Copyright New Republic Jan 6-13, 1997"Words such as respectable, insightful, and icon are spilling from the tips of some decidedly unexpected tongues." -from the introduction to an interview with Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler, in the July 1996 issue James Carville, having run through his patter of Ken Starr jokes, suddenly grows somber. "Milos Forman lost his parents in the Holocaust," he says, introducing the Czech director who will introduce the new movie the Washington establishment has gathered to watch, The People vs. Larry Flynt. "The first thing a totalitarian state goes after is pornography, and when they do, the public applauds. It gets worse from there." Carville's wife, Mary Matalin, rests a fidgety hand on her fur coat. George Stephanopoulos stops throwing popcorn and catching it in his mouth. The People vs. Larry Flynt is meant to be consumed with grave import, and it is; the post-viewing crowd mingles in subdued tones. Carville, who has a large-ish ranting role in the movie, says later that this reaction is a measure of his vehicle's subtle, nuanced nature. "Like they say in wine tasting, the movie had a long finish," he explains. "I can't imagine anyone going to see that movie and not stopping for a cup of coffee to talk about it."
The Christmas movie season is Hollywood's time for thinking large about large subjects. In the summer, it may be all sex, drugs and violence, but the winter solstice is a serious time, and it calls forth serious cinema about, well, sex, drugs and violence. But not pointless sex, drugs and violence. Sex, drugs and violence with a message-two thumbs up not from Joe Bob Briggs but from Frank Rich. This Christmas, pond scum is intellectually chic. Larry Flynt, once merely a millionaire publisher of vile, racist, scatological, pig-ugly and violently women-hating porn, has arrived, finally, at respectability's doorstep. Dredged from the sump just in time for HustLer's twenty-fifth anniversary, the old slimemeister has been retrofitted as a hardscrabble defender of American freedoms. It's a transformation that longtime Hustler regulars watch with some awe. "I once wrote a couple of pieces for Hustler, and I used to dread that David Broder would see them," says Rudy Maxa, who covered the Flynt saga for The 
Washington Post. "It wasn't so chic back then. Now if I say at a dinner party I'm one of Larry Flynt's best friends, I get a lot of interest. I get a big kick out of it."
In between coast-to-coast signings for his new autobiography, An Unseemly Man ("I can't keep track of him," frets his agent), Flynt is juggling calls from "ABC, NBC, MTV, print press, magazines, it's absolutely overwhelming," she frets yet again. And the coverage is respectful, almost reverential: "the most timely and patriotic movie of the year," raves Frank Rich in The New York Times. Barry Hannah, in a breathless profile in George (which is holding a private screening) is nearly silenced by admiration: "Flynt and I are the same age, and when you see him you feel, in the fight for freedom, a relative coward." Hannah leaves us this question to ponder: "Was Flynt our hero?"
You don't have to be Catharine MacKinnon to smell something fishy here. It's not, as MacKinnon or William Bennett might argue, that Flynt's magazine should be boycotted for corrupting young minds. And it's not that he doesn't deserve credit for fighting and winning, in the 1988 Supreme Court decision Falwell v. Flynt, one of the most important freedom of the press case since New York Times v. Sullivan. But our hero? In their desperation for a resounding liberal epiphany, the media seem to have swallowed Flynt's glossed-over image of himself. "We are talking about freedom!!" Woody Harrelson's Flynt screams at a group of reporters in one of the movie's endless portentous moments. "Doesn't anybody know what that means anymore?!" Script direction: "The reporters are silent. Larry is all choked up."
Crucial to the new Flynt mythology is faith in the movie's unstinting honesty; the idea that his new acolytes have bravely plumbed the abyss that is Larry Flynt's soul and have unflinchingly exposed this horror to the moviegoing public. "What makes this movie so effective is that it doesn't sentimentalize or airbrush Larry Flynt," writes Rich. Forman says he strove "not to glorify any of [Flynt's] life. I didn't try to cover the ugly side." The scriptwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, are adamant on this point. "I don't think anyone will accuse us of whitewashing here," says Karaszewski. "As purists, we try to be honest."
Excuse me? What about, to start with the most obvious, the whitewash of shaving 200 pounds off Flynt and chiseling him into Woody Harrelson? "We knew we needed a real star because the subject matter was so strange," admits Alexander. "The studio would not have been comfortable if we had gone with Tom Arnold."
There must have been many things that made the studio uncomfortable. The movie opens with a barefoot and freckled 10-year-old Larry peddling moonshine to the locals in eastern Kentucky (script direction: "Larry is backwards, dirt poor, barely educated, yet bursting with Huckleberry Finn industriousness"). Soon he parlays his entrepreneurial vigor into a series of go-go clubs. The clubs are skanky, but they are also just this side of cool. He pays his girls well and treats them with respect, except for the occasional pat on the bum. He loves girls; in fact, it's because the female body is the most beautiful of God's creations that he wants to share it with his fellow man. The central drama is the love story of Larry and Althea, his soulmate and muse. It's a story about what a mischievous but good-hearted young man has to do to make it in a tough world, and what he learns along the way about liberty, the Constitution and the inalienable rights of man. Basically, it's an updated Capra flick: Mr. Juggs Goes to Washington.
In the movie, Hustler is almost accidentally in the nudie business (which is, by the way, presented as pretty innocent). Its real mission is social progress. It is engaged in the noble task of "breaking taboos": publishing nude pictures of Jackie O., a cartoon of Dorothy and the Tin Man having sex, and interracial orgies. And it is engaged, too, in the artist's calling of showing life as it is: Playboy's hairless bunnies are replaced by working girls spreading it all under the bright lights. "God made the genitals. Who are we to say they aren't beautiful?" asks Woody/Flynt.
But what distinguishes Hustler is not its bare-all daring-the adult section of any newsstand is full of lesser-known titles brimming with genitalia-but its relentless depiction of sex as beastly and of sexual creatures as beasts. Sex in Playboy is a barefoot romp in the park. Sex in Hustler is a freak show. The magazine's pictorials are violent, depressing and perverse. The objects of sexual desire are often chosen precisely for their unwholesomeness. They mock and debase the very idea of the female body as sacred: women smeared with excrement, 300-pound women, women with penises-a horror house of Diane Arbus rejects. Hustler's preferred sex toy is a pile of shit. There is a running joke ad called "Buttwiper Beer-the King of Smears," showing a woman's firm, sexy behind with diarrhea dripping down her leg. Couples have sex by smelly urinals, a man masturbates while watching a fat woman pee. As Flynt writes in the September 1994 issue: "the desire to prick a pompous inflated bimbo is perfectly natural." (Yes, and so also to deflate a pompous prick.)
Flynt's venomous, bestial depiction of the world is not limited to women. What fits least well with the image of Flynt as liberal icon is the unbridled racism in Hustler, also left out of the movie. The magazine's pages are filled with pictures of fatlipped black men-Negroes, actually-stuttering in semi-literate English or waving their oversized manhoods. In one, a smirking Louis Farrakhan chomps on watermelon while watching two white women make it. In another, a Negro picking cotton in the antebellum South waxes prophetic: "Payback's a comin'," he says. "Two hundred years from now we'll sell 'em drugs and make their daughters hos. Then they'll be our slaves."
So what? Art is complex. Truth is ugly. The way of progressivism is not for the faint of heart. And so on. But the idea of Flynt as a man whom good liberals must regard as heroic falls apart for another reason: the facts of Flynt's own life. When, as noted in the movie, Flynt described himself as a "scumbag," it was rare modesty. Flynt has led the sort of life that gives sordid a bad name. If all you knew about Flynt came from Milos Forman, you would get the impression that Althea was the only woman he married. You would also get the impression that he passed most of his days winning over juries with impassioned speeches on the First Amendment. In fact, Althea was the fourth of Flynt's five wives. And the story of Flynt's serial marriages is an unenlightening one. Flynt's bootstrap autobiography maintains a calm, sentimental tone throughout ("I made a lot of mistakes..."), except when it comes to his ex-wives. First there's Mary, a blonde he met at a bar in Dayton. Only after they were married did he learn, to his horror, that he was "the only one in the place who hadn't screwed her!" Then there's Peggy, the girl-next-door type. She turned out to have "the morals of an alley cat."
One viewer of The People vs. Larry Flynt who knew a bit about the subject beforehand is Tonya Flynt-Vega, who is 31 and one of five children whom Flynt fathered but didn't live with. This summer, Flynt-Vega publicly accused her father of sexually abusing her. Flynt, calling his daughter "a habitual liar," has denied the accusation. His daughter won't divulge the details, making it impossible to know what really happened. But she says some of her other stories ring painfully true. Like the time Flynt sent her and her mother, who were living in public housing, a Christmas card with $500. Inside was a picture of Santa exposing himself to a little girl. Flynt says he never sent the card. "This movie makes Hustler into a coffee-table magazine," Flynt-Vega says. "It lifts my father up as some kind of American hero, like Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde. He's very manipulative, and he's just bought himself a respectable place in history."
Flynt's angry daughter is right about the movie. Forman's supposedly harsh examination of Flynt's life is really as soft and gauzy as a Playboy bunny shot. Even the fact that Flynt was a drug addict is presented with apologies. There is a brief interlude where an increasingly haggard and bloated Flynt ingests handfuls of pills and watches his wife do the same, but, as we learn later, it was only to dull the pain after he was shot. As soon as the pain is over he quits, "cold turkey." The movie ends with a teary, grieving Flynt, watching home videos of his dearly departed Althea. Forman excuses himself for his dishonesty. Artistic license and all that. "Bio pics are boring," he says, explaining why he left certain incidents out. But what Forman chose to omit is the central (and, incidentally, more interesting) truth of Flynt's life, and what he chose to include works to mitigate against that truth, in favor of what's politically apt.
As it happens, Forman's airbrushing of Flynt works against the core intellectual defense of Flyntism. Flynt's worshipers argue that accepting the grim, grubby reality of Flynt is the whole point. Flynt (and Hustler), they say, is the authentic voice of working-class America. "If you had a provocative magazine and it appealed to more educated people, it was all right," writes philosopher /movie star James Carville in the latest issue of Hustler. "But for blue-collar people to have this was less desirable. One thing to ponder. Are the masses entitled to as much provocative art and provocative magazines as the elites are?" Carville's view is shared by a certain breed of feminist, the vampish kind that gets a thrill from seeing Camille Paglia surrounded by her bodyguards. One such person is Laura Kipnis, who has just published Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, with a chapter devoted to Hustler. The author's photo shows a dreamy-eyed Kipnis leaning back on a Turkish pillow, her hair tousled, her billowy blouse wrinkled and undone.
Kipnis upbraids her feminist colleagues for one of their most "formative blind spots": class. Hustler, she argues, "rants madly" against privilege, making it "by far the most openly class antagonistic mass-circulation periodical of any genre." She chalks up its grossness to "Rabelaisian transgression," a triumph of carnivalesque inversions: "the out-of-control, unmannerly body is precisely what threatens the orderly operation of the status quo." And we would all see its value if we gave up our prudish "insistence ... [on] high-minded language."
But to accept Flynt's vision of the working class is, to say the least, condescending. Flynt invents a cast of blue-collar characters-buck-toothed sex maniacs, peeping Toms-and then spits on them. His working class has no aspirations outside the four walls of their truck beds. They mock American institutions and dream of nothing more than they already possess. Flynt actually disdains the working class, and his disdain shows in his lifestyle. He wheels around his mansion in an $85,000 gold-plated wheelchair and marvels at his French provincial and eighteenth-century English antiques, Persian rugs and faux Old Masters. He likes to brag to reporters that his average reader is 28 and has a median income of $50,000. He thought they were Joe Lunchbox types but was surprised in a recent survey to find he had more highly educated readers. "Ph.D.s must be more open-minded," he says. Thus, The People vs. Larry Flynt.
That Milos Forman should have an exaggerated impression of Flynt's heroism is understandable. After all, he points out, the two brutal regimes he lived through, the Nazis and the communists, "started with crusades against perverts." But for Frank Rich or Barry Hannah to repeat this mantra is stunningly empty. After all, Larry Flynt's story does not prove America is a dangerous place, but the opposite. There has never really been anything close to a real threat to Larry Flynt's liberty or his peculiar pursuit of happiness. Each time a narrow-minded Southern judge fined him or threw him in jail, the decision was overturned on appeal. He warns, and others repeat, that he was sentenced to twenty-five years. But he only served a few days, and, as he gloated at the time, his circulation skyrocketed. The court case on which Forman's entire movie is based was not even a censorship case. The very title of the movie is a lie. The case wasn't The People v. Larry Flynt. It was Falwell v. Flynt. It wasn't, in other words, an effort by the state to censor free speech. It was a libel case (much like the libel case Flynt plans to pursue against his daughter), an effort by one citizen, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, to prove that another citizen, Larry Flynt, had lied about him in publishing a parody interview in which Falwell talks about having sex with his mother. Flynt didn't go to court to stop the totalitarians from starting down the slippery slope of censorship. He went to court to protect his bank account. In doing so, he accidentally protected the right of free speech. That's not particularly brave or heroic. The real protectors of American rights are rather boring. They're a few dour justices and the Constitution that guides them. But that wouldn't make much of a movie.
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