Filth matters: the moral squalor of Hollywood.(CULTURE WATCH)

TWO things have ruthlessly conspired to prevent me from seeing as much cinema as I would like: parenthood and book-writing, which itself is a bit like giving birth to a child with painfully pointy edges and even less initiative or gratitude than a real kid. I have neither the time nor the energy to catch the buzz-generating highbrow films, at least not until after they wend their way through Hollywood's alimentary system and appear on cable or pay-per-view, already digested by every critic and blogger. And even if I disregard the spoilers and dismiss the lack of immediacy, it's difficult to watch There Will Be Blood when a five-year-old girl with the will of a Teamster and the eyes of Bambi insists: "There will be SpongeBob!"

Apart from having spent the last five years working on a fairly heady intellectual history, I usually need the eyepropping struts from A Clockwork Orange to endure anything less glandular than Roadhouse. If PBS's Miss Marple isn't standing in a jungle, cocking an M-16, and vowing "This time, it's personal!" she's not going to hold my attention for long.

Still, as John Dean's editors have said for years, people will always make room for mindless dreck. And so did I. Over the last few years, I've stayed abreast of my favorite shows (Deadwood, The Wire , The Sopranos, House, etc.), but I've also done a walkabout (if by walkabout you mean bunkering down into the couch) through the lands of toddler TV and teeny-bopper cinema. And I've made a perhaps unsurprising discovery: There's an enormous amount of left-wing crap out there.

And I'm not talking about the highbrow stuff that gets the attention of critics and the praise of cognoscenti. I'm talking about the stuff that is below the standards of the public intellectual, not worth the time of the Very Serious People who use phrases like mise en scene unironically and watch films the way Roman priests read goat spleens--but right up my alley!

And let's not delude ourselves: Crap matters. This is a more controversial point than you might think. Sure, we all know crap sells. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry grossed $120 million in 2007. La Vie en Rose: $10 million. But serious critics, on the right and the left, tend to ignore the middlebrow-and-lower fare as if it didn't matter. That's surely not the case. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, for all its childish humor and crude stereotyping, probably mainstreamed the topic of gay marriage more than any dozen serious art-house flicks on the same subject.

What's amusing--or dismaying--is how indistinguishable the highbrow messages are from the lowbrow ones. In the meaty intellectual movies, we get highly polished existentialism, radical autonomy, contempt for tradition and authority, and, most of all, the elevation of youthful passion over reason.

"I feel like I've been in a coma for the past 20 years. And I'm just now waking up," declares Kevin Spacey as American Beauty's Lester Burnham, who commences a "self-improvement" regimen that includes all of the staples: sexual obsessions, pot smoking, flipping off The Man.