked in its attentions, the movie carefully skirts around the issue that earned those attentions. Steinem and its critics have given Forman's work more credit than it deserves. As a movie, Flynt is entertaining, but as a tribute to the tradition of robust debate embodied by the First Amendment, it comes up empty.