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On Resisting Temptation

AUGUST 12, 1988

 

A few years ago a request came in to the office of my television program, Firing Line. Would I have on Harry Reems and his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz? Harry Reems was being prosecuted under the federal obscenity laws for, in effect, being the Fanny Hill of the movie Deep Throat. The feds were going after him in Tennessee, for the same tactical reasons that motivate defense lawyers when they try to get a sympathetic jury. Tennessee jurors were less likely to be amused by wide-screen fellatio than New Yorkers or San Franciscans.

Well, of course this engaged the resourceful wit of Alan Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard and standby advocate for front-page criminals. Mr. Dershowitz (who down the line won the case) objected on several grounds: the first, the selection of Tennessee as the locus for the trial; the second, the broad question of civil liberties (you can make any movie you want except a snuff film is Mr. Dershowitz’s position). But in the course of the discussion I asked him about a particular feature of the film and he said he had not seen it. Not only had he not seen the movie whose star he was defending, as a matter of principle he did not intend to see it, because although he is prepared to defend the legal rights of pornographers, he does not want to encourage them in their trade.

The episode comes to mind in the current tumult involving The Last Temptation of Christ. Like most Americans I am a Christian, and therefore believe that Jesus Christ was the Incarnation—i.e., that he was at once man and God. For God, one exercises special reverence. We do not tell dirty jokes in church. And it is something of a dirty artistic joke to take such liberties as Martin Scorsese has taken in his movie. It tells us something about current perspectives that you could never get away with showing a fictional treatment of the life of Martin Luther King imputing to him the impurities, mutatis mutandis, imputed by Scorsese to Christ.

Now, it is entirely within the biblical tradition to understand that that part of Christ that was human flesh and blood suffered greatly during his ordeal on earth. Christ, the night before he died, asked God the Father whether that cup might not be taken from him. That is, in contemplation of the horrors that lay ahead, he hoped finally, desperately, to be spared them. That illumination of the human side of the duality of Christ is inspiring to Christians, reminding them of the true suffering of their savior.

But Scorsese helps himself to the remaking of Christ. He gives us a figure who, among other things, serves as a carpenter engaged in the making of crosses on which other dissenters from Roman law were crucified: the equivalent, two thousand years ago, of being the manufacturer of the gas pellets used to kill the Jews of Nazi Germany. On the cross, he gives us a Christ whose mind is distracted by lechery, fancying himself not the celibate of history, but the swinger in the arms of the prostitute Mary Magdalene. The blend of the ultimate altruist seeking in primal agony the fantasy of hot sex is something far from what a Senator Bilbo would have dared to do at the expense of Stepin Fetchit, badmouthing blacks in a smoker in the thirties, let alone on huge Hollywood screens with hawkers outside shilling for big juicy audiences to get a shot of impiety while protecting Artistic License.

In a way, Alan Dershowitz had it right. A truly civilized society is judged by the extent that it succeeds in governing its own appetites without the need of the law. Drug taking is also illegal, but everybody knows that anyone with a few dollars and an I.Q. of 100 can get all the drugs he can buy. To the extent that we are a civilized society we reject the use of drugs, as we seek to reject—and mostly succeed in doing so—the improvident use of alcohol and, increasingly, tobacco.

Even as we resist, to some degree, pornography, never mind the erotic satisfactions it can give. Professor Dershowitz was saying that in a free society, people will produce such a movie as Deep Throat, and people will go to see such a movie, even as, two thousand years ago, people went to the circus to amuse themselves by seeing lions and tigers and gladiators kill and dismember Christians.

But Dershowitz made a fine point when he said that he would not personally view the film made famous by his client. I shan’t see Mr. Scorsese’s film, any more than I would go to see a movie featuring George Washington as a drug trafficker or St. Francis of Assisi as a slave trader. Mr. Scorsese has given the Christian community a little opportunity to show their loyalty to our God.