It's time to take sides.

In his celebrated essay, "Defining Deviancy Down" (American Scholar, Winter, 1993), Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm against passivity in the face of barbarization. He particularly deplored the nonchalance of many Americans toward violence in our culture. Moynihan quotes a New York trial judge, Edwin Torres:

This numbness, this near narcoleptic state can diminish the human condition to the level of combat infantrymen, who, in protracted campaigns, can eat their battlefield rations seated on the bodies of the fallen....a society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction.

These words came forcefully to mind as I read Commonweal's reviews of two arrestingly vicious movies: the infamous Natural Born Killers (October 7,1994) and Pulp Fiction (November 18,1994). Reviewer Richard Alleva can readily be pictured seated astride the smoking corpses in these films, in the posture described in Moynihan's essay, imperturbably assessing the aesthetics of the slaughter.

We are in desperate times when Natural Born Killers evokes more outrage in the Outland comic strip than it does in America's most prominent intellectual Catholic journal. A similar travesty occurred a year before, when Commonweal's Frank McConnell gushed like a supermarket tabloid over the mayhem and obscenity of TV's "NYPD Blue" (October 8, 1993). The truth is that Commonweal exemplifies the thrust of Moynihan's essay. It seems to have lost all sense of outrage over any sort of turpitude in the world of the arts.

If ever a movie cried out to be critiqued in moral instead of aesthetic terms, it was Natural Born Killers. This film romanticizes mass murder. It shows two young nihilists diabolically slaughtering innocent people for fun. Then it uses all sorts of clever ploys to induce the audience to empathize with these predatory killers.

Director Oliver Stone stated candidly that Killers was meant to convey "the thrill of it, the joy ride from [the killers'] point of view." He paced the action and the dialogue at a frantic, maniacal pace, allowing viewers no time to reflect. His script gave the killers excuses (child abuse), a twisted emotional depth, and a certain amount of high-sounding discourse. Meanwhile, the victims were dehumanized, and policemen were depicted as brutal hypocritical goons. When the killers were captured, Stone had his police beat and stomp one captive in an aping of the capture of Rodney King. No effort was spared to make the moral anesthesia complete.

Even more outrageous was the way in which Stone's film was aggressively marketed to disaffected youth. Lurid posters of the murderers were plastered up in record stores. Among other atrocities, Killers shows the teen-age heroine's mother being bound, gagged, and burned alive, and her father being ferociously bludgeoned with a tire iron and drowned.

Alleva reviews this barbaric film in an absolutely clinical manner, without any moral comment whatever. "The victims are photographed in close-up at the moment of death," he observes, "and are made to look stupid, craven, repellent, and bereft of dignity." The "mystical murderer" [sic] delivers a mock-profound speech in which he argues that all people deserve to die." Alleva matter-of-factly concludes: "the net effect of Killers is to make us feel that all humanity should be slaughtered for cravenness, vulgarity, and physical unattractiveness."

It is hard to conceive of an artistic project more utterly reprehensible. To romanticize mass murder, to cynically tempt young people to empathize with psychopathic killers, to "make us feel that all humanity should be slaughtered," is vicious conduct. An observer who can recognize all these elements, yet form no moral judgment about the film, has lost the capacity for outrage.

Is this what has happened to Alleva? He critiques this hateful film exclusively from an aesthetic standpoint: he faults it for a lack of style. "Trouble is, Stone hasn't achieved any such [surreal] style. Garishness, certainly, and plenty of high-tech display, but not style .... Stone's dramatic strategies often turn out to be incoherent .... Almost everybody is wildly overdirected." Et cetera.

Alleva's tone would be disturbing in any public commentary. But to find such a tone in Commonweal at a time when every Christian ought to be denouncing violence in our culture is incongruous in the extreme.

This incongruity becomes even more acute in Alleva's review of the ultraviolent Pulp Fiction. Here there is no equivocation. Alleva heaps unqualified praise on Quentin Tarantino for cleverness and polish as a director: "The script is put together with a jeweler's precision .... The cinematic flourishes, the pop references, the movie-movie in-jokes, the glamour of the performers, the self-conscious hipness of the dialogue--all this cushions the violence, makes it bearable, and, yes, even glamorizes it."

Once again, the review is all about style, without the least tincture of moral critique. And Pulp Fiction cries out for moral denunciation, if ever a movie did. Tarantino notoriously traffics not just in violence but in sadism and preternatural cruelty. Pulp Fiction panders to the public with outrageous sadistic displays completely superfluous to its plot. Alleva blandly discusses this sadism as if it were just an ordinary element of style. Pulp Fiction, he notes, is packed with "a Tarantino specialty,"--"heavy-duty, sadistically gloating speeches made by hitmen to their victims just before the bullet to the brain is dispatched."

Alleva does not even mention Pulp Fiction's most outrageously vicious scene. Two homosexual sadists bind and gag two captives in a cellar. One captive is tortured and raped, while the other is left with a mute dehumanized slave (a sort of Jeffrey Dahmer zombie) in a suit and mask of black leather. A rescue takes place, during which one rapist is disemboweled with a samurai sword and the other is shotgunned in the genitals. As the fallen rapist screams, the victim gloats ferociously and tells him that he is going to torture him slowly to death "with a blowtorch and a pliers."

This is diabolical imagery. That it should pass undenounced in a review in a Catholic intellectual journal shows that we live in desperate times. Our culture is radically debased, and our intellectuals (conspicuously, Catholic intellectuals) seem oblivious to the problem. Rape, torture, unspeakable cruelty, murder for hire, murder for fun, all are chattered about with bland sophistication. If evil is "glamorized" successfully, we applaud, whereas if evil is merely made "garish" we disdain it.

The moral abdication of arts critics has been denounced by Michael Medved in his recent philippic on popular culture, Hollywood versus America (HarperCollins, 1992). Medved (a critic for the Public Broadcasting System) broke ranks with the critical establishment for its touting of a spate of sadistic movies in the early 1990s.

This nihilist boosterism calls to mind Hannah Arendt's account of the renegade elites of the Weimar Republic. Arendt describes a tacit alliance of avant-garde intellectuals with Hitler's lawless thugs, drawn together by contempt for bourgeois culture and determination to wreck it. The elite read the Marquis de Sade and applauded savage works of art, and many were gleeful when real savages erupted out of the earth:

The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob

rested largely on this genuine delight with which the

former watched the latter destroy respectability.... [I]t

seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of

human values, and general amorality, because this at

least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing

society seemed to rest .... [T]he only political result of

Brecht's "revolution" was to encourage everyone to discard

the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept

openly the standards of the mob.

The same disastrous patterns are visible in American culture today. The "standards of the mob" discussed by Arendt-Linabashed predation, ruthless cruelty--are flaunted and glamorized in the arts. Meanwhile, humbler folk confront increasingly uninhibited violence on the streets and in the schools.

Doesn't Commonweal facilitate such violence when it fails to speak out against nihilistic art? This failure is particularly striking in view of Commonweal's tone on other social and cultural issues. Commonweal offers a forceful Christian moral witness on issues of politics, economics, the rights of the disadvantaged, and international justice. But it treats the arts from an absolutely secular and (generally speaking) completely amoral perspective. Commonweal's reviews are erudite, witty, clever, diverting--but for the most part they are sophisticated persiflage of the sort one finds in magazines like Harper's and the New Yorker. They treat the arts as a sort of intellectual parlor game, without any social or moral ramifications or points of reference in the gospel.

As John Paul II has warned repeatedly, America is in the grip of a burgeoning "culture of death," and every Christian has a moral obligation to speak out against it. Commonweal should be up on the line beside Michael Medved castigating nihilistic art. If lines in the sand are not drawn against sadism, no lines will ever be drawn. If Christian intellectuals cannot muster outrage over brazen displays of cruelty in the arts, then the culture of death will devour us all.

Richard Alleva

I asked the editors to print the excerpts from my reviews side by side with relevant quotes from Mr. Hagen's article [see page 22] for two reasons. First I wanted to set the record straight for those Commonweal readers who aren't familiar with my columns. Second, our readers have a right to know exactly whom they're reading.

Mr. Hagen broaches issues that throb better heads than his or mine. Nowadays, many of Hollywood filmmakers are perpetuating infernos on screen that certainly aren't underpinned by any Dantean theology. Movies are now filled with violence cut loose from any moral context, sex unmoored in love or even passion, obsessions with bodily functions that express an adolescent boy's dismay with his own body. The results of this rage for sensation litter our movie screens. On behalf of my readers, I've walked through some of this debris but I haven't walked around it. If I walked around it by pronouncing simple-minded anathemas unsupported by analysis, if I didn't attempt to see into the heart of artistic folly, then neither I nor my readers would discover anything about those possibilities of art that artistic folly always sabotages.

I think my negative reviews pretty devastating but it is true that I don't employ much invective in them. There are two reasons for this. First, I think that most readers of Commonweal, being Christian, sane, and intelligent, don't have to be informed by me that sadism and smirky depictions of sex and bodily functions are deplorable. That is why I did not write, "The victims are photographed in close-up at the moment of death and are made to look stupid, craven, repellent, and bereft of dignity. And that's a very bad thing to do!" The reason I wrote the first sentence is that I felt the second and count on my readers to feel the same way without any prompting from me.

Second, invective is too often a substitute for analysis. When a movie doesn't work, I want to find out why it doesn't work, and I take the reader along on my investigation. Sometimes, the flaw at the heart of a bad movie is a moral flaw, and so my inquiry becomes, however superficially, a moral inquiry. Thus, I found Cape Fear's failure rooted in Scorsese's obsession with obsessives; The Piano I found singularly lacking in curiosity about human motive, and--though Mr. Hagen would disagree--my revulsion from Natural Born Killers was prompted by its need "to make us feel that all humanity should be slaughtered for cravenness, vulgarity, and physical unattractiveness." Occasionally, such terrible need results in a major work like Gulliver's Travels. But the results of such need in Natural Born Killers is mere hideousness. On the cover of the October 7,1994, issue, the editors labeled my review "an autopsy." That was correct, for I regarded the film as aesthetically and morally dead.

There. I've just used the A word. Aesthetically. Oh, decadent sign of our decadent times! Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino burn America down while Alleva fiddles away at aesthetics!

Question: how can you get at the moral sickness or health of a movie without examining its art or lack of art? That would be like a doctor trying to determine a patient's vitality without examining his or her body. Sooner or later, a movie's or novel's moral delinquency betrays itself through aesthetic delinquency. Plot illogic may signal unconcern with human motive. Mindlessly obscene dialogue betrays indifference to the substance of human speech, a moral as well as an aesthetic failing. Mindless editing choices or camera set-ups may reveal a basic lack of interest in the humanity of the situation posited by the script. Someone (maybe Truffaut?) once said that a well-timed closeup was a moral choice. That's true. Planning the sequence of events in a story can also show moral choice. Consider:

Tarantino begins Pulp Fiction by showing Samuel L. Jackson savagely killing and ends the movie by showing Jackson scrupulously avoiding violence at considerable risk to his own life. Furthermore, the midsection of the story climaxes with a scene in which Bruce Willis rescues his worst enemy even though it's in his own best interest to let that enemy suffer a terrible demise. Clearly, the writer-director is trying to show us something and, lest we miss it, he's even expressed it in a line spoken by a minor character: "When you're together with someone in a pit of hell, you owe something to that person." Pulp Fiction is an adolescent, ultraviolent, foulmouthed romanticization of the gangster milieu. But it is also exhilarating, mind-teasing, breathtakingly well-made--and fundamentally moral. But Mr. Hagen refuses to see this because aesthetic matters like plot development are beneath him. He can see the isolated incidents of immorality that dot the landscape of Pulp Fiction, but he can't connect the dots to see the pattern. But without the pattern--no morality!

Commonweal readers have good reason to ask that this magazine's art critics write within a Catholic intellectual perspective. I have obliged with relish. The perception of the free choice between good and evil that is one of the tenets of Catholicism is also at the heart of most good drama. But I see no need to fog my writing with fulminations. I will persist in recognizing the morality in art by exploring the art in art.

Frank McConnell

Since my colleague Richard Alleva takes most of the heat from Counselor Hagen, and since he's a better writer,than I am anyway, I'll be short.

Can art conflict with morality? That's the gravamen of Hagen's brief for the prosecution, and the answer is yes, he's right, of course it can--and often does. Plato banished poets from his Republic because they told gnarly stories, Kierkegaard couldn't forgive himself for loving Mozart's Don Giovanni, and Tolstoy's late book What Is Art? exorcises about 90 percent of the world's literature as "un-Christian"--including his own greatest work. I have a helluva hard time forcing myself to reread that most nihilistic of all books, King Lear, to teach it, which I do every year.

Tolstoy's mistake--and Hagen's, Plato's and Kierkegaard's--is terminological. Art can conflict with morality. So does the daily crap-shoot of just living: like, say, all the time. But art never conflicts with religion, just because--and if I don't believe this then I don't believe anything--all art is religious. Art, said Amiri Baraka back when he was LeRoi Jones, is "whatever makes you proud to be a human being." And religion, says Karl Rahner in The Practice of Faith, is the conviction "that it is meaningful for a mere human to speak into the endless desert of God's silence."

So is everything allowed, or should "Christian intellectuals muster outrage over brazen displays of cruelty in the arts"? Well, in the first place, any outrage you have to "muster" isn't really outrage, is it? Art doesn't occasion outrage: it demands it. And yes, alas, everything must be allowed. In his story "The Secret of Father Brown," Chesterton tells us his little priest can solve crimes just because, in his own imagination, he too can envision the most monstrous evil. The politically correct Sherlock Holmes--and Hagen--want to ignore all the devils and thereby cleanse the world. Brown wants to understand them and thereby--it's not too strong a word--redeem the world.

Mind you, I hated Natural Born Killer. (Haven't seen Pulp Fiction-John Travolta gives me gas.) But I hated it because it was too moralistic. Come on: Oliver Stone, who is only slightly more subtle and ironic than a breath mint, gives us quick-cut after quick-cut of loony carnage, all the time nudging us and whispering, "See how desensitized you all are to the unspeakable? See how TV and movies have rotted your stupid, stupid minds?" If Hagen only knew it, he and Stone are allies. And it's just dumb to say that some cretins watch Natural Born Killers as a training film. Of course they do: they're cretins! I know a guy who thought (thinks) The Great Gatsby is about how the jews want to take over everything. And do you want to take Jeffrey Dahmer to the matinee of Silence of the Lambs? Prophets don't get points off for idiot fans.

Okay. Let's get it straight that representations of violence have not, that's not, proved a correlation to real violence, otherwise the race would have self-destructed about the time of the Iliad. And the role of the "Christian intellectual"--unless I was misinformed by the Xaverian Brothers and the Fathers of the Holy Cross--is to find and honor God and man in the paradisal sewer of the world, not apart from it. "Art cannot make us want to be good, but it can preserve us from the illusion that we already are": that's W.H. Auden, writing in Commonweal under the name "Didymus," in 1942.

Brother Hagen--with respect: you're righteous, but not right. Let me suggest, deferentially, that just as Christianity is humanity in its fullness, "Christian art" is simply art, like life, in all its glorious, scary, and redeemable grunginess; and that the nihil obstat and the imprimatlyr, though industrial byproducts of the religious imagination, are essentially inimical to the holy thing that spawned them.