Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (46 page)

Hollywood, too, offered a great deal of sex and violence. Releasing films almost every week, movie producers competed frantically in efforts to fill the seats, five times a day, of the 4,000-odd multiplex theaters that had sprung into being during the 1970s and 1980s. In their quest for profits, they relied especially on “blockbusters,” some of which cost more than $100 million to make and tens of millions more to market. Most of the blockbusters aimed to attract adolescents and other young people; older Americans were far less likely to go to the movies. That effort meant featuring what the young had already come to expect from their vast experience with television and video and computer games: near non-stop noise, movement, and action. Spectacular special effects, bloodshed, profanity, nudity, and gross-out humor added to the mix. A dream of many young people under seventeen was to see R-rated (Restricted) movies. Even movies rated PG-13 (Parental Guidance for children under thirteen) contained strong stuff. Ads for PG-13 films made that clear, noting that the films included “sex, profanity, adult themes,” “violence, some disturbing images,” “crude and sexual humor,” “scenes of violence and mild gore,” “intense terror sequences.” In these and many other films, sex and violence drove the action; subtlety and characterization lost out.

Some widely watched movies of the late 1980s and 1990s offered viewers virtually all they might desire in the way of gore and ghoulishness:
RoboCop
(1987), its shoddier sequels,
RoboCop 2
(1990) and
RoboCop 3
(1991),
Goodfellas
(1990),
Silence of the Lambs
(1991),
Natural Born Killers
(1994), and
Pulp Fiction
(1994). All these films, save
RoboCop 3
(PG-13), were R-rated. A few, notably
Goodfellas
, were well crafted and received favorable reviews. More commonly, however, macabre and violence-filled movies relied on ear-shattering, eye-catching, and blood-spattering sequences to engage their viewers.

Naked or near-naked bodies seemed to be almost required in R-rated films.
Basic Instinct
(1992) included highly erotic sexual activity.
Body of Evidence
(1992), starring Madonna, featured S&M sex, some of it involving hot wax and broken glass.
Titanic
(1997), though a far tamer movie that received a PG-13 rating, threw in what critics perceived to be obligatory sex scenes. The film showed the actress Kate Winslet in full frontal nudity, as well as a sequence that made it obvious that she was having sexual intercourse in the backseat of an automobile. The hot and heavy sex steamed up the car’s windows. Thanks in part to the enthusiasm (for the love story) of a great many teenaged girls, who paid to see the movie five and six times,
Titanic
was the highest-grossing movie of all time. It won an Academy Award for Best Picture.

Many magazines, emulating the glitz of TV, continued to focus on America’s celebrity culture, thereby slighting hard news in favor of exciting envious and materialistic urges among viewers.
People
often led the way, as it had since first appearing in 1974. Its commercially successful obsession with coverage of the rich and beautiful—especially of their troubled private lives—spread to other magazines as well.
Newsweek
, which had earlier featured political and world leaders on one-third of its covers, seemed eager to keep pace. By 1997, one-third of its covers depicted celebrities, compared to only one-tenth that showed world leaders.
⁷⁹
Most newspapers and magazines, like television, gave breathless and extended coverage to sensational stories with some sort of sexual angle. When an angry abused wife, Lorena Bobbitt, cut off her husband’s penis in 1993, television stations and tabloids seemed unable to report anything else. Well before the end of the decade it became a virtual cliché that there was little if any difference in the commercial media between news and entertainment.

Thanks to the power of celebrity culture, a number of performers raked in enormous sums in the 1990s. Among them were “personalities” masquerading as newsmen, notably Larry King, who signed a contract with CNN for $7 million a year, and Geraldo Rivera, who contracted with CNBC for $30 million over six years. Jerry Seinfeld, producer and lead character of
Seinfeld,
was reported to have earned $66 million in the 1996–97 season. Tim Allen, star of
Home Improvement,
agreed to a contract in 1997 that paid him $1.25 million per show. Given the money expended at the time by televisions advertisers (estimated to be as much as $500,000 per thirty seconds for the Thursday evening line-up that included
Seinfeld
), the enormous sums earned by stars such as these were expected to more than pay for themselves. At its peak between 1996 and May 1998,
Seinfeld
drew viewing audiences of 76 million per episode.

Other celebrities fared as well or better in the 1990s. Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars, received an estimated $12 to $15 million for his performance in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
(1991), $20 million for
Jingle All the Way
(1996), and $25 million for
Batman and Robin
(1997). Michael Jordan in his most enriching years received $70 million, most of it from endorsements. So long as celebrities avoided scandals, corporate sponsors competed vigorously for their presence in commercials.

Still other celebrities who prospered in the 1990s included Steven Spielberg, who earned a reported $175 million per year at his peak, and Harrison Ford, who took in $53 million. (Both Spielberg and Ford agreed to divorce settlements that paid their former spouses more than $100 million.) In 2000, the baseball star Alex Rodriguez signed a ten-year contract that promised him $252 million.
⁸⁰
At that time the nation’s economy was strong, but news stories regularly reported the rise of income inequality, and poverty afflicted 31 million Americans, 11.3 percent of the population.
⁸¹
In a commercialized world such as this, contemporary observers could be excused for believing that materialistic values had triumphed and that the nation was in decline.

Ownership and control of the media, moreover, became ever more concentrated, notably in huge multimedia corporations such as Walt Disney Company, Time Warner, and Capital Cities. By the end of the decade, General Electric owned NBC; Viacom, CBS; the Walt Disney Company, ABC; and Time Warner, CNN. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, a sprawling international business, was busily buying radio and television outlets, sports teams, newspapers, magazines (including
TV Guide
), and film companies (among them Twentieth Century Fox). The politically conservative slant of Murdoch’s far-flung empire, notably the FOX News Channel, increasingly enraged liberals and partisan Democrats in the United States.

There were, of course, potent reasons for the frequently frenetic races to the bottom (races that were replicated in most free-market countries around the world) that television producers resorted to. Competition among the networks—faced also with the proliferation of cable channels—was intense, leading producers to look anxiously at the all-important audience ratings that they needed in order to secure the advertisements (these, too, sex-laden) that paid for time.
⁸²
In their quest for audience-share, and therefore for larger profits, television stations ran eye-catching specials about Great Problems and Crises, and talk shows that pitted advocates of polar positions shouting at one another.
⁸³
During “sweeps weeks,” when the number of viewers was counted, channels highlighted whatever might glue people to the tube. Producers and managers defended themselves against charges of presenting low levels of entertainment by explaining that they were giving the people what they wanted—if popular taste was degraded, that was not their fault.

Defenders of television, including many civil libertarians, added that no one commanded viewers to immerse themselves in the sludge that critics said was befouling the screen. In the late 1980s and 1990s, as earlier, millions of consumers exercised their judgment and declined to do so, watching instead smoothly crafted shows such as
Cheers, The Cosby Show, ER
,
NYPD Blue,
and
Frasier.
Televised sports programs, notably the NCAA college basketball tournament (“March Madness”), the World Series, and the Super Bowl, attracted huge audiences and normally generated enormous advertising revenue. Quiz shows, holiday-time specials, oft-seen film classics, and happy-ending reruns continued to appeal to millions of viewers.

It was also a fact, then as always, that in America’s diverse and competitive culture, there was no such single thing as
the
media. Television viewers looking for serious approaches to the news could tune in to ABC’s
Nightline
with Ted Koppel, or to the
MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour
on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). C-SPAN, expanding since its creation in 1979, provided live coverage of Congress and of many significant speeches, hearings, and panel discussions. Its
Booknotes
program, which started in 1989, enabled viewers to watch wide-ranging conversations about important books, most of which concerned history, politics, and public policy. National Public Radio, when not pleading for contributions, featured commercial-free programs dealing with a host of national issues, as well as shows such as Garrison Keillor’s
A Prairie Home Companion,
which enjoyed considerable popularity for many years.
⁸⁴

Filmmakers, too, churned out a great deal of inoffensive stuff: chase and spy dramas, historical epics, comedies, movies for children, and boy-meets-girl romances with happy endings.
⁸⁵
Innovative computer-generated and animated films, such as
Jurassic Park
(1993),
The Lion King
(1994), and
Toy Story
(1995), entranced millions of viewers. So did sports movies, such as
Field of Dreams
(1989),
A League of Their Own
(1992), and
Rudy
(1993). In the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of critically well regarded films concerned with serious subjects, some of them imported from Britain—
Gandhi
(1982) (voted Best Picture),
A Passage to India
(1984),
Rain Man
(1988),
Glory
(1989),
My Left Foot
(1989),
Schindler’s List
(1993),
Apollo 13
(1995)—enjoyed respectable runs at American box offices. The angst-ridden Woody Allen, a prolific playwright and filmmaker, continued to please many of his fans. Art cinemas, surviving in major cities, specialized in showing films that appealed to sophisticated audiences.

Parents with young children, like other concerned moviegoers and VCR users, could consult the movie industry’s rating system—television developed guidelines in 1996, but they were feeble and complicated—if they wished to watch films without a great deal of violence or sex. They had a considerable variety of inoffensive shows from which to choose. Music lovers, too, had ample choice. Those who disliked heavy metal, rap, or pop gyrators like Madonna could buy CDs, attend a great many performances of country, folk, or religious music, or enjoy hit musicals staged by touring companies. Long-popular singers such as Reba McEntire, Cher, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, and Tony Bennett continued to attract enthusiastic crowds.

It also remained the case in the 1980s and 1990s that many institutions of high culture—museums, art galleries, repertory theaters, symphony orchestras, and chamber music groups—were managing to stay afloat, despite receiving far less generous public support than had long been available in nations like France or Germany. The plays and music of Stephen Sondheim, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet earned critical acclaim and box-office success. Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour epic concerning homosexuality, AIDS, and political conservatism,
Angels in America
(1992), won a host of awards. Public-spirited citizens’ groups and philanthropists raised their support of university endowments and of cultural institutions, helping thousands of artists and musicians to carry on with their creative work. Though many publishers and bookshops struggled to break even, fiction by highly talented authors—Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Anne Tyler, Richard Ford, John Updike, and others with smaller name recognition—sold well. So did excellently researched works of non-fiction. James McPherson’s prize-winning
Battle Cry of Freedom
(1988), a history of the Civil War era, enjoyed huge sales. A considerable variety of serious magazines and journals (many of them subsidized by wealthy publishers or universities) awaited buyers at bookstores and magazine counters.
⁸⁶
Americans looking for cultural edification, including a larger number of people with higher education, had wider choice than in the past.

Were gruesome scenes on TV and film provoking a rise of violent behavior in the United States? This was surely difficult to prove. Blood-filled classics of stage, screen, and high school English courses—
Macbeth
, for example—had had no such effect in the past. Violent crime, moreover, sharply declined in America, the spread of mayhem on TV and film notwithstanding, during the 1990s.
⁸⁷
The very gratuitousness of violence in most productions of popular culture, like the staginess of TV wrestling, may have lessened its capacity to affect real-life behavior. At any rate, it remains doubtful that the proliferation of blood and gore in America’s visual popular culture, though distressing when available to children, incited greater violence among the general population.