QUADRANTS & QUALITY : Why Hollywood feeds kids schlock.

Remember the short-lived hullabaloo sparked off by the Federal Trade Commission's report that film studios were previewing violent R-rated films to children? Coming as it did in the midst of a presidential campaign, the news evoked the censure of political figures, notably Joe Lieberman and Lynn Cheney, who made threatening noises about keeping movie executives on short leashes.

Of course, it felt good to see Hollywood hustlers exposed as hypocrites like those cigarette manufacturers caught prevaricating in congressional hearings. But it is precisely when you compare the moral trespass of the movie "suits" with that of the tobacco "suits" that you begin to see the moral intricacy of the movie problem. The cigarette people were deliberately aiming their marketing strategies at children in the hope of turning them into addicts, young addicts who would become older addicts (some of them never very much older, alas). Not much ambiguity there. Cigarettes kill. Do movies?

Yes, say the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Institute of Mental Health, some movies are a direct stimulus to violent behavior. Can all these impressively titled groups be wrong? Of course, answers the writer Richard Rhodes in his New York Times op-ed piece of September 7, "Hollow Claims about Fantasy Violence." He avers that mock violence is actually irrelevant compared to the way young psyches are brutalized by real violence "learned in personal violent encounters, beginning with the brutalization of children by their parents or their peers." And Andrew Sullivan (New Republic, October 2) went further. Citing statistics that point to a drop in under-eighteen violence, he suggests that "the rise of a bawdy, violent popular culture is actually linked to the decline in crime and dysfunction among the young...a fourteen-year-old consumed with murdering mythic gods on his PlayStation is not on a street corner making trouble; he's taking out his aggression on a monitor."

Richard Rhodes's argument strikes me as unexceptionable: yes, real violence must warp kids in ways that pretend violence cannot even begin to, and any junior hooliganism ignited by a film or video game was probably begging to be ignited by something. Any match will do for some fuses.

But I wonder about Andrew Sullivan's theory. Movies, more than TV or video games, more vividly stir the senses than they ever did in the past, due to recording and projecting inventions that have made recent movies gaudier, faster, louder, and certainly more wrenching in the imagery of violence, desire, and degradation. Sullivan would probably agree and might say that this is precisely what makes Hollywood junk beneficially purgative. And he would be right in regard to most normal young viewers, who have little blood lust raging within them and who take most violent movies for nothing more than fun.

But even if pop entertainment purges some kids of violence, does it purge other feelings as well? Feelings that shouldn't be purged? It may not matter to society at large if many young people prefer movie or computer schlock to Marcel Proust, but surely it does matter if courtesy becomes rare, if all gallantry and tenderness are drained out of sexual desire, if it's no longer recognized that some human situations pivot on nuance and not on sensation. Certainly, Sullivan is right that most fourteen-year-olds won't turn criminal while their imaginations are consumed with the murder of mythic gods, but this is the sort of social strategy usually welcomed by Roman emperors, not intellectuals writing in a free, democratic society. Give 'em bread and circuses, Sullivan seems to be saying, so they won't make havoc in the streets.

I'm sure that Sullivan, a sensitive and tough-minded commentator, wants the youngster glutted on movie gore and video games to mature, go to college, read better books, think weightier thoughts, but by the time a teenager reaches the age of eighteen, haven't the din of computer combat and rap music and the hectic imagery of slasher movies and MTV taken a certain toll? To cope with the difficult imagery of Shakespeare or the tricky rhythms of Henry James requires a certain unjangled sensibility, and adolescents are normally jangled enough without the music and movie industries aggravating the nerviness. If you subsist on recreational drugs for long, it's difficult to reacquire a taste for food. I'd certainly welcome a world in which fewer young lives are lost, but I'd also like it to be a world in which fewer young minds are lost.

But, if I'm right, let me quickly qualify my argument. The younger the sensibility, the more easily it's damaged, and I would be willing to bet that more kids have been psychologically damaged, or at least coarsened, by G- and PG-rated movies and TV kid shows before reaching the age of ten than by R-rated mock violence seen in early adolescence.

To be sure, there are no children's movies or shows that advocate bloodletting or devil worship or even handgun ownership or smoking. But the plots of most "family movies" are threads on which a string of visual and aural explosions and smirky jokes are strung. There certainly have been superior kid flicks in recent years, such as Hercules, The Iron Giant, Toy Story I and II, and, best of all, Chicken Run (one of the high points of Western civilization), but I have to say that the best as well as the worst--The Rugrats Movie (far inferior to the clever TV show), The Little Vampire, Snow Day, etc.--all seem to be based on scripts carefully engineered to eliminate all moments of hush and awe, of poignancy, of anything life-sized, and supply instead a nonstop wiseass, media-hip, basically cynical comedy that I sometimes relish (raised as I was on "Saturday Night Live") but that I wish didn't pervade every movie to which I dare take my nine-year-old. (All these films supply at least one maudlin scene in which one character "opens up" and "shares" with another, and I think this is when most kids, rightly, run up the aisles for popcorn.) The very last movie for children that had a large sense of humanity and a bit of awe for the mysteriousness of the human condition was The Indian in the Cupboard, and that was made in 1995! And before Indian was the even better Black Stallion, released in 1980. More recently, the mildly good Stuart Little seemed to be trying for something humane in its first half, then shucked off E.B. White's concluding quest for his rodent-boy hero in favor of the usual series of chases and Dolby-enhanced collisions and explosions that the world of kid flicks has in common with the action and horror movies that teenagers see.

And we shouldn't be surprised that children's movies have a lot in common with R-rated violent or comically gross films. After all, they're all in the same quadrant.

All in the same what?

John Travolta and Nora Ephron, respectively the star and director of Lucky Numbers, were hyping their movie on Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" at the end of October. While lamenting the difficulties of getting studio support for any script without instant youth appeal, Travolta remarked that most studio honchos pigeonhole a project in one of the following "quadrants" before deciding whether or not to fork over the dough: young males, young females, older males, older females. "Oh? And who are in the older quadrants?" asked Leno. "Forty and up?" Ephron and Travolta shot each other a split-second glance of amusement and commiseration before the actor answered that twenty-five was the dividing line. Leno's impressive jaw dropped and so did mine.

But once we have adjusted to the way movie executives think, can we really be surprised that some violent R-rated movies got marketed to the young? Within the young-male quadrant (which is the one that brings in the big profits), ratings may vary from movie to movie but the texture is constant. When din and bang and smirk and explosions are always the main items on the bill of fare, who is going to notice the presence of a little extra blood, a few obscene words, a couple of mutilated corpses? Certainly not the young parents I have seen carrying their two-year-olds into movies like The Cell and The Matrix. To the movie honchos, the kiddie audience for the coarse, witless Snow Day (PG) is just a few years away from being the audience for the sensationalism of The Fifth Element (R). They're both in the same quadrant.

'Twas not always so. Just as in the Victorian era when there were adult novels that you read aloud to the entire family (Dickens, Thackeray), so the majority of movies before the eighties were aimed primarily at adults but could be seen by children with profit. Pauline Kael said it best in her 1968 article, "Movies for Young Children": "it's possible, too, that this kind of movie [she had mentioned National Velvet, The African Queen, and Ivanhoe, only the first of which had been made specifically for kids--with its excitements and plot anticipations] may help children develop the story sense, that sense of narrative structure which is...so necessary for the enjoyment of the traditional English novel, and which may even be necessary for a sense of history."

True, such adult films are in short supply nowadays, but they still exist. You could have taken your ten-year-olds (and up) to see The Sixth Sense, Sense and Sensibility, Ulee's Gold, The Last of the Mohicans, Amistad, The Truman Show, etc., and now you can rent the videos. Yes, some of these movies contain violence and sex and coarse language, but would you rather have kids encounter adult content in these morally lucid films or in The Cell or There's Something about Mary? Stuck in the G-rated movie ghetto, children will not develop a taste for classic novels or a sense of history from Disney's lunkheaded, politically correct Hunchback of Notre Dame or the saccharine, incoherent Anastasia. Courage, my fellow media pawns. The world of moviemaking is still wide and various, and you and your children can escape from the quadrants.