Dolespotting
By Tyler Barley

Last week I spent an evening doing what comes naturally: locating a bottle of cheap, fermented comfort and settling down with friends and relations to watch some filmed entertainment. Some of the relations smoked an illegal substance that Supreme Court justices have been known to ingest, and we all sat enraptured by the full-bore comic book that is Natural Born Killers. Since we obviously were in a brain candy mode, we topped that silly movie off with The Secret of N.I.M.H.

Of course, such activities draw the wrath of both Bill the C and Bob Dole Bob Dole. Both men have orchestrated self-serving and hypocritical attacks on the entertainment industry in hopes of raising political capital. The usual suspects are targeted: successful black entrepreneurs, women and "liberals" in general. After all, back in 1987 most of the country believed that the L.A.P.D. deserved its community's respect. Those NWA guys were way out of line, decrying police brutality and racism. Shame, shame. Sit down and shut up, black man (well, maybe they used another word in private).

And plenty of folks have jumped on the bandwagon. Right now there's a lot of handwringing over the movie Trainspotting, which supposedly glamorizes drug use. But, hey, just the appearance of Nancy Reagan anywhere screams "diet-pill amphetamine junkie" to me. And in the world of the cultural conservative, she's considered some kind of role model.

But I know I'm getting off the subject. Folks railed against Natural Born Killers even before its release, and even now John Grisham is suing Oliver Stone because he refuses to believe people should take ultimate responsibility for killing another human being. I'd be happy to join a class-action counter-suit alleging mental cruelty for having to read any of his books or sit through a movie inspired by his insipid writing. Didn't the Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne verdicts tell Grisham anything? Stone is as easy target for such silliness, I guess.

Hey, I don't consider the movie any great shakes, artistically or any other way. I just like watching Stone's bombastic amusement from time to time. No big deal. God knows Bob Dole Bob Dole has been on the outs with Stone at least since Salvador, for reasons that are apparent to just about anyone. But the Republican camp's recent attacks on such "kiddie subversion" as the aforementioned Don Bluth production kinda surprised me.

See, the movie (which is at least ten years old) is based on a children's book called Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H. Some weird litigation caused changes in the names of the movie and the main character, a mouse by the name of Mrs. Brisby, but for the most part, the movie presents a simplified version of the book's events. And I think there are more than a few bits that would seriously trouble the "pro-family" sorts. Let me delineate the trouble spots.

First, the rats in question have attained intelligence (they can read, write and purposely murder) through experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health. Indeed, they became so smart they escaped from the lab and set up shop on a farm ( in the bowels of a rose bush, to be exact). There are a couple of fairly graphic scenes depicting animals going through the regular paces of medical research. This biased view, of course, represents environmental activism at its most extreme. As all good Amurrcans know, the government and private industry must have the right to torture whatever critters they see fit. It's in the Constitution somewhere, quoth Bob Dole Bob Dole.

Second, the hero of the story is a woman. Alright, so she attained her position of power through the death of her husband (pretty much the only way women got anywhere in our country's political system until the latter stages of this century), but still, when the chips were down, the power of a woman saved the day. As recent Bob Dol Bob Dole comments on his favorite movies of the summer indicate, if the movie's main character doesn't have a penis or shoot a gun, that film won't be screened in a Dole White House. Sense and Sensibility, yer out.

And lastly, of course, Mrs. Brisby was a welfare mom. She visited various entities, both private (Mr. Ages, a mouse who escaped the N.I.M.H. experiments with the rats) and public (the great owl, the supreme power of the farm society). Mrs. Brisby had to rely on the kindness of strangers and her society to get by in a time of need. Shameful, indeed. Should have pulled herself up by her bootstraps and allowed her entire family to be literally plowed under.

I could also run through the occultic leanings, the fact that the bad guy shares a name with a famous athlete, the glamorization of a nomadic life (they're all terrorists, you know) and the overt interspecies sexual tension between Mrs. Brisby and a rat. But why stoop to overkill? This movie has "anti-family" written all over it. If a child watched it even once, it might decide to (gasp) think for itself and consider compassion a virtue.

Next time, I'll dig up some real family fare like Rambo and Falling Down. Nothing like excessive bloodletting, rancid patriotism and xenophobia to bring people together.

Tyler Barley lies in repose most of the time, surfacing only to reassert her overwhelming belief that people are stupid and mean.

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