Talk Shows That Dress In Sheep’s Clothing
I missed “Real Life Indecent Proposal” on the Jenny Jones show, when the husband talked about how he thought it was jim-dandy for his wife to “date” a millionaire, but I caught the follow-up. After the divorce.
The wife said she’d never slept with the millionaire, and complained about her husband’s jealousy. The husband complained he’d gotten nothing from the deal except a new car stereo.
As I’d never watched a daytime talk show before, I was amazed. Clearly, the pop-cultural zeitgeist had passed me by.
After awhile, the perky Jenny took her mike into the studio audience. The first audience member berated the couple for their immorality, greed and stupidity. So did the second. And the third. One woman told them to stop whining about the predictable effects of their behavior. “Where I come from, you’re a pimp,” she told the man, “and she’s your whore.”
The audience cheered.
I cheered, too. Then I wondered: Why are these sensible women sitting in the studio audience listening to this drivel?
The “cultural rot” of trash-talk shows is the new crusade of Mr. Virtue himself, former Education Secretary William Bennett, who’s teamed up with Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. Bennett, author of the “Book of Virtues,” led the campaign that embarrassed Time Warner into selling its gangsta rap division. Now he’s trying to mobilize indignation about TV shows that fill the afternoon air waves with the sex lives of the weird and shameless.
In their news conference, Bennett and Lieberman attacked a Jerry Springer show featuring a 17-year-old girl who has four children with her husband, whom she calls “Dad” because he was her foster father. He is 71. On a recent Jenny Jones: Discovering that a former lover has become an adult entertainer.
It’s estimated that a million teenagers and 650,000 pre-teens turn on daytime sleaze, and absorb its perverted values.
But this is not simply about protecting kids. It’s about protecting some sense of social boundaries between the normal and the abnormal, between the public and the private.
The “revolt of the revolted,” as Lieberman called it, does not call for government censorship. The revolters are trying to pressure advertisers into refusing to sponsor the most tasteless talk shows.
Trash-talk hosts claim their shows serve as morality plays, with the studio audience cast as judges.
This lets viewers revel in the lurid confessions and confrontations. Then they get to condemn it. Small-town morality lives, only with hotter gossip and a better choice of sins.
That, surely, is what motivated the studio audience who told off the “Indecent Proposal” couple so thoroughly. They got to look down - way down - on the featured duo without missing any of the dirt.
This urge to combine prurience and prudery is, of course, very American. The ultimate example comes from screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who wrote “Showgirls,” which is about a Las Vegas lap dancer.
“Showgirls” is not sexploitation, Eszterhas says. It is a saga of female empowerment. With a message. “The message is about a young woman who refuses to sell her soul, who refuses to sell out against the forces of corruption,” the screenwriter said on the “Today” show. This is a “spiritual message,” not to mention “almost a deeply religious message on a very personal level.”
Eszterhas might have said: Lots of men like to look at semi-nude women gyrating, so I thought I’d write a movie showing lots of semi-nude women gyrating, so I could make lots of money.
Instead, he wants to have his sex and moralize, too.
I don’t think there’s much social risk when trash is presented as trash. The risk comes when trash pretends to be spiritually uplifting, or therapeutic, or grittily realistic. After awhile, we might forget which is which.
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