Filth matters: the moral squalor of Hollywood.

TWO things have ruthlessly conspired to prevent me from seeing as much cinema as I would like: parenthood and book-writing, which itself is a bit like giving birth to a child with painfully pointy edges and even less initiative or gratitude than a real kid. I have neither the time nor the energy to catch the buzz-generating highbrow films, at least not until after they wend their way through Hollywood's alimentary system and appear on cable or pay-per-view, already digested by every critic and blogger. And even if I disregard the spoilers and dismiss the lack of immediacy, it's difficult to watch There Will Be Blood when a five-year-old girl with the will of a Teamster and the eyes of Bambi insists: "There will be SpongeBob!"

Apart from having spent the last five years working on a fairly heady intellectual history, I usually need the eyepropping struts from A Clockwork Orange to endure anything less glandular than Roadhouse. If PBS's Miss Marple isn't standing in a jungle, cocking an M-16, and vowing "This time, it's personal!" she's not going to hold my attention for long.

Still, as John Dean's editors have said for years, people will always make room for mindless dreck. And so did I. Over the last few years, I've stayed abreast of my favorite shows (Deadwood, The Wire , The Sopranos, House, etc.), but I've also done a walkabout (if by walkabout you mean bunkering down into the couch) through the lands of toddler TV and teeny-bopper cinema. And I've made a perhaps unsurprising discovery: There's an enormous amount of left-wing crap out there.

And I'm not talking about the highbrow stuff that gets the attention of critics and the praise of cognoscenti. I'm talking about the stuff that is below the standards of the public intellectual, not worth the time of the Very Serious People who use phrases like mise en scene unironically and watch films the way Roman priests read goat spleens--but right up my alley!

And let's not delude ourselves: Crap matters. This is a more controversial point than you might think. Sure, we all know crap sells. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry grossed $120 million in 2007. La Vie en Rose: $10 million. But serious critics, on the right and the left, tend to ignore the middlebrow-and-lower fare as if it didn't matter. That's surely not the case. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, for all its childish humor and crude stereotyping, probably mainstreamed the topic of gay marriage more than any dozen serious art-house flicks on the same subject.

What's amusing--or dismaying--is how indistinguishable the highbrow messages are from the lowbrow ones. In the meaty intellectual movies, we get highly polished existentialism, radical autonomy, contempt for tradition and authority, and, most of all, the elevation of youthful passion over reason.

"I feel like I've been in a coma for the past 20 years. And I'm just now waking up," declares Kevin Spacey as American Beauty's Lester Burnham, who commences a "self-improvement" regimen that includes all of the staples: sexual obsessions, pot smoking, flipping off The Man.

"Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go f--himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost $60,000. Pass the asparagus," Lester tells his daughter at the dinner table.

Countless respectable films simply recycle the same mulch of Marxist banalities, Rousseauian solecisms, and threadbare insights from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It can be found in everything from Dead Poets Society to Brokeback Mountain. But it keeps trickling down, below the horizon, past the point where serious critics pay serious attention.

At the end of Legally Blonde, for example, Reese Witherspoon's Elle Woods gives her big, rousing graduation speech. She begins, "On our very first day at Harvard, a very wise professor quoted Aristotle: 'The law is reason free from passion.' Well, no offense to Aristotle, but in my three years at Harvard I have come to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study and practice of law--and of life."

Take that, Aristotle!

The protagonist of The Girl Next Door is a nerdy high-schooler who's always been a decent, diligent kid. He's up for a scholarship for the student who best exemplifies "moral fiber" but, just days before he's to give a big speech to clinch the award, a smoking-hot porn star moves in next door. Hijinx, porn jokes, rutting, felonies, and the like ensue. Then when it comes time for his speech, the druggedup--and therefore liberated--young man decides to scrap his prepared remarks, delivering instead this heroic peroration:

   Moral fiber. So what is moral fiber? I
   mean, it's funny. I used to think it was
   always telling the truth, doing good deeds
   ... you know, basically being a f--ing
   Boy Scout. [The audience gasps.] But
   lately I've been seeing it differently. Now
   I think that moral fiber is about finding
   that one thing you really care about. That
   one special thing that means more to you
   than anything else in the world. [That one
   special thing in this case being a porn
   star.]

   And when you find her, you fight for
   her. You risk it all. You put her in front of
   everything ... your future, your life ...
   all of it. And maybe the stuff you do to
   help her isn't so clean. You know what? It
   doesn't matter. Because, in your heart,
   you know that the juice is worth the
   squeeze.

   That's what moral fiber's all about.

Pope Benedict couldn't have said it better.

It would be a stretch to argue that the filmmakers in question want these movies to be taken entirely seriously, but there is a real desire for their messages to be taken seriously. These little speeches are supposed to justify and legitimize the squalor.

Preschool programming has a moral squalor all its own. Yes, there's a lot of kiddie agitprop about tolerance, niceness, and eating healthy--Cookie Monster's diet includes a lot of roughage now--and this is mostly harmless, or even helpful. What's not harmless is the defective moral compass that is embedded deep in the heart of every five-year-old: self-esteem. Ever since the days of Captain Kangaroo, kids have been taught that "the most important person in the whole wide world is you ... and you hardly even know you." The result has been a confirmed explosion in unwarranted self-esteem among young people. I am all for teaching self-confidence and creativity, even bolstering self-esteem, but parents don't deserve to be parents if they think "go with your gut instincts" is a remotely helpful maxim for little kids to live by. When kids shove car keys into electrical sockets, they're going with their guts.

Hollywood, meanwhile, has been cranking out ideologically loaded kids' flicks for a long time now. Globalwarming themes are standard fare in everything from Ice Age to Happy Feet. But even more traditional leftwingery is not hard to find. They should have given out promotional red diapers for A Bug's Life and Antz, two animated films lifted in big chunks from Das Kapital. Even Time film critic Richard Schickel warned, "Kids may be puzzled by rebellious worker ants chanting Marxist slogans, but their parental guides may welcome the relief from the prevailing blandness of family films."

The very best mass-market movies run against the propagandistic tide. In The Incredibles (a brilliantly anti-PC animated movie) the mother tells her son, Dash, that "everyone's special"--and Dash mutters in response, "Which is another way of saying no one is." Films like Juno, and even Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, poke holes in the pieties that are spoon-fed to toddlers and fire-hosed at teens.

Why take this stuff seriously? Because people watch. Kids raised on Britney Spears epigrams such as "Can you handle my truth?" are probably going to find a lot of self-confirmation in the highly cultivated postmodern stupidity of America's campuses. The recent incident in which a Yale student claimed to have impregnated herself repeatedly and aborted the pregnancies is hardly surprising in a world where young people are taught that they are the measure of their own morality and that truth is a fashion statement. My NR colleague John Derbyshire may overstate things when he says that "popular culture is filth." But the truth--whether you can handle it or not--is that filth matters.