art should trump elevation

When I was a kid I loved the movie Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939).  What I liked best was right at the end when Quasimodo takes to the ropes high above the gallows and swoops down in a great arc snatching Whatshername from the noose and swings back and deposits her in the church steeple where she has sanctuary from evil Whatshisname and the streets of Paris ring with cheers.  Ah, my friends that is entertainment.  Years later I read the book, lots more going on in there of course, good stuff, that Victor Hugo he can write.  But as we come to The End there she is on the gibbet and there is Quasimodo looking down, and there is only like a page and a half to go and I am thinking Quasimodo get on the stick, and then the trapdoor snaps open and there she goes and, and, it's The End. 

And I am thinking of The Last Detail.  Jack Nicholson and his partner are lifers in the navy with no real life outside of it and they are detailed to escort this poor young seaman to an awful brig for a petty crime.  The guys take a liking to the young seaman and on the way to the brig they take him out to bars, a whorehouse, to some hippie chanting group and finally they take him on a picnic in the middle of the winter where, emboldened by this vision of what life could be, he makes a break for it, but is recaptured by Jack and his partner and taken to the brig where a grim fate awaits him.

When the young seaman almost escapes we are all rooting for him of course and maybe later we are hoping for some Hollywood change of heart from the guys but none of this happens.  If it did we would be happy for a time, but the movie would soon be forgotten and not have the impact.

TV is of course a vast wasteland.  Maybe Hill Street Blues stands out.  Some of the cops were kind of rotten and some of the crooks were not so bad.  When NYPD Blue came out it I thought maybe it would be like Hill Street especially because Dennis Franz, a pretty bad cop from Hill Street was in it, but they turned him into a grumpy guy with a heart of gold and all the cops were good guys and all the crooks were bad guys.  When Law and Order first came out the good guys lost every now and then, but after awhile they won every case.

That thing in old movies where the criminal always had to get his comeuppance came from the movie code of 1930.  Sometimes you see an old movie and are surprised that it is pretty good and then you realize it was made before the code, like those comic books that came before the comics code.

I realize that Disney is not at fault for all that.  There is a kind of thought in the land that art forms should elevate people by showing them that the good guy always wins, therefore you should strive to be a good guy. 

Nowadays the PC folk have become the censors and judge movies by how much they adhere to their rigid moral code and they don't give a damn about whether it is a good movie or not.  A plague upon them.