Attention, webheads, free-speech defenders, libertarians, patriotic conservatives, rationalists, hackers, citizens of the digital nation, and free thinkers everywhere: Clear your weekend calendars and head for the nearest showing of Boogie Nights.
You'll enjoy a great movie, but, more than that, you'll also get to witness a watershed in one of this country's perennial political and cultural dramas - the battle between our self-appointed moral guardians and people who want to think for themselves.
These two conflicting traditions have been colliding in spasmodic bursts for centuries, the most recent confrontation beginning nearly 20 years ago with the forces of the Reagan revolution, the Christian Right, fearful baby-boomer parents, and the politically correct, all fighting to control, shape, and censor the content of America's booming, techno-transmitted, popular media culture.
A generation ago, Midnight Cowboy was given an X rating because it features Jon Voight's behind. In 1990, Henry and June, an artsy film about the relationship between authors Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, was given an NC-17 rating and consigned to movie-arthouse hell because a fornicating rear end was on screen for a few seconds too long.
So here comes Boogie Nights, a movie about a bunch of porn producers and actors that explores the upheaval that swept the porn industry in the '80s as videotape replaced film and made pornography into a multibillion-dollar industry. It includes, in just one of many memorable scenes, the main character, porn star Dirk Diggler (played by Mark Wahlberg), examining his own 13-inch-long penis. It's a tableau that makes rapper and Bennett-target Ice-T seem like Luciano Pavarotti.
But the most striking thing about this movie is the absence of furor emanating from its wide release in hundreds of mainstream mall and megaplex theaters.
How could this movie - featuring a number of sex scenes and explicit references to oral and anal sex, along with perhaps the largest sexual organ ever displayed in mainstream cinema - end up in suburban megaplexes with an R rating and nary a peep from the platoons of the prudish clustered in Congress, academia, and our nation's newsrooms?
Has Boogie Nights just slipped under the radar? Is William Bennett too busy to get to the movies? Has Bob Dole retired from movie criticism as well as politics? Has the Christian Right folded its tents and headed back to the revival circuit?
Perhaps it's that the overwhelmed censors are wearing out - short-circuiting - before our eyes. They're running up white flags and stealing off the field in the middle of the night. New media technologies - video, faxes, home-entertainment systems, VCRs, cable, the Net, the Web, and all those new movie screens - have made it nearly impossible to monitor, let alone control, all the creative content being generated, or to police all the many forms in which this content can be seen, read, or heard.
To some, especially the so-called moral guardians, this is a nightmare that breeds perversion, illiteracy, and cultural anarchy.
But that's a paranoid fantasy - and a lie. Crime is down among all ages and income groups; college test scores are up. More kids are involved in outdoor sports than ever before. Religious attendance is way up. Last year, record numbers of young and old Americans bought books, went to the movies, took trips. The violence-wracked, illiterate, amoral, isolated, and de-civilized nation we're supposed to have become by now is a media myth. It has failed to materialize.
And it's been more than a decade since the Meese commission report and its attendant hysteria. A US$8 billion business, pornography has become one of the biggest and most profitable in America, according to US News & World Report.
Just a few years ago, a movie like Boogie Nights, if it were made at all, would never have received such wide distribution. Or if it had, politicians, evangelists, fundamentalists, and probably some feminists would have been picketing and boycotting all over the place. This movie would have gotten an X or NC-17, not an R rating. Movie chains would have refused to show it. Video chains wouldn't have stocked it.
It would have won an award or two at Cannes or the New York Film Festival, enlivened the weekends and dinner parties of a few thousand people in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City, and then vanished from sight.
But Boogie Nights has been widely released. According to Variety, it had the highest per-screen average in the United States (the number of people sitting in front of each showing) the week it opened. It not only got raves from critics, but there was nary a peep from the righteous furies in politics and elsewhere, who have attempted to dictate propriety in popular culture, boycotted TV shows, pressured Hollywood movie raters, and campaigned for government policing and regulation of speech on the Internet.
Perhaps Dirk Diggler has come as a millennial messenger, bringing a lot more than his fictional organ. He just may be here to tell us that the time of the moral guardians of the world has passed, along with the arrogant and misguided movement they have lead.
If this is truly the sign of a trend, not just the freak event of a movie somehow falling below the country's moral radar, it has enormous significance.
And our moral guardians haven't really seen anything yet. If cable and video have driven them bonkers, just wait until most of the country is wired up to the World Wide Web. Already countless Americans are getting to do what was unthinkable just a few years ago - go online every night to talk about their sexuality freely and without fear of arrest and humiliation. As free talk of sexuality becomes more ubiquitous, it is certain to become less controversial as well.
The information boundaries have become too plentiful and porous to patrol. They are being extended regionally and nationally, as well as globally. They are reshaping our economic as well as political and moral understandings.
If so, Diggler's 13-inch penis, appearing 6 feet long, in full color, on movie screens across America, is perhaps the most fitting symbol of a new era in the long struggle between people who want to think freely and people who want to tell the free thinkers how to think.
Out here in the ether, where freedom is more than a musty notion in textbooks, we ought to mark the moment, and see if this curious symbol isn't just an aberration, but a revealing preview into the possibilities brought by the digital age.
Related links:
HotWired's special report on Time magazine's Net-porn scare
Katz on the porn in libraries controversy
Katz on why men want to keep all the porn for themselves
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
