A Sanitized ‘French Connection’ vs. the Hip-Hop Gutter

A highlight of moving to New York City after college 30 years ago was the second-run movie houses that afforded me the chance to see classic films—“Lawrence of Arabia,” “Ace in the Hole,” “Rear Window,” “Sweet Smell of Success”—on the big screen, as they were intended to be viewed.

Some showings were packed with fellow film buffs while others were oddly deserted for a city of more than seven million. One evening in the late 1990s I caught “The Exorcist” at a multiplex on 42nd Street. Maybe a dozen other people showed up. The only thing more surprising than the near-empty theater was how much I disliked the film, especially given its reputation as one of the all-time greatest horror flicks. The acting seemed fine, and the special effects were impressive for a film released in 1973. Still, I found the story about a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil far more repulsive than spooky.

The movie’s most famous scenes are when the girl, Regan, vomits into the face of a priest and when she slowly rotates her head until it’s facing backward. Elsewhere in the film, however, she urinates on a carpet in front of guests at a dinner party, defaces a statue of the Virgin Mary, and stabs herself repeatedly in the crotch with a crucifix and then rubs her mother’s face in the blood. “The Exorcist” doesn’t wear its misogyny lightly. For most of the film, you’re watching grown men torment a helpless little girl with escalating cruelty.

“It’s easy to see why people, especially women, detested the picture,” Peter Biskind wrote in “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” his acclaimed history of the era’s defining movies. “It presents a male nightmare of female puberty. Emergent female sexuality is equated with demonic possession, and the men in the picture—almost all celibate priests—unite to abuse and torture Regan.”

William Friedkin, who directed the film, died last week at 87. Two years before “The Exorcist,” he made another pathbreaking movie, “The French Connection,” which collected Oscars for best picture and best director. “The French Connection” stars Gene Hackman as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, a New York City detective who’s trying to bust up an international drug-smuggling ring. There “were no clear-cut heroes and villains” in the film, Mr. Biskind wrote. “Friedkin resisted Hackman’s inclination to sentimentalize his character.” So much for that.

The New York Times recently reported that a version of the “The French Connection” now available for streaming edits out a scene early in the film in which Doyle uses a racial slur to refer to a black suspect who stabbed Doyle’s partner while resisting arrest. Apparently, lurid and sensationalistic depictions of a preteen girl performing lewd acts with a religious object are fine, but realistic cop dialogue in a 50-year-old movie somehow offends current sensibilities. The censors are worried about the N-word, but it’s difficult to take that concern seriously.

Earlier this month, fans of hip-hop marked the 50th anniversary of the musical genre’s creation. It would be difficult to name another cultural phenomenon that has done more than hip-hop to normalize—if not popularize—use of a racial slur. Children today are far more likely to hear the word coming from a black person than a white person. Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds now dance, sing and laugh—seen a Dave Chappelle stand-up routine lately?—to entertainers who spew the term with abandon.

A-list hip-hop artists such as Jay-Z, Dr. Dre and Puff Daddy became fabulously wealthy trafficking in racist gutter lyrics and ugly stereotypes about black people. For decades, black parents have devoted an inordinate amount of time—with mixed success—to shielding their children from the materialism, drugs, promiscuous sex and thuggish behavior that pervade the songs of some of hip-hop’s most popular artists. They aren’t worried about their kids watching “The French Connection.”

Chuck D of Public Enemy, a pioneering rap group, took pride in spreading degeneracy among the younger generation. “You walk into a fourth or fifth grade black school today,” he told the Village Voice in 1991. “I’m telling you, you’re finding chaos right now, ’cause rappers came in the game and threw that confusing element in it, and kids is like, Yo, f— this.”

For generations, pop music has been a vehicle for adolescent rebellion, but we’re a long way from worrying about Elvis’s gyrating hips or the Beatles singing about their acid trips. Decades of glorifying the gangsta-rap lifestyle and, worse, presenting it as the only authentic black experience, have come at a cost. This is the hip-hop legacy that must be confronted sooner or later by people eager to edit an ugly word out of an old movie while ignoring its continuing use—and the implications of its use—in so many other contexts.