By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, October 06, 2019
When it comes to bad ideas, there’s always room at the
bottom.
Conservatives used to exasperatedly observe of
gun-grabbing Democrats, “Imagine how they’d complain if someone tried to treat
the First Amendment the way they treat the Second Amendment!”
Hold my cappuccino, says Andrew Marantz of The
New Yorker. Writing in the New York Times under the headline “Free
Speech Is Killing Us” — and Marantz argues that is literally true — he argues
that the gun-control program should be taken as a template for a speech-control
program. He has come to this conclusion, he writes, after “having spent the
past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and
propagandists.” Some reporters are embedded in Afghanistan, and some are
“embedded” on Twitter, which is a great place to be embedded in that you can do
it while you are literally embedded, at home, in bed. The thing to understand,
I suppose, is that this is a war story.
Marantz’s argument is drearily predictable. He writes
that he does not want to repeal the First Amendment and then makes a case for
gutting it, mired in vagueness (foreswearing the position of the “free-speech
absolutist” but offering no controlling principle) with a great deal of not
obviously plausible dot-connecting, and then moves on to what this is really
about: an enemies list, in this case beginning with Alex Jones and Milo
Yiannopoulos, a couple of attention-hungry entrepreneurial charlatans who
always have been and always will be found at the margins of public life. He
offers many infinitely plastic pretexts under which speech to which he objects
might be suppressed, among them “equality, safety, and robust democratic
participation.” He also proposes government subsidies for the kind of speech of
which he approves, having discovered that “the Constitution prevents the
government from using sticks, but it says nothing about carrots,” which surely
would be news to the nation’s religiously affiliated schools, among others.
Marantz is the author of a book about “online
extremists,” because the guy who proposes gutting the Bill of Rights is worried
about extremism.
The “x might plausibly encourage y”
argument against free speech has been with us for a very long time. It was the
basis for the persecution of heretics in the Christian world, the censorship
that John Milton criticized in the 17th century, the suppression of war
protesters in the United States (the legal justification of which is the origin
of the ubiquitous “fire in a crowded theater” trope), and the effort to censor
and marginalize rap music in the 1980s, a project that brought to public
prominence a woman called Tipper Gore, at the time Mrs. Al. Mrs. Gore’s name
became, for a generation, the national shorthand for prudish blue-rinsed
tight-assery allied to scheming political opportunism. She was a figure of fun,
loathed by all right-thinking people.
But Tipper Gore–ism, like the poor, syphilis, and usury,
we shall always have with us.
Director Todd Phillips has made a kind of superhero
movie, Joker, which forgoes the usual tights-and-tights comic-book formula
to tell a different kind of story, a psychologically realistic account of the
interaction of loneliness, despair, poverty, and cruelty. Surprisingly for what
is, at after, a species of Batman film, it was awarded the Leone d’Oro for best
film at the Venice Film Festival,and Joaquin Phoenix’s nomination for an
Academy Award for his performance already is generally assumed.
But we live in philistine times, and the mob demands that
art serve them. For that reason, film, television, literature, music, and much
else is subjected to a standard of social utilitarianism, meaning that they are
not judged on aesthetic criteria but for their value as propaganda, moral
instruction, or therapy. Therapeutic notions are at the moment especially
prevalent; that is why press criticism of Game of Thrones, to take one
example, dealt with questions of demographic “representation” to the exclusion
of almost everything else.
And so Joker is challenged on its “fitness for the
present political moment,” as Sam Adams puts it in Slate. “Is this
really the time for a story about a frustrated, alienated white man who turns
to violence?” he asks. Of course it is, which is why there are at least five
productions of Coriolanus under way, and the bestsellers lists are full
of worked about frustrated, alienated white men who turn to violence —
strangely, no one criticizes Margaret Atwood on those grounds. (What, The
Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments aren’t about frustrated, violent
white guys?) Joker is in fact now criticized on the grounds of empathy,
or at least suspicion of empathy. “Because our point of empathy in the film is
Phoenix’s troubled Arthur, Joker basically dodges the question of
whether we’re supposed to read his acts of violence as redemptive or
abhorrent,” three (!) authors write in the Hollywood Reporter. The
filmmakers, in this view, “leave themselves open to such charges of
irresponsibility.” The New York Times complains:
Joker is also causing deep
unease. Some people, including a few rank-and-file employees on the Warner
Bros. lot, worry that the violent, hyper-realistic movie is potentially
dangerous — that rather than critiquing the societal failings that have given
rise to America’s mass-shooter crisis, the film legitimizes such atrocities and
could provoke more of them.
In much the same way that the left-wing cultural vanguard
that once presented itself as the check on and alternative to corporate power
immediately embraced corporate power upon getting its first real taste of it
(the Left now is quite satisfied to deputize the HR departments of the Fortune
500 as guardians of political discipline), its members have grown friendlier to
suppression of many kinds — and more hostile to heterodoxy — as their power has
grown. Conservative critics of the National Endowment for the Arts once were
treated to smug little homilies about how art is supposed to be transgressive,
to challenge us, to make us uncomfortable, etc., and now we are treated to smug
little sermonettes about the “dangerous” creation of films that cause “deep
unease” among certain people who work at Warner Bros. or write for Slate
or teach at Oberlin. (Aren’t those exactly the powerful people we’re supposed
to want our art to make uncomfortable?) Reagan-era progressives scoffed when
Tipper Gore and her allied church ladies panicked that the rise of rap music
would turn America’s streets into a blood-drenched warzone (hip-hop culture’s
eventual triumphant occupation of the commanding heights of pop in fact
coincided with a dramatic decline in violent crime in the United States) or
that Ozzy Osbourne songs were turning sweet towheaded kids in the suburbs into
dope fiends and satanic little cannibals, or that violent video games were
going to leave the real world looking like Grand Theft Auto. (It was
enjoyable to remember the video-game panic when watching Ralph Breaks the
Internet, in which the GTA ethos is revealed as being so neutered
and rehabilitated that it is embodied by Gal Gadot, whose lines might well have
been cribbed from self-help manuals.) Power changes everything.
The moralistic busybodies were wrong in the Eighties.
They’re wrong today. They deserved the contempt they received then. They
deserve it now. The difference is that free speech and heterodoxy used to have
allies in such venues as The New Yorker and the New York Times,
where both political and artistic freedom now have so many enemies. But I
understand that retro-Eighties nostalgia is hot right now. If we’re going to
bring back big hair and shoulder pads, we may as well resuscitate the public
career of Tipper Gore, last seen skulking around Democratic fundraising circles
at the junior-varsity level. Perhaps we could bring back Johnny Carson and the
constant threat of nuclear annihilation while we’re at it.
And maybe we can find someone to speak for the cause of
art that declines to be subordinated to anybody’s political agenda, current
social-improvement projects, the tender sensibilities of critics at the New
York Times, or the increasingly baroque rules of etiquette that organizes
the lives of New Yorker readers as they sway
in the wind like a field of ripe corn.
Nuclear annihilation remains the safer bet, but one may
still dream.
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