Let's stop and ponder a cultural milestone: Castle Rock Entertainment paid Demi Moore $12.5 million to "appear" in their movie Striptease. This is the highest amount ever received by an actress. A victory for gender justice, certainly, and for the proposition, equal pay for equal work.

Megastars have been paid at these nosebleed heights for some time. What were they paid for? To be well-toned, look tough, fire big guns, and slaughter all the bad guys. Now it's a woman's turn. And what does Moore have to do? Well, being well-toned and looking tough helped, but we haven't even reached the monetary second comma yet. What pushed her salary into eight digits was her breasts. For letting us see her naked she got paid what Michael Jordan earns for playing 40-odd games of basketball.

Why are Demi Moore's breasts so expensive? Make no mistake about it, Moore has a great body, as she has amply displayed on screen, on tv, and on magazine covers. The mother of three, she has worked hard to be hard in all the right places. And the wonders of modern medicine have added softness where quantity is a virtue. The bionic woman has nothing on her.

Yet Playboy and its kindred display oodles of mammary splendor, as do real strip clubs. So why pay Demi $12 mill.? Her male counterparts get to do all sorts of things we ordinary mortals cannot: jump out of planes, fire laser guns, and bed pretty women. But most people do not have to drive that far to find a strip joint. One could argue that this is simply the latest evidence of Hollywood's moral degeneracy, or that this proves Tinseltown's misogyny, only valuing women as long as they take off their clothes. While true, these observations are so obvious even actors make them. They do not fully explain this particular top-heavy transaction.

I think they paid Demi over 250 years' worth of my wages because Hollywood's imagination is so Christian.

Striptease is a lust movie. The producers bet their millions that America desperately wants (i.e., lusts) to see all of Demi. And for lust to work, it needs a context that says it is naughty. Without the naughtiness factor all you have is someone embarrassed because he or she forgot to put clothes on. With it, you have heat, adrenalin, arousal, and the energy one needs to fuel ticket sales for a multimillion-dollar movie.

Lust works. I know. In seventh grade I was converted overnight into a bibliophile when I discovered Ian Fleming's Bond books had sex scenes. In high school I remember sneaking off and into a drive-in theater with my friends in order to see my first x-rated movie. Out-of-focus and just plain bad, the movie was a hit for us. Wired and thrilled, we were intoxicated with the idea that we had pulled it off, that we had seen something forbidden.

Lust is a prized commodity in Hollywood, but one that depends on a Judeo-Christian imagination in order to maintain its flammability. For the dynamic to work, someone (and in America, Christians take on this role) must establish moral boundaries (in this case, regarding the proper attire when men and women commingle) in order for Hollywood to flirt with crossing them. This cultural metastory casts Christians (usually referred to nowadays as the Religious Right) as the parents and Hollywood as the rebellious teenager who delights in revealing parental hypocrisy and how out-of-date Dad really is. Hollywood is thoroughly Christian in that it depends on Christian parent figures to define naughty and nice so it can subvert them for fun and profit.

This metastory is made explicit in Striptease. Congressman Dilbeck (embarrassingly played by Burt Reynolds) represents traditional authority. A card-carrying member of the Religious Right and friend of Newt, he pontificates about family values and is support ed by an obnoxiously clean-cut group called the Young Christians; at the same time, he is thoroughly corrupt and a drunk, murders those who get in his way, and has a secret "thing for naked women"-he anonymously visits strip joints.

Meanwhile, Erin Grant (Moore), whom Mom and Dad would label the bad girl because of her profession, is really a good girl who is the victim of our corrupt patriarchy-evil ex-husband, lawyers, judge, and so on. She strips only to earn enough money to win back custody of her daughter. Smart and resourceful, she outmaneuvers the bad guys and restores justice. Gee, Mom, you thought strippers were bad people.

But Striptease does not inspire lust; it invites boredom. Demi gyrates, struts, and reveals, and the audience fights to stay awake. In fact, most people simply stayed away. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Critics will explain the movie's box-office failure by pointing to its many flaws (it is amazingly bad). Cultural optimists might be tempted to see this as a sign that America is not interested in sleaze (yeah, right). But I think the explanation goes deeper.

Hollywood depends on a Christian imagination to define itself, but I would argue that it is becoming more and more incapable of understanding the basis for that imagination and thus is simply flubbing the moral dynamics of its movies. If Moore's character had hesitated over whether to return to her Edenic uniform, or even experienced some guilty pleasure in doing it, then perhaps the dynamics might have worked. But it is all stripping and no tease.

The culture that drives Hollywood cannot understand why stripping might be considered bad (a very judgmental notion) or why anyone would be ashamed about listing it on her resume. It is a post-Christian community driven by notions of self-esteem, polite hedonism, and individual freedom. As long as these exotic dancers are not coerced by the evil patriarchy, goes their line of thought, then nothing is wrong with what they do.

But this is a lust movie. Without lust it is a late-night, low-budget, made-for-tv whodunit. Still, can there be such a thing as post-Christian lust? Lust needs some sense of the forbidden. It haunts the murky underside of our personalities. It teases our consciences. If nothing is forbidden, lust is deflated. If nudity is no big deal, then lust hibernates. If stripping is just another job, lust is emasculated. If fornication is just a game played among consenting adults, then lust is reduced to showing bad taste. So how then does Hollywood do a movie that only works if it causes us to lust?

Badly. Or at least it does so with a split personality. For instance, when Striptease's dancers talk about what they do, Erin reassures them that stripping is "honest work" with "nothing to be ashamed of." In her very next line she confesses that she still gets nauseated before she goes out to perform.

One element of the story that rings true is Erin's discomfort over her daughter knowing, and later witnessing, what her mother does. This shame fuels Erin's courageous and risky attempts to thwart the bad guys, win custody of her child, and quit her job. That is the Christian understanding of morality at work. Here is the post-Christian side: Moore had her own seven-year-old daughter cast to play her onscreen daughter. Did you see Mommy dance, honey? Wasn't that fun?

Despite this lust-challenged mentality, Hollywood still loves the sexy movie. Other recent hot and heavy releases include Showgirls, Jade, Sliver, and Color of Night. And they all share this with Striptease: they flopped.

I am not saying that this is a victory, or that we should feel safer at future cineplex offerings. Anyone willing to pay $12.5 million to an actress to take her clothes off is bound to get it right eventually. They will find some poor ex-midwestern Sunday-school dropout who will remember how lust works.

In the meantime, we must play our roles as the parents. We can scold, give time out, or wash our hands and hope our California-bound adolescents grow up someday, but these strategies don't work with real teenagers. Our best recourse is to continue to model adult behavior as best we can-perhaps someone will notice and make a movie of it.

Still, I'm worried what they are going to ask some actress to do for $13 million.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 17

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