Hollywood Courage

Joseph Epstein on how to get a stand ovation

COURAGE is nine-tenths context. What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.

I had an early insight into this several years ago when my friend Edward Shils gave one of his Jefferson Lectures at the University of Chicago. At the heart of his lecture was a frontal attack on the universities for accepting federal money while naively thinking that no strings--not to mention ropes, thick cables, foolproof stainless steel handcuffs--would come along with it.

After the lecture, I happened to be standing near the podium, when a woman came up to congratulate him on his "intellectual courage" in saying what he did. "Intellectual courage!" Edward exclaimed, genuinely surprised. "What I said in that lecture took no intellectual courage. It takes intellectual courage to speak one's mind in the Soviet Union or in South Africa, where they clap you in prison or kill you for your opinions. But doing so here takes no courage whatsoever--only the absence of intellectual cowardice, which isn't quite the same as intellectual courage." Quite right, just so, and bang-dang-diddly-on.

The context for artistic and intellectual courage in America is often a bit tricky, because, culturally, the United States is really two cultures, and they distinctly aren't the two cultures of C.P. Snow's imagining in the early 1960s, that of literature and that of science. What we have is Culture No. 1, the liberal-left culture of the humanities and social-science divisions of the universities, the worlds of art and literature and entertainment (less clearly that of classical music and science), and much of the Democratic Party; and then Culture No. 2, which constitutes the more amorphous remainder of the country. They are not divided by money -- though no one in Culture No. 1 figures to be very hard-pressed financially -- but by belief. What takes courage to say in Culture No. 2 often passes for the utterly commonplace in Culture No. 1, or visa versa.

WHEN DAN QUAYLE, then-vice president of the United States, made his infamous Murphy Brown speech, in which he said he thought, on balance, having a child out of wedlock was not such a hot idea, he was everywhere excoriated by Culture No. 1, while Culture No. 2, perhaps sensing he was right, was a little nervous about openly coming out on his side: I mean, the guy couldn't spell potato, right? A few years after this incident, now out of office, Quayle, in recounting it to a small group of which I happened to be a member, said that one of the notable curiosities of his Murphy Brown speech was that he heard from a fairly large number of people working in movies and television who told him they thought he was absolutely right, though they hoped he would understand they were talking off the record and he was not to mention their names. Quayle was, he said, astonished at the deep conformity implicit in their fear. "I mean," he said, "they were terrified."

Imagine a Rob Reiner, an Alec Baldwin, a Susan Sarandon saying that having babies out of wedlock may not have been such a good thing for the children, or adding that they certainly wouldn't want their daughters put in so vulnerable a position. I ask you to imagine it because, having tried, I can't.

A few months ago I was on an FM radio show with an arts foundation executive and the composer of the operas Amistad and X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. The composer was openly delighted at what he thought his sly courage in slipping in such radical material about race into the opera repertoire. I was rude enough to suggest that I didn't understand where courage came into it and that it all sounded to me a sure thing, big box office, which in fact it turned out to be. The wound opened, salt shaker raised, I added that I thought what would take courage would be to compose an opera about a married man with young children who is about to begin a love affair with a woman twenty years younger than he, but then at the last moment, before taking the plunge, decides to return to his wife. "Now there," I announced, "is what I would call radical opera."

Whenever Hollywood takes on what it thinks is a radically courageous subject, be sure that it is in reality only an occasion for a warm bath of self-congratulation, usually in already used, morally tepid water. I took a pass on The Cider House Rules, one such movie, because I don't go to movies about abortion, a subject and issue that seems to bring out the sanctimonious virtucrat in everyone. I'm told that the movie makes the claim that abortion is O.K., and maybe better than O.K., a damn fine thing. This is a proposition so utterly accepted by Culture No. 1 that it would require a social Geiger counter so fine not even Hammacher Schlemmer sells it to discover anyone in Hollywood who disagreed with it.

I DID SEE American Beauty, another Hollywood adventure in bogus courageous movie-making, which presented another opportunity for one of those slightly skuzzy baths just referred to. I'm a bit uncertain myself wherein the courage of this movie derives. From showing a chap wanking in the shower--through isenglass, to be sure, and from behind? From portraying two gay men as sweethearts, in every sense of the term? From showing suburban American family life as one inexorable nightmare? From mocking ambition? From suggesting that all violent emotion is really an expression of repressed homosexuality? From suggesting that adolescents are so much wiser than their parents? From all of this and a few further bits of received wisdom that I've probably overlooked.

All this, surely, is the stuff out of which standing ovations on Oscar night are made. Had I been in the Oscar-night audience when American Beauty won all its awards, I would have sat that standing ovation out, muttering to myself that--harummph, harummph--the only brave people in Hollywood are its stuntmen.

Essayist Joseph Epstein, former editor of the American Scholar, teaches literature at Northwestern and is a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard.

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