A Free Speech Hero? It's Not That Simple
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New York Times
December 22, 1996
A Free Speech Hero? It's Not That Simple
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Christmas week might not seem the best time to open a movie that celebrates a millionaire pornographer as an American folk hero. But in its own way, ''The People vs. Larry Flynt,'' Milos Forman's raucous hymn to the First Amendment, belongs to a season when the sacred and the crass are served up in one flamboyant pudding of consumer excess and sentimental redemption.
If America has a civic religion, as the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has observed, the First Amendment is its central article of faith. And the Czech-born Mr. Forman, with the gusto of a convert, is offering us an unabashed smut peddler as its patron saint, draped in all the star-spangled iconography that Hollywood can muster.
The movie, shown to acclaim at the New York Film Festival this fall and opening in theaters on Friday, has been critically embraced not only as an artistic tour de force but as a kind of democratic morality play.
But to some First Amendment legal scholars and practitioners, it all sounds a little too pat, if not too pious. They know that like any sacred doctrine, the First Amendment is subject to the conflicting interpretations of its true believers. And even with a United States Supreme Court decision to his name, Larry Flynt stands for only one version.
''A lot of the press reports have treated this as though Larry Flynt, for all his flaws, is kind of a hero of the First Amendment,'' complains Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at the University of Chicago and a First Amendment specialist. ''It's as if there are these evil people who are really moralistic and punitive, and then there are these freedom lovers. That's a really self-congratulatory, complacent way for movie makers to see the conflict.''
Even Burt Neuborne, the civil liberties lawyer who in the movie is cast against the grain as the self-important counsel to the Rev. Jerry Falwell, worries that ''The People vs. Larry Flynt'' is one-sided. ''Preachy'' is the word he used to describe some of the pro-Flynt courtroom speeches taken directly from court transcripts.
Can it be that a movie that features a cartoon of a sexually aroused Santa Claus is not too raunchy but too reverent about free speech to do justice to the First Amendment?
''I would have loved to see somebody in that movie make the case against the First Amendment position,'' said Mr. Neuborne, a former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and now a law professor at New York University. ''The pitch was always free speech against narrow-minded bigots. What you never heard was a more thoughtful voice.''
In fact, civil libertarians agree, a long tradition of First Amendment case law relegates sexual expression to the very fringes of Constitutional protection while jealously guarding political speech even at its most hateful. The free exchange of political ideas, no matter how offensive, has been enshrined as essential to the very purpose of the Constitution: self-government by the people. Obscenity -- in theory, at least -- remains one of the few categorical exceptions to the First Amendment, like libel, ''fighting words'' and falsely shouting ''Fire!'' in a crowded theater.
''Flynt isn't basically a political dissident; he's basically a pornographer,'' Mr. Sunstein said. While it may be permissible to publish ''materials that portray human beings as dehumanized objects for other people's masturbation,'' he added, ''people who think that's not protected by the First Amendment have got an argument, and they're not puritanical people who are trying to oppose freedom.''
But the movie gives us Larry Flynt (played to the hilt by Woody Harrelson) as the lovable enfant terrible of the Constitution, his redneck vulgarity not just the price of a free society but a bracing antidote to the social pretentions of scoundrels. He is the Horatio Alger of the sexual revolution, a poor Kentucky boy who parlays a string of seedy Ohio strip joints into a porn publishing empire, getting rich and having fun while thumbing his nose at the establishment.
What could be more American? To underline the point, Mr. Forman, who came to the United States in 1968 as a refugee from Communist repression in Czechoslovakia, is lavish in his use of red, white and blue.
In one memorable sequence, Flynt appears against a night sky filled with fireworks, flanked by drummer girls and a Statue of Liberty, like some Ruritanian vision of a Yankee Doodle dandy. The occasion is a bicentennial party at his first mansion, where a hot tub orgy becomes the prelude to his marriage proposal to Althea Leasure (played by the rock star Courtney Love), an under-age dancer with a keen bisexual appetite and the provocative business sense to propose a Wizard of Oz cartoon with an anatomically correct Tin Man.
In another scene, we are treated to a flag-draped chorus line strutting to ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic,'' and we see Flynt preach his gospel of unlimited sexual expression before a giant slide projection of waving stars and stripes. ''What is more obscene, sex or war?'' he asks as gentle porn is intercut with scenes from My Lai and Hiroshima. And when he is shot down and paralyzed by an unknown sniper on the steps of a Georgia courthouse, the movie suggests that he has been martyred by all the nation's darkest forces, deprived of his manhood, as he puts it, by an establishment that outlaws sexual release but celebrates violence.
You would never know that the most passionate First Amendment debates about pornography, then as now, concern sexual violence against women. Or that for many women, Hustler magazine in its glory years was synonymous not with sexual liberation or even sleaze (though it was truly sleazy) but with the imagery of violent sexism.
Fleetingly, we do see the notorious Hustler cover of a naked woman being fed into a meat grinder, as Flynt, who has just undergone a bizarre, short-lived Christian conversion, protests, ''I'm just trying to illustrate that I am not going to exploit the female body anymore.''
But we don't see another Hustler classic: the picture of a nude woman bagged like a deer and bound to the luggage rack of a car. That image was recalled by Frederick Schauer, a law professor who served on the Commission on Pornography, which was convened in the Reagan era by Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d.
''Even characterizing Larry Flynt's magazine as sexually explicit, rather than sexually violent, reflects a position,'' argued Mr. Schauer, whose title at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard is Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment. ''I want to resist thinking of Larry Flynt's glorification of violence against women as of a lesser order than the glorification of racial or religious violence.''
The paradox here is that under traditional First Amendment rules, the more pornography is seen as a form of hateful advocacy, the stronger is its claim to legal protection. Consider that one of the real landmarks of contemporary free speech law is Brandenburg v. Ohio, a 1969 case upholding the rights of a Ku Klux Klan leader who advocated violence and discrimination against blacks and Jews at a rally where some of his supporters brandished firearms. Don't hold your breath for a major motion picture about his contribution to American liberty.
But in the movie, Flynt is hard to hate even during his most demented, drug-dependent period. Yes, he wears an American flag as a diaper, spits at a Federal judge and twirls in his gold-plated wheelchair exulting, ''I'm turning the whole world into a tabloid!'' as U.S. Marshals storm his Beverly Hills estate to enforce a Federal subpoena. He also leads a posse of television reporters up a down escalator on a wild-goose chase, gleefully singing ''The Star-Spangled Banner.'' But in the era of Beavis and Butt-head and the Michigan Militia, none of it is necessarily an audience turnoff.
''A lot of things in that movie are embarrassing,'' said the real Mr. Flynt, who plays a cameo role in the movie as the Ohio judge who first sent Larry Flynt to jail. ''But it's my life. What can I say?''
Speaking in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles, he repeated lines from the movie: ''The price you pay in a free society is toleration. People have to tolerate the Larry Flynts of the world.''
Cincinnati didn't think so in the late 1970's. A 1973 United States Supreme Court decision, Miller v. California, allows local juries using ''community standards'' to determine obscenity, defined as material that is prurient, patently offensive and lacking in serious scientific, literary, artistic or political value -- what lawyers call the SLAP test.
In theory, the Miller decision still means that something that evokes shrugs in Times Square can be condemned by a jury in Cincinnati as ''prurient and patently offensive,'' terms once memorably explained by the Stanford law professor Kathleen M. Sullivan as ''turns you on'' and ''grosses you out.'' In practice, well before the Internet made ''community standards'' an unworkable concept, obscenity law withered and the pornography industry expanded into new markets through video, cable television and CD-ROM's.
''We've come a long way,'' said Mr. Flynt, whose Internet version of Hustler boasts ''the youngest flesh allowed by law.'' He added: ''You can see on cable TV today what I was publishing in Hustler 23 years ago. But there's still a long way to go, and there's a huge effort by the religious right to turn back the clock.''
Many in the arts and entertainment industry feel they're under assault by a conservative backlash that has targeted ''indecency'' in everything from rock lyrics and the Internet to art exhibitions. If obscenity has been hard to define -- famously illustrated by Justice Potter Stewart's declaration ''I know it when I see it'' -- ''indecency'' is at least as subjective and far more sweeping. Courts keep striking down laws based on the concept as unconstitutionally restrictive of free speech, but legislators keep passing new ones.
It was the narrower definition of obscenity in the Miller decision that young Larry Flynt confronted when he tried to promote his failing Hustler go-go clubs with a slick ''newsletter'' made up of nothing but nudie pictures.
''You've got to have some kind of text,'' the printer warns him in the movie, rifling through the proffered crotch shots with an inky thumb. The printer knows that a little text is necessary, if not sufficient, to drape Mr. Flynt's go-go dancers in SLAP value.
But it isn't enough: a local anti-porn crusade goes after the fledgling Hustler as Mr. Flynt wins national publicity for publishing photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunbathing nude.
The film revels in showing the porn entrepreneur's enemies as hypocrite socialites who can't wait to be shocked by the stack of Hustler magazines that the county prosecutor distributes at a ballroom dinner. Tongue-in-cheek casting and gag camera work add to the mockery: the prosecutor is played by James Carville, the Democratic political consultant. And when the main speaker denounces ''a new, darker influence in Cincinnati,'' the zoom to his name tag invites a double take: he is Charles Keating, later to be convicted of swindling billions in the savings and loan scandals of the 1980's. (The American court system moves in ways too mysterious for film makers to anticipate, however. Mr. Keating's last criminal conviction was overturned this month by a Federal court.)
Flynt, sentenced to 25 years in prison -- ''All I'm guilty of is bad taste!'' -- awakens to the importance of civil liberties law. With the help of a boyish civil liberties lawyer, played by Edward Norton, the conviction is overturned on appeal. Flynt is soon courting arrest in Georgia to challenge a local crackdown on his news dealers.''Why do I have to go to jail to protect your freedom?'' he asks a reporter as he is led away in handcuffs.
At least he says it to a man. For two decades, the First Amendment debate over pornography has been polarized by the argument that it oppresses women. The question has bitterly divided feminists and forged unlikely alliances between right and left on both sides of the issue. In ''Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex and the Fight for Women's Rights,'' Nadine Strossen, the president of the A.C.L.U., argues that the alliance of ''pornophobic feminists'' and traditional conservatives poses an unprecedented danger to sexual expression and to the idea that such expression is protected by the First Amendment.
But you won't find a hint of that argument in the movie. Catharine MacKinnon, the leading legal scholar of the anti-pornography faction of feminism, contends that First Amendment absolutism has left us with a marketplace of ideas where the speech of men, including pornographic speech, silences women. One does not have to approve of her prescriptions to see that by leaving out Flynt's female adversaries, the movie only bolsters that perception.
Ms. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin -- who sued Hustler and lost in 1988 in a case that does not figure in the movie -- contend that pornography hurts women, first those used in producing it, then others degraded, raped or murdered by its consumers. Ms. Strossen counters that there is no credible evidence of such harm and that censorship -- historically used to prosecute advocates of women's rights -- would hurt women and the cause of equality far more. At a time when the sexual is so obviously political, from debates over gay marriage and abortion to financing AIDS research, all obscenity statutes violate First Amendment principles, she argues.
In a joint telephone interview, the scriptwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski agreed that the ''intellectual arguments of feminists'' were less cinematic than ''the idea of the government putting you in jail'' for publishing some sexy pictures.
''Because of time limits, it is a bit of a black-and-white argument in the movie,'' Mr. Alexander acknowledged. ''The movie is a love letter to the First Amendment.''
It is also a love story -- minus Mr. Flynt's first three wives and four children, of course. And in Ms. Love's powerful performance, it is Althea Leasure who redeems the movie from its worst impulses. Empowered and exploited, shrewd and vulnerable, she embodies all the ambiguities and contradictions that abound in life and in art but not in case law. Indeed, in a film that did not pull its punches about pornography and the First Amendment, she, not Flynt, could be the Great Gatsby of the sex industry -- a sexually abused orphan who reinvents herself as a fiercely ribald princess of porn, contracts AIDS and dies in ''the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty,'' to use F. Scott Fitzgerald's phrase.
In legal terms, the United States Supreme Court decision that serves as the movie's climax and Flynt's vindication was an open-and-shut case: important, but easy. It turned on political satire, not pornography, and reaffirmed a line of case law dating back to 1964. The Court unanimously overruled a $200,000 jury award to Mr. Falwell for his ''emotional distress'' at Hustler's publication of a parody that had the Baptist preacher describing his ''first time'' as a drunken, incestuous encounter with his mother in an outhouse. For the court to have done otherwise would have declared open season on political cartoonists. The lower court had acquitted Mr. Flynt of libel, because the satire, labeled ''ad parody -- not to be taken seriously,'' was not taken by its readers as factual.
''Hustler is saying: 'Let's deflate this stuffed shirt. Let's bring him down to our level,' '' Flynt's lawyer, Alan L. Isaacman, tells the justices in the movie, as Flynt peels an orange in the background and casts triumphant looks at his adversaries.
But in a film that likes to have its kitsch and tweak it too, Flynt still does some suffering for his sins in grand Hollywood style. On the steps of the Supreme Court, a reporter asks Flynt if he has any regrets. Just one, he replies, and with Dvorak's ''Stabat Mater'' swelling liturgically in the background, the scene shifts to his lonely mansion. Sweeping up the grand staircase, the camera pans past the gaudy chandelier to the portrait of his dead love, Althea.
''Strip for me, baby,'' Flynt calls from the emperor-size bed they used to share, as he watches, on triple monitors, a videotape from the good old days.
 |
New York Times
December 22, 1996
A Free Speech Hero? It's Not That Simple
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Christmas week might not seem the best time to open a movie that celebrates a millionaire pornographer as an American folk hero. But in its own way, ''The People vs. Larry Flynt,'' Milos Forman's raucous hymn to the First Amendment, belongs to a season when the sacred and the crass are served up in one flamboyant pudding of consumer excess and sentimental redemption.
If America has a civic religion, as the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has observed, the First Amendment is its central article of faith. And the Czech-born Mr. Forman, with the gusto of a convert, is offering us an unabashed smut peddler as its patron saint, draped in all the star-spangled iconography that Hollywood can muster.
The movie, shown to acclaim at the New York Film Festival this fall and opening in theaters on Friday, has been critically embraced not only as an artistic tour de force but as a kind of democratic morality play.
But to some First Amendment legal scholars and practitioners, it all sounds a little too pat, if not too pious. They know that like any sacred doctrine, the First Amendment is subject to the conflicting interpretations of its true believers. And even with a United States Supreme Court decision to his name, Larry Flynt stands for only one version.
''A lot of the press reports have treated this as though Larry Flynt, for all his flaws, is kind of a hero of the First Amendment,'' complains Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at the University of Chicago and a First Amendment specialist. ''It's as if there are these evil people who are really moralistic and punitive, and then there are these freedom lovers. That's a really self-congratulatory, complacent way for movie makers to see the conflict.''
Even Burt Neuborne, the civil liberties lawyer who in the movie is cast against the grain as the self-important counsel to the Rev. Jerry Falwell, worries that ''The People vs. Larry Flynt'' is one-sided. ''Preachy'' is the word he used to describe some of the pro-Flynt courtroom speeches taken directly from court transcripts.
Can it be that a movie that features a cartoon of a sexually aroused Santa Claus is not too raunchy but too reverent about free speech to do justice to the First Amendment?
''I would have loved to see somebody in that movie make the case against the First Amendment position,'' said Mr. Neuborne, a former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and now a law professor at New York University. ''The pitch was always free speech against narrow-minded bigots. What you never heard was a more thoughtful voice.''
In fact, civil libertarians agree, a long tradition of First Amendment case law relegates sexual expression to the very fringes of Constitutional protection while jealously guarding political speech even at its most hateful. The free exchange of political ideas, no matter how offensive, has been enshrined as essential to the very purpose of the Constitution: self-government by the people. Obscenity -- in theory, at least -- remains one of the few categorical exceptions to the First Amendment, like libel, ''fighting words'' and falsely shouting ''Fire!'' in a crowded theater.
''Flynt isn't basically a political dissident; he's basically a pornographer,'' Mr. Sunstein said. While it may be permissible to publish ''materials that portray human beings as dehumanized objects for other people's masturbation,'' he added, ''people who think that's not protected by the First Amendment have got an argument, and they're not puritanical people who are trying to oppose freedom.''
But the movie gives us Larry Flynt (played to the hilt by Woody Harrelson) as the lovable enfant terrible of the Constitution, his redneck vulgarity not just the price of a free society but a bracing antidote to the social pretentions of scoundrels. He is the Horatio Alger of the sexual revolution, a poor Kentucky boy who parlays a string of seedy Ohio strip joints into a porn publishing empire, getting rich and having fun while thumbing his nose at the establishment.
What could be more American? To underline the point, Mr. Forman, who came to the United States in 1968 as a refugee from Communist repression in Czechoslovakia, is lavish in his use of red, white and blue.
In one memorable sequence, Flynt appears against a night sky filled with fireworks, flanked by drummer girls and a Statue of Liberty, like some Ruritanian vision of a Yankee Doodle dandy. The occasion is a bicentennial party at his first mansion, where a hot tub orgy becomes the prelude to his marriage proposal to Althea Leasure (played by the rock star Courtney Love), an under-age dancer with a keen bisexual appetite and the provocative business sense to propose a Wizard of Oz cartoon with an anatomically correct Tin Man.
In another scene, we are treated to a flag-draped chorus line strutting to ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic,'' and we see Flynt preach his gospel of unlimited sexual expression before a giant slide projection of waving stars and stripes. ''What is more obscene, sex or war?'' he asks as gentle porn is intercut with scenes from My Lai and Hiroshima. And when he is shot down and paralyzed by an unknown sniper on the steps of a Georgia courthouse, the movie suggests that he has been martyred by all the nation's darkest forces, deprived of his manhood, as he puts it, by an establishment that outlaws sexual release but celebrates violence.
You would never know that the most passionate First Amendment debates about pornography, then as now, concern sexual violence against women. Or that for many women, Hustler magazine in its glory years was synonymous not with sexual liberation or even sleaze (though it was truly sleazy) but with the imagery of violent sexism.
Fleetingly, we do see the notorious Hustler cover of a naked woman being fed into a meat grinder, as Flynt, who has just undergone a bizarre, short-lived Christian conversion, protests, ''I'm just trying to illustrate that I am not going to exploit the female body anymore.''
But we don't see another Hustler classic: the picture of a nude woman bagged like a deer and bound to the luggage rack of a car. That image was recalled by Frederick Schauer, a law professor who served on the Commission on Pornography, which was convened in the Reagan era by Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d.
''Even characterizing Larry Flynt's magazine as sexually explicit, rather than sexually violent, reflects a position,'' argued Mr. Schauer, whose title at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard is Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment. ''I want to resist thinking of Larry Flynt's glorification of violence against women as of a lesser order than the glorification of racial or religious violence.''
The paradox here is that under traditional First Amendment rules, the more pornography is seen as a form of hateful advocacy, the stronger is its claim to legal protection. Consider that one of the real landmarks of contemporary free speech law is Brandenburg v. Ohio, a 1969 case upholding the rights of a Ku Klux Klan leader who advocated violence and discrimination against blacks and Jews at a rally where some of his supporters brandished firearms. Don't hold your breath for a major motion picture about his contribution to American liberty.
But in the movie, Flynt is hard to hate even during his most demented, drug-dependent period. Yes, he wears an American flag as a diaper, spits at a Federal judge and twirls in his gold-plated wheelchair exulting, ''I'm turning the whole world into a tabloid!'' as U.S. Marshals storm his Beverly Hills estate to enforce a Federal subpoena. He also leads a posse of television reporters up a down escalator on a wild-goose chase, gleefully singing ''The Star-Spangled Banner.'' But in the era of Beavis and Butt-head and the Michigan Militia, none of it is necessarily an audience turnoff.
''A lot of things in that movie are embarrassing,'' said the real Mr. Flynt, who plays a cameo role in the movie as the Ohio judge who first sent Larry Flynt to jail. ''But it's my life. What can I say?''
Speaking in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles, he repeated lines from the movie: ''The price you pay in a free society is toleration. People have to tolerate the Larry Flynts of the world.''
Cincinnati didn't think so in the late 1970's. A 1973 United States Supreme Court decision, Miller v. California, allows local juries using ''community standards'' to determine obscenity, defined as material that is prurient, patently offensive and lacking in serious scientific, literary, artistic or political value -- what lawyers call the SLAP test.
In theory, the Miller decision still means that something that evokes shrugs in Times Square can be condemned by a jury in Cincinnati as ''prurient and patently offensive,'' terms once memorably explained by the Stanford law professor Kathleen M. Sullivan as ''turns you on'' and ''grosses you out.'' In practice, well before the Internet made ''community standards'' an unworkable concept, obscenity law withered and the pornography industry expanded into new markets through video, cable television and CD-ROM's.
''We've come a long way,'' said Mr. Flynt, whose Internet version of Hustler boasts ''the youngest flesh allowed by law.'' He added: ''You can see on cable TV today what I was publishing in Hustler 23 years ago. But there's still a long way to go, and there's a huge effort by the religious right to turn back the clock.''
Many in the arts and entertainment industry feel they're under assault by a conservative backlash that has targeted ''indecency'' in everything from rock lyrics and the Internet to art exhibitions. If obscenity has been hard to define -- famously illustrated by Justice Potter Stewart's declaration ''I know it when I see it'' -- ''indecency'' is at least as subjective and far more sweeping. Courts keep striking down laws based on the concept as unconstitutionally restrictive of free speech, but legislators keep passing new ones.
It was the narrower definition of obscenity in the Miller decision that young Larry Flynt confronted when he tried to promote his failing Hustler go-go clubs with a slick ''newsletter'' made up of nothing but nudie pictures.
''You've got to have some kind of text,'' the printer warns him in the movie, rifling through the proffered crotch shots with an inky thumb. The printer knows that a little text is necessary, if not sufficient, to drape Mr. Flynt's go-go dancers in SLAP value.
But it isn't enough: a local anti-porn crusade goes after the fledgling Hustler as Mr. Flynt wins national publicity for publishing photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunbathing nude.
The film revels in showing the porn entrepreneur's enemies as hypocrite socialites who can't wait to be shocked by the stack of Hustler magazines that the county prosecutor distributes at a ballroom dinner. Tongue-in-cheek casting and gag camera work add to the mockery: the prosecutor is played by James Carville, the Democratic political consultant. And when the main speaker denounces ''a new, darker influence in Cincinnati,'' the zoom to his name tag invites a double take: he is Charles Keating, later to be convicted of swindling billions in the savings and loan scandals of the 1980's. (The American court system moves in ways too mysterious for film makers to anticipate, however. Mr. Keating's last criminal conviction was overturned this month by a Federal court.)
Flynt, sentenced to 25 years in prison -- ''All I'm guilty of is bad taste!'' -- awakens to the importance of civil liberties law. With the help of a boyish civil liberties lawyer, played by Edward Norton, the conviction is overturned on appeal. Flynt is soon courting arrest in Georgia to challenge a local crackdown on his news dealers.''Why do I have to go to jail to protect your freedom?'' he asks a reporter as he is led away in handcuffs.
At least he says it to a man. For two decades, the First Amendment debate over pornography has been polarized by the argument that it oppresses women. The question has bitterly divided feminists and forged unlikely alliances between right and left on both sides of the issue. In ''Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex and the Fight for Women's Rights,'' Nadine Strossen, the president of the A.C.L.U., argues that the alliance of ''pornophobic feminists'' and traditional conservatives poses an unprecedented danger to sexual expression and to the idea that such expression is protected by the First Amendment.
But you won't find a hint of that argument in the movie. Catharine MacKinnon, the leading legal scholar of the anti-pornography faction of feminism, contends that First Amendment absolutism has left us with a marketplace of ideas where the speech of men, including pornographic speech, silences women. One does not have to approve of her prescriptions to see that by leaving out Flynt's female adversaries, the movie only bolsters that perception.
Ms. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin -- who sued Hustler and lost in 1988 in a case that does not figure in the movie -- contend that pornography hurts women, first those used in producing it, then others degraded, raped or murdered by its consumers. Ms. Strossen counters that there is no credible evidence of such harm and that censorship -- historically used to prosecute advocates of women's rights -- would hurt women and the cause of equality far more. At a time when the sexual is so obviously political, from debates over gay marriage and abortion to financing AIDS research, all obscenity statutes violate First Amendment principles, she argues.
In a joint telephone interview, the scriptwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski agreed that the ''intellectual arguments of feminists'' were less cinematic than ''the idea of the government putting you in jail'' for publishing some sexy pictures.
''Because of time limits, it is a bit of a black-and-white argument in the movie,'' Mr. Alexander acknowledged. ''The movie is a love letter to the First Amendment.''
It is also a love story -- minus Mr. Flynt's first three wives and four children, of course. And in Ms. Love's powerful performance, it is Althea Leasure who redeems the movie from its worst impulses. Empowered and exploited, shrewd and vulnerable, she embodies all the ambiguities and contradictions that abound in life and in art but not in case law. Indeed, in a film that did not pull its punches about pornography and the First Amendment, she, not Flynt, could be the Great Gatsby of the sex industry -- a sexually abused orphan who reinvents herself as a fiercely ribald princess of porn, contracts AIDS and dies in ''the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty,'' to use F. Scott Fitzgerald's phrase.
In legal terms, the United States Supreme Court decision that serves as the movie's climax and Flynt's vindication was an open-and-shut case: important, but easy. It turned on political satire, not pornography, and reaffirmed a line of case law dating back to 1964. The Court unanimously overruled a $200,000 jury award to Mr. Falwell for his ''emotional distress'' at Hustler's publication of a parody that had the Baptist preacher describing his ''first time'' as a drunken, incestuous encounter with his mother in an outhouse. For the court to have done otherwise would have declared open season on political cartoonists. The lower court had acquitted Mr. Flynt of libel, because the satire, labeled ''ad parody -- not to be taken seriously,'' was not taken by its readers as factual.
''Hustler is saying: 'Let's deflate this stuffed shirt. Let's bring him down to our level,' '' Flynt's lawyer, Alan L. Isaacman, tells the justices in the movie, as Flynt peels an orange in the background and casts triumphant looks at his adversaries.
But in a film that likes to have its kitsch and tweak it too, Flynt still does some suffering for his sins in grand Hollywood style. On the steps of the Supreme Court, a reporter asks Flynt if he has any regrets. Just one, he replies, and with Dvorak's ''Stabat Mater'' swelling liturgically in the background, the scene shifts to his lonely mansion. Sweeping up the grand staircase, the camera pans past the gaudy chandelier to the portrait of his dead love, Althea.
''Strip for me, baby,'' Flynt calls from the emperor-size bed they used to share, as he watches, on triple monitors, a videotape from the good old days.
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