Horror and Malicious Glee as Flynt Takes On Politics
During that phase of childhood when little girls find bugs and brothers to be icky beyond bearing, my friend Becky and I would leaf through National Geographic so gingerly, turning each page at the very tip of the corner, lest our fingers even touch a picture of a bug.
And yet, as I came to learn, the world couldn’t survive six months without bugs. So I put up with flies, try not to drown the ants trudging across my sink, and rescue the spiders in my shower.
That’s pretty much my ambivalence about Larry Flynt, a man who publishes a scabrous magazine that once showed a woman being fed into a meat grinder: that he’s here to test our tolerance with his ickiness, to remind us that the 1st Amendment is not just about “Ulysses” and Madalyn Murray O’Hair, but about not being able to throw a guy in jail for coming to court wearing an American flag as a diaper.
Now, after being accorded the crowning American accolade of having a movie made about him, Flynt is casting us all, willing or no, as extras in his latest performance.
His slow, taunting checkbook striptease of the sexual foibles of American politicians makes us uneasy, even as we guiltily relish the schadenfreude of seeing the pompous put through the wringer. (Ew, Bob Barr! Those eyes! That mustache! Getting a face full of what he’s been throwing!)
Just what kind of show is Flynt putting on, anyway? Are we witnesses to a peep show, or jurors with ourselves in the dock? Is he mocking our ethics and ideals, setting us up for parody? Or is there some larger point here, about the genteel contradictions we live with every day, the real and ideal, the personal and the political, and about which bugs us more: sin or hypocrisy? Or are we just annoyed at how hugely he’s enjoying himself?
Flynt makes his timely reinvention before a nation that is still sexually adolescent, simultaneously romantic and leering, marketing sex shamelessly in the service of capitalism, yet blushing and stuttering about condoms and sex education until public policy is paralyzed.
The people who have the minds and the time for pursuits like these are people like whoever got a “Where’s Waldo” book banned from a Long Island school library because he or she found, among the hundreds of tiny figures in a beach scene, a cartoon woman with her left breast partly exposed.
Now we have a scandal about whom people choose to go to bed with, being assessed by unwilling bedfellows: the louche Howard Stern crowd and Harvard attorneys under one blanket . . . and feminists like Gloria Steinem and Christian fundamentalists under another.
Jack Kevorkian epitomizes right message, wrong messenger--legal assisted suicide with a ghoulish poster boy. And now we have Larry Flynt, a gargoyle in a gold-plated wheelchair, mocking us with the seismic collision of our own appetites and beliefs. He is the gory accident we know we shouldn’t want to look at, but can’t bear not to.
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The roots of this run far deeper than the sordid O.J. Simpson case. They took hold in the intrusive and unseemly scandal sheets of 1940s Hollywood, and branched and flowered in the innocuous-seeming People magazining of the nation, a phony democratizing where everyone connives at playing Just Folks--George Bush and his pork rinds, Michael Dukakis and his snow blower, Bill Clinton and his boxer shorts.
TV has accelerated the blurring of distinctions between fame and virtue: Cronkite is Geraldo is Homer Simpson, Oliver Wendell Holmes is Clarence Thomas is Judge Wapner.
Our Man Flynt, the porn profiteer, exemplifies this. Last year, conservative weather vane Arianna Huffington attended his wedding. Two years ago, tele-fundamentalist Jerry Falwell--who sued Flynt and lost over a Hustler cartoon showing Falwell and his mother being carnal in an outhouse--met amiably over coffee. Nothing personal.
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For journalists this has been unsettling. Flynt’s press conference Monday night, among the naked statuary, was marked by awkward silences and by questions striving to elevate adultery and a $300 legal abortion 15 years ago to the lofty language of justice and democracy.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe all of this has to bottom out, until our national parody of McCarthyism makes the intrusions so revolting, so despicable, that we realize that We The People alone can stop it, or none of us can hang a “do not disturb” sign on the door to our inner lives.
Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com
