ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 21, 1997 TAG: 9701210063
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: ELLEN GOODMAN
SOURCE: ELLEN GOODMAN
I HAVE LONG regarded Larry Flynt as the curse of the First Amendment. He's the catch that comes with the freedom of speech. The asterisk on the Constitution.
The right to publish a cartoon about Clinton and Paula Jones on the editorial page comes with the curse of a sexual satire in Hustler about Jerry Falwell and his mother. The right to an unauthorized wedding photo of JFK Jr. and his bride comes with the curse of a photo of Jackie O in the buff.
You want the freedom to say whatever you want? Fine, but you can't shut up the smutmeister.
Nevertheless, there is one thing that Larry Flynt is not. My hero.
That brings us directly to ``The People vs. Larry Flynt,'' a film that opened with the most fawning reviews. This movie has morphed a curse into a hero with greater ease than it transformed Flynt himself into Woody Harrelson.
Director Milos Forman has fulfilled Flynt's last fantasy: ``I would love to be remembered for something meaningful.'' Flynt the movie bears as much resemblance to Flynt the man as the R-rating does to his triple-X life.
Now, I will spare you my ranting about the way that movies become history. See ``JFK,'' see ``Evita,'' and you get the picture, or the pictures. But this biopic cleans up Flynt's act to fit producer Oliver Stone's description of the pornographer as someone ``in the rapscallion tradition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.''
The cleanup takes place magically by making women disappear. The love story of Larry and Althea edits Flynt's down relationships with other women and edits out his effects on all women. This movie about a pornographer is virtually devoid of questions surrounding pornography.
We do see Flynt at some drugged-out moments. We see him introducing pink to the full spectrum of his male magazine.
But the average viewer can leave the darkened theater without knowing that Flynt had five wives, two of whom he actually trashed for promiscuity. Without knowing that he had, and neglected, five children, one of whom he refers to as a ``lying little whacko.''
In the movie the only serious opposition to Hustler isn't from women, it's from Jerry Falwell and the religious right. The magazine's most controversial act is a parody of a Dewar's ad.
This is all part of a rehab of Flynt's reputation. According to the title of his new autobiography, we are now to see him as ``An Unseemly Man.'' Unseemly? Well, maybe ``Politically Incorrect'' is unseemly. Maybe Don Imus is unseemly. Larry Flynt is eons below unseemly on the evolutionary scale.
Of course, director Milos Forman was at a disadvantage. ``I must admit that I have never bought Hustler magazine,'' he confesses, ``and I believe I never will.'' How many of the movie reviewers are Hustler subscribers?
But if ``The People vs. Larry Flynt'' is now the text for the debate about free speech, tell it like it is. Anyone leaving the theater should be handed a copy of Hustler before they go off for their espresso and their erudite conversations about Courtney Love's performance.
This is what's in the current Hustler:
Enough ads for phone sex to constitute a porn yellow pages.
Dozens of centers of centerfolds.
Women having sex with each other with large plastic male organs strapped on.
A feature called ``How to Know if Your Girlfriend is a Dog.''
Enough racist cartoons to ``balance'' an article against neo-Nazis.
And don't leave out Nataly's sexual fantasy about occupying armies: ``She knows that her only hope for survival is complete submission to their will - a price she is prepared to pay.''
This is the porn that reduces a woman to the sum of her sexual parts. The real porn that is degrading, desensitizing, and arguably dangerous.
In the film, Larry/Woody says, ``If the First Amendment can protect even a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you, because I am the worst.'' But the irony is that the filmmakers don't present ``the worst.'' They turn the sick to the unseemly.
It's as if they didn't trust the answer to the question they ask the public: ``You may not like what he does, but are you prepared to give up his right to do it?'' They don't show what he does.
For my own part, I accept the curse that comes with the First Amendment. When the Falwell case went to court, I wrote a friend-of-the-Flynt brief in this column. But I continue to regard him as an enemy.
Those of us who are free-speech absolutists believe absolutely that you fight speech with more speech. I don't truck with censors. But spare me those in Hollywood who turn the scumbag into the star.
- The Boston Globe
LENGTH: Medium: 87 linesby CNB