MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Damned in the U.S.A.’ Documents Cultural War

Now that the Rev. Donald Wildmon has lost his $8- million suit prohibiting the showing of Paul Yule’s “Damned in the U.S.A.” (at the Nuart), you can see for yourself what all the fuss has been about.

Since its screening here last June as part of the Human Rights Watch Festival, the now 76-minute documentary on arts censorship arts in America has acquired an eight-minute prologue highlighted by Lou Reed’s performance of his sly “Walk on the Wild mon Side” and a TV clip of Wildmon saying the documentary is “so filthy I don’t want anybody to think I would be associated with it knowingly.”

One of the film’s several ironies is that it is Wildmon himself who neatly defines the issue at hand: “a cultural war for the hearts and souls of the nation.”

Yule, who made the documentary (Times-rated Mature for graphic sexual images) for Britain’s Channel Four, focuses the struggle on Wildmon’s censorship tactics, the NEA controversy, the Cincinnati obscenity trial over an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photos and the 2 Live Crew “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” case in Florida. What emerges is a succinct portrait of an increasingly multicultural society upon which Wildmon and others are trying to impose their values. In the process, the documentary reveals a colossal and dangerous semantic breakdown.

Wildmon generates a certain grudging respect as a man of integrity, whereas other self-appointed censors interviewed seem grandstanding, fire-breathing rabble-rousers.