The age-old story of an innocent in the big, bad city gets a refreshing twist in recent films that take . . . : A Detour on the Mean Streets

Think fast: What’s scarier than a giant ape, a speeding asteroid and Ken Starr combined?

If you’re a Hollywood producer, you probably said a trip downtown. At least that’s how it seems from the movies they make.

Cities, in movies, are frightening places. They can be frightening in real life, too. But, then again, so can public speaking. You don’t see many movies about the horrors of public speaking.

Cities, though, are different. The mythological urban landscape harbors our collective fears--of the Other, of the dark, of forces we can’t fathom, rules we don’t understand. And cities won’t let us forget the truth we most want to avoid: that all of us and everything slides inevitably into decay. Movie cities, in short, represent everything that drove us to the ‘burbs in the first place. Who would want to go back there?

A typical movie plot line: Character A (usually suburban, nearly always white) crosses into an urban hell against his will or better judgment, and endures all manner of calamity before getting out.

You can play it straight (“Judgment Night”) or you can play it for laughs (“Adventures in Babysitting”); the essentials remain the same. So does the message: Cities, and the people who live there, mean to do you harm.

The message is encoded in all kinds of films--from the original “Superman,” in which the Man of Steel spent as much time battling street thugs as he did saving the world, to the recent “Babe: Pig in the City,” in which our hero is chased by an urban bull terrier and duped by city monkeys.

“Throughout the representation of cities in literature and film the city was always presented in opposition to the suburbs or small town,” said Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television. Cities today are portrayed in the cliched way they are, he said, because of the culture’s inability to deal with the people who live there as flesh-and-blood. “It’s as though you cannot enter the city without encountering large social and political issues that I think are a very real part of that cliche,” he said.

He suspects this is one reason so many TV sitcoms--even shows like “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Living Single” and “Mad About You” that are set in New York--tend to feature either all-white or all-black casts. It is as if producers are unable to portray a racially diverse city without bringing those “large social and political issues” into it. Rather than do that, television portrays cities as racially polarized.

Movies trade in cliches and stereotypes all the time: the dumb Southerner, the black criminal, the Italian hood. Even a stereotype-busting movie like “Enemy of the State,” which posits Will Smith in the role of a corporate lawyer, is guilty. It portrays pasta-loving Italian Mafiosi so broadly that they almost seem to belong in another movie.

Ethnic stereotyping can be harmful. It is doubtful, though, that it can affect public policy the way the demonization of cities potentially can. Boyd, for example, noted conflicts that have existed in cities such as Detroit, where two public transit systems operate, one designed to serve the city, the other for the suburbs. Similarly, Atlanta residents who need to travel by bus to jobs in adjoining Cobb County must change bus systems to leave the city limits.

Political and racial polarization between largely black cities and wealthier, predominantly white suburbs has been blamed as a stumbling block to economic development and regional cooperation in cities ranging from Detroit to Atlanta to Camden, N.J., to East St. Louis. How responsible is it for filmmakers who personally would rather have brain surgery than get off I-10 on Crenshaw headed south to make movies that exploit and reinforce that schism?

The social messages in movies often lie below the surface. They creep in through the unexamined use of cliches--cliches, Boyd noted, that are perpetuated and reinforced by much rap music, which portrays itself as serving up the authentic urban experience.

Sometimes, though, the formula is turned on its head. It happened with “Bulworth,” the Warren Beatty satire released in 1998. It is a classic Innocent in the City story for much of its length, but it differs because Beatty was aware of the cliches and used them to address political issues head-on. Unfortunately, the clumsy handling of those cliches undercuts its intended message, and the movie morphs (like “Babe”) into another type of story along the way--the classic White Savior Among the Savages tale. But that’s a subject for another rant.

Another movie that subverts the formula is “Brother From Another Planet,” from 1984. It deals with a panoply of social issues by using the ultimate outsider, a mute alien, plopped down in the middle of Harlem. Unlike other Innocent in the City stories, though, the threats here are from the outside--he’s pursued by other aliens, and instead of corner drug peddlers, white businessmen are shown importing drugs into the city. And, perhaps most revolutionary of all, the Harlem the alien wanders through is a warm and caring place, a neighborhood instead of the fearsome “ghetto” we usually see.

Shorn of racial and class baggage, several recent and upcoming movies offer variations on the Innocents in the City theme, sometimes in inventive and wildly amusing ways. What they have in common, beyond the obvious plot machination, is that they all revolve around a symbolic clash of values. In each one, current-day social problems and cynicism clash with the innocence we associate with another era and with small-town life. And interestingly for these most jaded of times, each movie comes down squarely on the side of sweetness.

In “Blast From the Past,” a film that reaches theaters next month, Brendan Fraser plays a man who was born in a fallout shelter in 1962 and emerges for the first time at the age of 35 to confront a Los Angeles he can’t even begin to negotiate.

By the time the family surfaces like groundhogs after a long hibernation, a business district has sprouted on the orchard where their home once stood. The block has degenerated to the point that the family believes it’s seeing the remains of a bombed-out planet and that the people they meet are mutants. Leaving the side of his parents (Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek) for the first time in search of supplies (and a non-mutant bride, if he’s lucky), the childlike Fraser finds himself smack-dab in the middle of urban America.

“Oh, my God, a Negro!” he shouts happily upon seeing an African American for the first time. And he’s so out of date that he still believes in treating people with respect.

As Fraser meets a girl (Alicia Silverstone) and interacts with modern society, the movie uses the resulting culture clash to examine today’s value system.

The recent “Pleasantville” is virtually the same story told in reverse. Two ‘90s teenagers (Tobey McGuire and Reese Witherspoon) get sent into a fictional TV land frozen in a squeaky-clean and innocent era before AIDS, before Watergate, before Vietnam and promiscuous sex and cynicism. In the end, the displaced kids broaden the horizons of Pleasantville’s sorely limited denizens, but the brush with simpler, more innocent values changes McGuire’s and Witherspoon’s characters, too.

Before the modern teenagers arrive, the world beyond the borders of the fictional small town in “Pleasantville” doesn’t exist for the people who live there. Val Kilmer is in a similar position in “At First Sight,” which opens Friday.

He portrays a man who went blind so early in life that the only sight he remembers is something fluffy and white. A cloud? He’s not sure. Since then he has learned to use his senses of hearing and touch to perceive reality. When he takes Mira Sorvino, playing a New York architect, on a walking tour of his village, he stops at the edge of the business district.

“What’s out there past the street?” Sorvino asks, referring to an abandoned building in the woods.

“Nothing,” Kilmer answers blankly. And for him this is true.

The plot will eventually take him “out there past the street,” into New York City, where his sight will be restored and where his horizons will be broadened as he relearns how to exist in the world. He finds the city disorienting and frightful at first, both because of the visual stimulation and because the culture is so foreign to him. The movie is in part about the clash of values, and like most of the other Innocent in the City movies, small-town values are made to look more appealing.

“Pleasantville” and “Blast From the Past” (and even “Babe” in some particulars) have a distinctly Capra-esque quality. They may at times wade a tad into Capracorn. But like the hardest-edged and most political of Frank Capra’s movies (films like “Meet John Doe” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”--two seminal Innocent in the City films) these movies--especially “Pleasantville”--have more on their minds than 90% of what comes out of Hollywood.

And like the Capra films, they show that it is possible to send a country boy to the city and find humor or drama without exploiting and reinforcing hurtful social prejudices.*