Violent Fantasy: It's not the Hollywood Gore that's the problem.

Like presidential elections and the Olympics, political denunciations of Hollywood violence have become a bedrock quadrennial American tradition. At least every four years-sometimes more often, if there's a school shooting-movie-industry lobbyist Jack Valenti simultaneously sucks up to politicians and lectures them about the First Amendment. Liberal activists who denounce Joe Camel as a pied piper of social coercion swear that screen idols have no influence on human behavior. Television executives who make billions of dollars off the persuasive power of 30-second commercials declare that the 26- and 54-minute programs those ads punctuate have no net impact on their viewers.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that there are no new arguments since the last go-around, when Bob Dole denounced "nightmares of depravity" and the "mainstreaming of deviancy" in a slew of films he'd never seen. This season, a Federal Trade Commission report-released with precise political timing-details how the film industry targets very young audiences for mature films. While this gives the controversy a newsier feel, the report's details merely confirm what everybody knew: Hollywood makes its money from kids.

Of course, what really makes this year's repeat of history a farce is that this time it is the Democrats who are bemoaning the "coarsening of our culture." In years past, we could at least expect some ritualistic huffing and puffing about free speech from the Hollywood liberals; but this time around they know that their Al doesn't really mean it. "Go, go, go, Al! We need a little spanking!" cheered Bette Midler at a star-studded fundraiser recently, giving full expression to the gravity with which Hollywood views this "crisis."

Despite all of the posturing, nobody is addressing the real problem with Hollywood: It's not the violence at all, but the message of moral relativism. Violence has been a constant in world culture. You can draw a line starting from cave paintings, and trace it through all visual media up to this weekend's latest blockbuster. Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's plays, Japanese picture books, and Native American oral histories can hold their own with just about any Schwarzenegger film in terms of murder and gore. Talking about violence-even graphic violence-as something "new" is like talking about a disturbing rise in the use of percussion instruments in music.

The antiviolence handwringers contend that it is the graphic, realistic nature of modern depictions that does real damage. But if simple film violence were the problem, one would look for some correlation between crime rates and violent-movie distribution. Such correlations remain elusive.

A more realistic contention is that while movie violence is not bad in itself, it can be bad when presented in a morally harmful context. During the 1992-93 round of Hollywood-bashing, Sen. Paul Simon threatened the television networks with government "action" if they didn't clean themselves up; in response, the networks sponsored a UCLA study that concluded that "context is the key to the determination of whether or not the use of violence is appropriate." The problem for liberals, though, is that they don't think there are many contexts where violence is permissible-save, perhaps, in cautionary tales about Nazis, southern slaveowners, and military homophobes. The Left always despised Dirty Harry movies, for example, because the moral context of those films suggested that criminals were, in fact, criminals, and that a liberal do-gooder court system was allowing the bad guys to rule the streets.

In a 1992 article in Reason magazine, aptly entitled "Faster, Hollywood, Kill! Kill!" Tevi Troy suggested that the popularity of Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and other violent vigilante films was actually a healthy expression of public discontent with the crime wave of the 1960s and '70s. Watching Dirty Harry administer rough justice was a healthy release valve for frustrated Americans who did not, after all, take the law into their own hands upon leaving the theater. When Dirty Harry killed, he may have been defying the legal order-but he was still confirming the moral order. Troy's analysis is surely correct: Action heroes from Perseus to Captain Kirk have always taken the law into their own hands; they are men of action, with a well-defined sense of the moral right.

This was the central appeal of the films of John Wayne, who-from 1949 to 1974-was on the annual list of Top 10 biggest box-office movie stars for a record 25 years. Out of his well over 100 films, you can count on two hands the number that didn't depict him shooting, slugging, or ordering the shooting or slugging of someone. A whole generation of men wanted to imitate Wayne, seeing him as the definition of an authentic male. The Left criticized his films for glorifying war, because they didn't show the terrible consequences of battle; as a result, in many of the Left-influenced war films of the last 30 years, we have seen in much more graphic detail how unpleasant and messy killing can be.

Violence in popular entertainment, then, has a complicated history; it's neither new nor especially harmful. What really is new and harmful is the trendy moral relativism that characterizes so many movies and TV shows. These cultural products receive rave reviews from liberal activists for their "positive" (and relatively nonviolent) content. But in these films, protagonists do not defy the legal order so that they can uphold a higher moral order; instead, these "heroes" rebel against the notion that there is any moral order at all.

"Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go f**k himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost sixty thousand dollars. Pass the asparagus," says Lester Burnham (played by Kevin Spacey), the hero of American Beauty, one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the last decade. A brilliantly executed film of a very conventional story, American Beauty typifies the reigning attitude in today's Hollywood: The pursuit of personal liberation, especially sexual liberation, is the only legitimately heroic endeavor in American life.

Lester Burnham is a bourgeois professional with a bourgeois-professional wife and an alienated daughter. Lester "suddenly" realizes-just in time for a midlife crisis-that he hates his conventional life when he becomes sexually obsessed with a friend of his high-school-aged daughter. "I feel like I've been in a coma for the past twenty years. And I'm just now waking up," declares Lester, who commences on a campaign of "self-improvement" that involves flipping off all social conventions and indulging every desire.

"Your father seems to think this type of behavior is something to be proud of," Lester's wife tells their daughter at the dinner table.

"And your mother seems to prefer I go through life like a f**king prisoner while she keeps my d**k in a mason jar under the sink."

American Beauty won the Oscar for best picture last year, but it wasn't alone in its message. Indeed, the winners in almost every major category involved some variation on the theme that external moral authority is illegitimate, or that personally designed morality is superior. For example, another academy favorite was Boys Don't Cry, a film about a petty criminal, a transsexual woman who prefers masquerading as a boy in order to seduce and bed teenage girls. What raised the film to heroic status for Hollywood is its assertion that America remains, at heart, a nation of sexual fascists who cruelly impose conventional bourgeois standards on courageous nonconformists.

The entertainment industry has hammered home the idea that conformity of any kind is a sign of spiritual surrender. While films with excessive violence often receive considerable critical and popular scrutiny, the idea that we are all our own priests is celebrated throughout the popular culture. This idea is found even in technically well-made films like Dead Poets Society and the pernicious Pleasantville, both of which redefined the concept of "to thine own self be true" to mean "thine own self is the only truth." It is also the moral of hundreds of individual TV shows and movies; it is the core social and political insight of rock 'n' roll and rap music. How else to explain the familiar litany of rap songs which exult in killing and rape?

This attitude makes violent films all the more poisonous. In a world where no set of moral principles is superior to any other, why not make heroes out of murderers? This is the lesson of nearly the entire Quentin Tarantino oeuvre and its many ripoffs. More and more often, we are seeing psychopaths and serial killers as protagonists. An early example can be found in the 1984 Terminator, in which the audience is invited to see things through the eyes of a killing machine-and enjoy it. Since then, the pace has only accelerated. In the 1991 Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter was a profoundly sympathetic cannibalistic serial killer; in the upcoming sequel-if it's adapted loyally from the novel-he will be the hero.

What's important to remember about this amoral context for violence is that it stems from the amoral worldview of the Hollywood filmmakers; and at the very core of that worldview is sex. It's a bit of cliche by now to point out that liberals fret over violence in movies, and conservatives about sex. But there's a good reason for that. We know from endless studies as well as common sense and experience that a tendency for violence, especially in boys, manifests itself without much prodding from the culture. Give a young boy a Barbie doll and he will, in all likelihood, try to make a gun out of it. But sex is more complicated. Young boys who know a million ways to kill a man-hypothetically-are quite ignorant about sex, if left to their own devices until puberty.

Hollywood changes that dynamic. In its contention that not only should sexual appetites be indulged, but those who most fully indulge them, without regret or remorse, are living the most authentic lives, it offers young boys a recipe for mayhem.

And where did Hollywood get this idea? In the mirror, of course. Consider again the heroism of Lester Burnham in American Beauty: Here is a man with a family and a job. His prosperous life of responsibilities and obligations is depicted as a soul-numbing suburban gulag. He is a hero to himself for quitting his job, blackmailing his old boss, and abandoning his responsibilities, all because he wants to boink a high-school girl. Now, when you are a Hollywood star who can afford to have your business manager pay off your alimony; and you can afford to send your kids off someplace out of sight; and you can indulge in an occasional boink with the office intern, it's very easy to give this sort of advice. It is especially easy when you have an entire entourage of sycophants who speak to you of your entitlement to such behavior. Remember, these are people who go into conniptions if they're not seated immediately at restaurants; and a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly reported that a number of Hollywood stars, including Barbra Streisand and Tom Cruise, have even instructed their staffs not to look them directly in the eye because they find it too uncomfortable.

It should go without saying that this lifestyle is not for everyone. For people with limited budgets and a need to look others in the eye-i.e., those "who work hard and play by the rules," in the words of Bill Clinton-this advice can be disastrous. Its central insight is that the moral concerns of others, even the worth of others, can be dismissed. The FTC report that launched this latest round of Hollywood-bashing was itself prompted by the Columbine massacre in Littleton, Colo. But children in Colorado have had access to guns and been exposed to violence for over a century. What nobody ever told those kids until recently is that you can buy your own morality retail.