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Belles lettres.

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Hollywood Courage

Joseph Epstein on how to get a standing ovation

WHENEVER HOLLYWOOD takes on what it thinks is a radically courageous subject, be sure that it is in reality only an occasion for a warm bath of self-congratulation, usually in already used, morally tepid water. I took a pass on The Cider House Rules, one such movie, because I don't go to movies about abortion, a subject and issue that seems to bring out the sanctimonious virtucrat in everyone. I'm told that the movie makes the claim that abortion is O.K., and maybe better than O.K., a damn fine thing. This is a proposition so utterly accepted by Culture No. 1 that it would require a social Geiger counter so fine not even Hammacher Schlemmer sells it to discover anyone in Hollywood who disagreed with it.

I did see American Beauty, another Hollywood adventure in bogus courageous movie-making, which presented another opportunity for one of those slightly skuzzy baths just referred to. I'm a bit uncertain myself wherein the courage of this movie derives. From showing a chap wanking in the shower - through isenglass, to be sure, and from behind? From portraying two way men as sweethearts, in every sense of the term? From showing suburban American family life as one inexorable nightmare? From mocking ambition? From suggesting that all violent emotion is really an expression of repressed homosexuality? From suggesting that adolescents are so much wiser than their parents? From all of this and a few further bits of received wisdom that I've probably overlooked.

All this, surely, is the stuff out of which standing ovations on Oscar night are made. Had I been in the Oscar-night audience when American Beauty won all its awards, I would have sat that standing ovation out, muttering to myself that-harummph, harummph-the only brave people in Hollywood are its stuntmen.

- Winter 2001

A Reading List for Every Young Woman

TWQ has hosted a number of symposia. In one, we asked participants to pick four books every educated young lady should read.

Roger Rosen blatt

DEAR JANE (I'll call you Jane):

You ask me to recommend four books for your college reading list. That's a good number, four. It forces your correspondent to choose works for more than pleasure, or even literary value. I guess it's the old, "What books would you want with you on a...

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