Today’s students absorb little of the Bill of Rights in school. Adults loathe silly ACLU arguments or First Amendment testimonials from pompous editors. But Woody Harrelson’s Flynt, with his scuzzy humor and steamy sex, should get everyone of age hot for once about their constitutional freedoms. A spoonful of sleaze helps the medicine go down.
Movies like “All the President’s Men” featured heroic reporters. Flynt, by contrast, is reprehensible. The publisher of Hustler dresses in a diaper made from an American flag and pelts the judge with an orange. He’s so obnoxious that his own sympathetic lawyer quits. Of course, this makes his constitutional case all the more compelling. “If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me,” says Flynt, “then it will protect all of you.”
Because this (largely factual) film is so full of drugs, sex and profanity, it feels free to linger over subtle constitutional questions much longer than do other movies. In the climactic sequence–which captures one of the most important free-expression cases of recent times–the Rev. Jerry Falwell brings suit against Flynt for running a parody ad for Campari in Hustler. In the “ad” Falwell is depicted describing his “first time” making love to his mother in an outhouse. Flynt’s lawyer gets Falwell to admit that no one could possibly believe this was true, thereby freeing Flynt from any libel claim. But Falwell wins in court by proving “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
The case goes to the Supreme Court. If Falwell had won there in 1988, it would have been, quite simply, the end of freedom as we know it in this country. What parody or cartoon or political barb does not “inflict emotional distress” on its targets? The Supreme Court rules for Flynt, and the movie ends on a patriotic note. As the Antonin Scalia character finally understands, Falwell’s argument was about taste, not law, and courts don’t rule on taste.
But if Milos Forman could explore this legal and moral subtlety, he should have been able to illuminate one that is at least as relevant today. The film fails to distinguish between government efforts to jail or silence Flynt (horrible) and the freedom of magazine distributors to keep Hustler off their racks (desirable, especially when kids are around). The former is censorship; the latter–be it the result of boycotts, Wal-Mart corporate policy or media-generated pressure on companies–is not. We minimize the true threat of government suppression of speech when the word “censorship” is casually applied to private decisions of morality or commerce. Just because Flynt has a right to publish his magazine doesn’t mean his critics are wrong to denounce it.
In one scene a Cincinnati lawyer, played by political consultant James Carville, denounces Hustler at a luncheon sponsored by an anti-pornography group, then goes into court to prosecute Flynt (in front of a mean-looking judge, played by Flynt himself). Forman believes both scenes are of a piece: the Nazis and other totalitarians always seem to go after pornographers first, he says. So in the movie, the anti-pornography crusaders, led by smarmy savings and loan thief Charles Keating, are made to look like fools and hypocrites.
But the distinction between what these anti-smut crusaders do in court–versus out of court, at the luncheon–is essential. Artists and journalists must repeatedly draw a bright line here in the public consciousness. Otherwise, William Bennett, C. DeLores Tucker, Sen. Joseph Lieberman and others using free speech to battle cultural pollution will be lumped in with Jerry Falwell and the truly dangerous prosecutors who threw Larry Flynt in jail. Bennett and his compatriots are not saying rap artists or record producers should be imprisoned or sued into poverty. They’re simply saying that big-name companies like Time Warner and Seagram’s should be stigmatized when they underwrite songs urging kids to shoot each other and act like gangsters. Wal-Mart is not saying you can’t make a CD full of explicit sex or gangster garbage; it’s simply saying Wal-Mart won’t sell it. Huge difference.
Yes, record companies have the same right Larry Flynt has to try to make a buck off junk. But they don’t have the right to be immune from stinging criticism. “Unfortunately, the wardens of morality [are] defining what is good and right for all Americans,” the Recording Industry Association of America wrote in a press release last week, piously wrapping itself in the flag of free expression. Well, at least someone is defining some standards, because the record companies certainly aren’t. “The People vs. Larry Flynt” fulfills a public service by taking on bluenose censors. But maybe someday a movie will strike a different blow for vigorous speech–a blow for those who are tired of corporate America’s cloaking greed as a passion for art.
