c. 1996 Religion News Service

Eds: Matt Zoller Seitz writes for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

(UNDATED) A while back, a friend told me he’d become a fan of the edgy, offbeat character actor Harvey Keitel. I urged him to rent “Bad Lieutenant,” a 1992 urban drama starring Keitel as a cop who’s fallen so far into degradation that the gutter is a step up.

“It’s absolutely not for the squeamish,” I warned. “But Keitel is amazing in it, and it’s a great movie.”

My friend rented it. Later, he told me he thought it was terrible _ so badly directed and edited that it was difficult to follow, much less enjoy.

I knew what question to ask next: “You rented it at Blockbuster, didn’t you?”

The answer, alas, was yes. Which meant that the film my friend rented was not “Bad Lieutenant.”

The real “Bad Lieutenant” _ the one that made several critics’ year-end Ten Best lists _ was rated “NC-17.” When this adults-only rating was created in 1990, Blockbuster Video decided not to stock NC-17 movies. Films that received that rating (or an “X”) had to be re-edited to “R” standards or they wouldn’t appear on Blockbuster shelves.

Sometimes the cutting is done with finesse; most of the time, it is not.

The video chain’s “NC-17” policy is part of a disturbing trend that has been gathering steam in recent years: censorship practiced not by governments but by corporations.

I am reminded of this because of the recent showdown between China and the Walt Disney Co. over director Martin Scorsese’s new movie about the Dalai Lama, which is funded by the Disney subsidiary Touchstone Pictures. The Chinese government, which is sensitive about all matters Tibetan, gave Disney an ultimatum: Pull the plug on the film or risk being denied access to the world’s largest consumer market.

Disney was faced with a clear choice: sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Goofy dolls and “Lion King” videos in China or stand up for Scorsese and the First Amendment. Though the company is not known for its moral courage _ it no longer allows its arthouse subsidiary, Miramax, to release NC-17 movies and routinely orders its mainstream films re-edited over directors’ objections _ in this instance, it did the right thing.

This kind of corporate backbone is rare in an age where edgy popular artists are routinely muzzled, bullied into compromise or shut out of the marketplace entirely.

Consider the following:

_ “Love Is a Good Thing,” a song on Sheryl Crow’s self-titled second album, contained this lyric decrying violence among kids: “Watch out sister, watch out brother/watch our children kill each other/with a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores.” In September, Wal-Mart banned Crow’s CD from its shelves.

Wal-Mart also refuses to stock any product bearing the likeness of MTV cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-head or any albums bearing the “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” sticker. The latter effectively bans many rappers and heavy metal groups from Wal-Mart entirely. Albums that don’t bear the “Parental Advisory” sticker aren’t necessarily home free: Record companies have changed CD covers, bleeped out words and phrases, even dropped whole songs to meet Wal-Mart’s standards of propriety.

_ According to the trade magazine Variety, media mogul Ted Turner denied a time slot on TNT’s schedule to “Bastard Out of Carolina” _ a film his company had helped fund _ because he thought its depiction of child abuse was too graphic for the network’s viewers.

The defenses offered up by Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, Disney and Turner are: (1) corporations have the right to make their own decisions about what works of popular art they will fund or sell and to ask artists to make changes; (2) artists have the right to look elsewhere for sponsorship; and (3) consumers are free to spend their money on art that has not been censored.

On a basic level, all of these things are true, but they rest on two dicey suppositions.

The first is that as long as artists are not physically prevented from making their art, the creative process has not been interfered with. That might have been true during the age of the printing press and the lithograph, but not in the business world of the ’90s, whose code word “synergy” translates as “I have all the marbles, so I make the rules.”

In an America that is moving ever faster toward a chain-store/mall culture of bulk shipments and Price Club discounts, this is cause for concern. Popular art that is frozen out of this culture becomes invisible, at least on a national or regional level, and thus incapable of influencing the way large numbers of Americans think about creativity, politics, religion or anything else.

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With each passing year, more media outlets are swallowed up by multinational behemoths. Sixty percent of U.S. videotape rentals are accounted for by three national chains: Blockbuster, West Coast Video and Hollywood Video.

Blockbuster alone accounts for 30 percent of rentals in the United States _ a figure industry analysts expect to double in the next four years thanks to the company’s policy of selling and renting tapes at or below cost in order to destroy independent competitors. (Since 1990, the number of independent video stores has dropped from 31,500 to 27,500.)

Blockbuster’s parent company, Viacom, owns or co-owns Paramount Pictures, the UPN network and the cable stations Showtime, Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi Channel.

Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest retailer, responsible for 8 percent of CD sales _ a market share that is also expected to double by the end of the century.

Time-Warner owns Warner Bros. Studios, New Line Cinema and the once-independent arthouse studio Fine Line; the Warner Bros. Network; cable stations HBO, Cinemax, TNT and Turner Classic Movies; several publishing houses and a string of magazines, including Time, People and Entertainment Weekly.

For filmmakers and musicians, it is no longer a matter of choosing one corporate patron from among dozens. Each corporate parent has several siblings, and they all answer to the same executive patriarchy.

What can be done? For starters, record producers and filmmakers could band together and request that a common clause be written into all of their contracts stating that when a work of art is considered contractually “finished,” and a third party requests that it be altered, the changed version must bear a label clearly stating, “This work has been edited for content at the retailer’s request.”

If such labels existed, I suspect the problem of corporate censorship would dry up. The pressures of religious and political groups are nothing compared to the prospect of millions of customers demanding explanations from beleaguered store clerks.

But this scenario almost certainly won’t happen _ partly because filmmakers and musicians are as prone to greed and spinelessness as the next person and partly because such stickers would be possible only in a world where film studios, record companies, cable stations and retail outlets weren’t all owned by the same companies.

What’s at stake is the right of legitimate artists to make provocative or controversial statements from a mainstream, public platform _ a right secured less than 30 years ago by a bold generation of young filmmakers and musicians and one that already appears to be fading into history, sold piecemeal in exchange for increased domestic and foreign profits and insurance against protests or boycotts.

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In this context, the idea that we can choose the kind of culture we want by voting with our pocketbooks seems woefully naive. Companies like Time-Warner and Blockbuster have increasing power to decide what names go on the ballot, what each candidate may say and what words he or she is permitted to use. In a system this rigged, all votes lead to the same outcome: a homogenized culture that leaves provocative artists shouting in the wind.

JC END SEITZ