The ongoing debate over Times Square
reminds me of last year's dustup
over Milos Forman's bio-pic about Larry Flynt. That debate was
not so much over a movie that glorified a purveyor of misogynistic
smut but over the choice of a pornographer as a kind of ideal
violator of public values and hence a suitable subject for a film
in celebration of freedom of speech. In constructing him as an
avatar of free expression, Forman foregrounded Flynt's roguishness,
vulgar charm, and old-fashioned uxoriousness. And by choosing
the amiable and attractive (and young) Woody Harrelson to portray
Flynt, Forman was better able to conjure sympathy for his subject's
struggles for self-expression. The argument against this--a telling
one--is that the rhetoric of the film, in its creation of a character
with whom the audience could identify, chose a pornographer in
lieu of, say, a Nazi bent on marching through Skokie, and thereby
implicitly suggested that pornography is--on some larger scale
of public values--a more fundamentally benign violation. This
is clearly a hierarchy established at the expense of women, and
the objection to the film is precisely that the very possibility
of making a charmer out of a truly loathsome pornographer is only
possible via culture's greater willingness to tolerate this implicit
denigration.
Much of the argument over Times Square is also framed as a question
about the rights of the sex trade and--like the debate over Flynt--is
often couched in a veneer of standard-issue liberal pieties. These
include not simply the notion that the sex industry is entitled
to a kind of locational freedom of the city but also the idea--as
expressed, among others, by Rem Koolhaas in Grand Street
last year--that Times Square has a special "authenticity"
bred of the coupling of pornography and density and is thus entitled
to absolute tolerance. Of course, this particular argument works
best retrospectively, as counterpoint to the looming Disneyfication
of the place. As with the Forman film, the freedom--the license--of
the sex scene is to be preferred to the homogenizing repressions
of the mouse. And, like the Forman film, the same fallacy is unpacked.
Sex for sale--and here we are presumably meant to be drawn to
the exemplary liberalism of the tolerant Dutch with their medically
inspected sex workers under glass--is like Larry Flynt, a transgression
sufficiently benign to be embraced as a victim of big brother
rather than big brother's own m.o.
But the Forman film suggests another, even more serious consequence
of current strategies toward Times Square. By choosing Flynt--whose
pornographic production abounds with images of women tortured
and mutilated--as a poster boy for free speech--there is a conflation
of Flynt's pornography with pornography in general. This all-or-nothing
approach, which refuses to make distinctions within the field
of the pornographic, leads with little difficulty to an identification
of the pornographic with sexuality in general. At the end of the
day, this is--ironically--the problem of the film. Embraced under
the shining aura of "free speech," all sexual practices
become as one.
In Times Square this leads to a false choice: either celebrate
the crummy and degraded sex bazaar as it is (Koolhaas's monument
to his beloved laissez-faire), or bring on Disneyland. Disneyland--symbolized
by that hairless, sexless mouse--is the representation of the
kind of totalizing approach that is anathema to what has been
best about Times Square, its complexity, unpredictability, louche
charm, and--yes--its concentration of sexual energy. Disneyland
is the postmodern version of urban renewal, advanced not on the
theoretical grounds of a hygienic fantasy of a universal working-class
subject living in circumstances of utter sameness, but on the
grounds of a hygienic fantasy of a universal tourist-class subject
playing in circumstances of utter sameness. Either way, the agenda
is the same.
In making this argument, I raise one of the great and necessary
difficulties of the discussion of Times Square. Times Square is
burdened by the competing claims of the exemplary and the exceptional.
Clearly, the "otherness" of the place and its historic
role as a sanctuary for both diversity and deviance simultaneously
attract liberal opinion and appall a proper bourgeois sense of
urban decorum. More, in the richly coded language of urban description,
Times Square has come to symbolize not simply a criminal environment
but a zone in which "the criminal element"--which is
to say black and gay men--is given the right of the city at the
very core of the city. In New York, where "crime fighting"
is the leading item on the municipal agenda, the demonization
of Times Square can only presage its demolition and "cleanup,"
a standardization and scaling up that will dilute the mix to acceptable
strength, the same hygienizing cycle that was brought to us historically
by the (we thought) discredited history of exclusionary zoning
and urban renewal.
History, of course, does repeat itself. First as tragedy, then
as farce, then as a made-for-TV movie, then as a cartoon, then
as a Broadway musical. . . . It does not seem entirely just that
Times Square be made to bear the burden for the entire culture.
After all, Times Square is not responsible for television, for
the immaterial antimatter that has produced the circumstances
for its annihilation. It bravely fights back by deploying an enormous
analogue, lightbulbs like pixels, a synesthesia of luminosity,
David Letterman stories high on the Jumbotron, biggest TV in the
world. It may be true that the culture prefers Beauty and the
Beast, but it is certainly true that the vast majority of
both the Square's defenders and detractors have seen neither Cats
nor the show at the Adonis. And of course, it is terribly true
that the demise of Times Square, its conversion to another version
of the recursion of Vegas (which has now built its own Times Square,
even more pared and distilled than the vanishing "original")
must be blamed squarely not simply on the energetic advocates
of sanitized fun but on our own failures to propose a better idea.
1998