Demi Moore has large breasts, and she loves to show them. Why shouldn’t she? They’re not really hers anyway, since they are less the handiwork of God than Dow Corning, Inc., makers of the silicone-gel packet. Besides which, Moore plainly says that her willingness to bare all — or, at least, every inch of her that has been approved for public display by her plastic surgeon and Vanity Fair photographer Annie Leibovitz — is what makes her worth $ 12 million a picture.
True, she didn’t receive quite that much to play Hester Prynne, perhaps the most memorable female character in American literature, in the new film version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. That paycheck came when she was cast in Strip Tease, due out this Christmas, in which she plays Mother Teresa — I mean, a stripper. Fear not, dear reader; just because Moore didn’t get $ 12 mil doesn’t mean you have to wait until Christmas to get a look at her in the altogether. And if a great American novel is desecrated in the process, who cares? What are you, some kind of elitist?
Moore makes sure that Hester Prynne shows up topless, and in a bathtub, no less, reminiscent not only of the ablutions of the 17th century Massachusetts Bay Puritans but also of About Last Night, the movie Moore made with Rob Lowe back in 1985, some time before she made the acquaintance of Dow Corning. Hester stands in her tub, slowly washing herself they must have dubbed out the sound of the silicon splashing around in there — as she thinks about that gorgeous hunk, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman), whom she had earlier espied swimming naked in the woods. Suddenly her hands disappear from view, she arches her head back, and . . . can it be? Yes, it can: Hester Prynne seems to be, umm, touching herself.
And man oh man, who could blame her? After all, she got to see not only the tortured minister’s tush, but also a whisper of his . . . well, modesty forbids me from mentioning the specific part of Oldman’s body that flits by for just a moment. But suffice it to say: You gals who love the male ecdysiasts at Chippendale’s, this Scarlet Letter is for you!
Perhaps you don’t recall the bathtub masturbation scene in the original novel. You’ve probably also forgotten Dimmesdale’s nude swimming scene. How about the scene where Hester is nearly raped by the son of the governor of Massachusetts Bay? Or the one where Hester’s long-missing husband, the brilliant scholar who comes to be known as Chillingworth, engages in a little marital rape himself?. Or the one in which Chillingworth scalps the governor’s son, believing him to be Dimmesdale? Or the one where an Indian leader named Metacomet storms Boston, kills all the bad Puritans, saves the city’s Christian Indians, and rescues Hester from being hanged as a witch?
None of this sounds familiar? How about this exchange:
DIMMESDALE: God help me, Hester, I love thee!
HESTER: I love thee, too!
Or this one, on the scaffold where Hester is sentenced to wear the scarlet A as a mark perpetually signifying her adulterous behavior:
GOVERNOR: Hester Prynne, do you deny you have sinned?
HESTER: I believe I have sinned in your eyes, but who knows if Heaven shares your views?
Hester tells the governor that the letter “is a badge not of my shame, but of your own!” Indeed, she does little after being compelled to wear the “A” but walk around yelling at everybody, even her boyfriend with the cute tush. ” You rush to your own ruin,” she says, shaking a finger at Dimmesdale, “and deny my right to stand up to their hypocrisy!”
The movie, written by Douglas Day Stewart and directed by Roland Joffe, is a particularly deranged example of neo-Bowdlerization. The original Bowdler, you may recall, was the 19th century editor who cut out all the sex from Shakespeare’s plays in a fit of prudery. Today’s Bowdlers engage in a kind of reverse prudery. They insist that any great work of art which fails to conform to their taste for explicit sex and leftist politics must and should be revised to conform to the fashionable tastes of the moment.
Usually, these revisions are theoretical, the work of academics who take joy in releasing the Ebola-like virus of deconstructionism on the literature of the past with the intention of destroying it. Now, in a $ 40 million work of soft-core pornography, Hollywood morons are working the same street as the Yale English department. As director Joffe has said: “To my amazement, as I reread the novel, it seemed there was an entire other book hidden inside. I thought: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to pry open the pages and look deeper into the story? Hawthorne is so clearly in love with Hester Prynne but he is also terrified of her. The whole book seems to yearn to set her free, but ultimately, Hawthorne can’t. He has pinned Hester like a butterfly and I thought it would be wonderful to pull the pin out of her and see her fly.”
These astonishing words could only have come out of the mouth of a man who considers himself educated, cultivated, and, as they say these days, “evolved” — more evolved, certainly, than Hawthorne, a writer Joffe nonsensically describes as terrified by the sexuality of a woman he himself created out of whole-cloth. The startling impertinence of Joffe’s Scarlet Letter is of a piece with today’s Hollywood, where the world’s most fantastically greedy people love to give speeches condemning greed at ceremonies where they bestow unearned awards upon one another.
In Hollywood’s Golden Age, the notorious vulgarian dictators who ran the movie studios had a totetalc respect for literature like The Scarlet Letter. They didn’t read it — couldn’t possibly understand it — but they respected it and feared it. Samuel Goldwyn, whose misuse of the English language was legendary, once moved heaven and earth to bring the aged George Bernard Shaw to Hollywood to discuss how they might work together. “The problem, Mr. Goldwyn,” Shaw is reputed to have said at the end of the meeting, “is that you are interested in Art, whereas I am only interested in money.”
Hawthorne was a writer of dark and unsettling imagination, one whose greatest work climaxes with the revelation that the letter “A” has literally engraved itself on the chest of the adulterous Dimmesdale. But could Hawthorne have imagined an American future in which the nation’s most beautiful women would pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to have goo inserted into their breasts by choice?
Actually, maybe he could have. Just because he was the foremost American chronicler of Puritan life, Hawthorne has often been mistaken for a Puritan himself — not least by Joffe — when he was anything but. Indeed, at one point, Hawthorne was a wide-eyed radical, a follower of a crackpot philosophy of personal liberation, socialism, and antinomianism that finally found its moment in the sun during the counterculture craze of the 1960s.
The Scarlet Letter is itself a radical piece of work — a tragedy about sin in which the villains are not the sinners but those who seek to judge and avenge sin itself. “What we did,” Hester tells Dimmesdale, who is still in agony seven years after their one liaison, “had a consecration of its own.” This is, not surprisingly, one of the few lines from the novd that make it into the movie.
Perhaps Hawthorne, the possessor of a genuinely tragic sensibility, would have appreciated the irony that he might share a tiny portion of the blame for the cinematic mockery that Demi Moore and her merry band of insanely tasteless hacks have made of his masterpiece.
By John Podhoretz
