He was instrumental in banning novels of Balzac and Zola in this country, because of their perceived indecency. Although Medved stops short of ever advocating government censorship, he resonates sympathetically with Comstock in his belief that the public deserves to be protected from dark literature. But our Supreme Court rejected this argument in 1953 when it held a government-enforced movie licensing scheme to be unconstitutional. In fact, dark, depressing, hopeless literature and grim movies share both their origins and their effect upon us. A great novel is a high quality mirror, as is a great movie.
Great movies are literature, no matter how dark the theme, and similarly conceal the strings.
Medved complains about the perception that critics should only judge the construction of a movie, not its values, and frequently acknowledges that movies he is bitterly criticizing are well-made. Then, going completely overboard, he complains that the art of the last three hundred years has largely organized itself around the overthrow of conventional mores. He dusts off the old saw about Michelangelo, Dante and Shakespeare praising, not criticizing, the governments they lived under. Medved is so far off base here that replying to him is rather like arguing with someone who claims the Earth is flat. For large stretches of antiquity, plays of Aristophanes and other playwrights were not permitted to be performed because of their indecency.