If any left-wing points of view still reach the broad American public, it's usually by some accident of mass culture. Bruce Springsteen rose to fame independently of his Guthrie-like sentiments for the poor and oppressed (the more they dominate his music, the less popular he's been); Al Franken achieved stardom on Saturday Night Live before he became the best-selling author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. Spike Lee is a more complicated example, because with him the distinction between ideology and careerism completely disappears (for example, his demand that black high school students get the day off to see Malcolm X). In general, though, it's rare for a hero of popular culture to reach that status through work in which left-wing views are intrinsic. Almost always they're pinned to celebrity like red ribbons on tuxedo lapels and gown bodices at televised awards ceremonies.

But at least two exceptions come to mind—the filmmakers Oliver Stone and John Sayles. Since the eighties they have been turning out movies that attempt to portray and interpret America with some consistent degree of sympathy for the downtrodden and suspicion of the powerful. Stone and Sayles put the individual stamp of writer-director on all the movies they make, and they have high ambitions for movies that encompass the large moral and social questions of our day—that try to fill the role that novels played in the nineteenth century. Both directors started out with literary dreams. Sayles has published three novels and a collection of stories; the rejected manuscript of Stone's youthful and only novel ended up in the East River. Both were products of the sixties (Stone was born in 1946, Sayles in 1950). Both are lovers of history.

Yet Stone and Sayles make a study in contrasts. On the most obvious level, it's a contrast in styles and personalities. Stone is notorious, an icon of op-ed pages, every movie leaving behind its own wake of controversy (most recently The People vs. Larry Flynt, which he produced but didn't direct). An awed yet ultimately devastating New Yorker profile several years ago showed Stone bullying employees, goading cast and crew, going through women like cans of film stock—all the while murmuring about his “darkness” and complaining that the press has been unfair to him. He's also neck-deep in Hollywood culture, his movies backed by major studios. Sayles, by all accounts, keeps a low, Hoboken, N.J. profile with his girlfriend-producer of two decades, Maggie Renzi. There's an atmosphere of good spirits and mutual regard among the cast in all his films. Some of them come and go so noiselessly that you have to track them down on video.

But the contrast is deeper and more interesting, and in a way it goes back to the sixties. It's the difference between reasonableness and paranoia, collective hope and individual excess, the Port Huron Statement and Mark Rudd. Sayles says, “Basically I'm for whatever makes people's lives better and against what doesn't.” Stone says, “You have to recreate the climate of madness in the culture. The world is violent, and we're swamped in it in this century. So I mirror that—I'm a distorting mirror, like in the circus.”

Sayles's first picture, Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), was an ensemble piece about the loves and ennuis of a group of ex-radicals reunited for a thirtieth birthday party. It doesn't hold up well—the camera work looks amateurish, and the dialogue, which must have resonated with Sayles's peers at the end of the seventies, for the movie became a cult hit, seems to drag on aimlessly. But this first movie became the prototype for Sayles's mature work, Matewan, Eight Men Out, City of Hope, and last year's Lone Star—all detailing the relationships, personal and social, among a range of characters, all concerned with justice. They feel like the work of a man who came of age reading Nelson Algren novels and living in group houses. The style is understated, the pace often slow, the cinematography simple. Three or four plots are woven together, suggesting a theme of mutual responsibility—between white, black, and Italian coal miners (Matewan), or whites and blacks in a decaying East Coast city (City of Hope), or Anglos and Mexicans in a Texas border town (Lone Star). The dialogue is earnest, the humor without irony and often symbolic, like the fragmentary slogans rattled off by a homeless man who walks through City of Hope as a deranged Greek chorus: “Help. We need help. We got deals. Under one roof. Why settle for less when you can have it all.” Few of Sayles's scenes remain vividly in mind; what you remember are the speeches. From Matewan you remember the union organizer Joe Kenehan, played by Chris Cooper, telling a roomful of miners who have just rebuffed a black scab named Few Clothes: “You think this man is your enemy? This is a worker. Any union keeps this man out ain't a union. It's a goddam club. They've got you fightin' white against colored, native against foreigner, hollow against hollow, when you know there ain't but two sides to this world—them that work and them that don't.”

For a moviemaker who is at heart a writer, working in a visual form without narrative depth, there's a serious risk of didacticism and sentimentality that Sayles doesn't always escape. His characters have to state baldly what a novel's narrator could explore suggestively and with less finality. There is too much thematic talk in Sayles's films, and in his latest and perhaps best, Lone Star, there are at least two too many sub-plots, included strictly for topical value—sexual harassment in the military and illegal immigration. One can see these same tendencies in Sayles's novel Union Dues (1977), about Third Way radicals in Boston at the end of the sixties and the West Virginia boy who stumbles into them—the huge cast of characters, the crosscutting between plots, the clamor of diverse opinions, the love of working-class speech, the temptation to cram a whole city and a dozen issues into one book.

A child of the sixties, Sayles belongs temperamentally to an earlier period of radicalism. His main characters aren't alienated rebels, but working people ensnared in mundane obligations to family, job, town. His vision of community isn't a dropout's utopia held together by love but a town divided by social class in which individuals are faced with old-fashioned moral choices. Will the chief of police stand up to the coal company's thugs? Will a building contractor cut a corrupt deal with the mayor to keep his son out of jail? Will the sheriff of a Texas border town pursue the truth about a racial incident that might discredit his long-dead and lionized father? Will an illiterate baseball player take a bribe to fix the World Series?

Ordinary people in all-American settings struggling for courage, justice, tolerance: it's reminiscent of the Popular Front era, and of films by directors like Capra and Ford. The ghosts of Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart hover around the sets of these movies. To Sayles, most people are basically decent, or at least try to be. Few of his characters are out-and-out villains—more often they go wrong when pushed or cornered, and the consequences haunt them, and in the end they always find that they are their brothers' keepers.

It's a hopeful, goodhearted view of human beings. And, needless to say, it isn't a view attuned to either the tastes of the consuming public or the spirit of the age. The budgets of Sayles's movies preclude wide distribution, and before he decided to stop seeking studio backing his story ideas made for extremely brief meetings with Hollywood executives. But beyond the circumstances of the market, what keeps him out of the mainstream is his seriousness, his cinematic plainness, his sense of political responsibility and moral decency. From a commercial point of view, the worst that can be said of Sayles is that he is sincere.

The first thing that needs to be said about Oliver Stone is what most of his critics won't admit: he is an extremely talented filmmaker, far more visually inventive than Sayles and even—at his best—a better screenwriter. Stone's first important film, Salvador (1985), is proof that he once had a strong gift for story and characterization. Salvador manages to create all at once an authentic atmosphere of menace building into terror, a sharp sense of the turn in American policy from Carter to Reagan, and—in James Woods' performance as a fast-talking small-time journalist on the trail of a big story as El Salvador slides into civil war—a distastefully riveting central character, a figure from the sleazy, irresponsible seventies as the decade burns out at the dawn of Reagan-era American boosterism.

In the twelve years since Salvador Stone has made nine movies—none of them as good. The way in which he has squandered his talents displays both the benefits and the high costs of making yourself a “distorting mirror” in a “climate of madness.” In fact, the story of Oliver Stone's career seems natural material for a film by Oliver Stone: set in the Philippines and the Arizona desert and Hollywood, with two ex-wives in supporting parts, a large cast of attractive female extras, huge quantities of drugs, an unrelenting work pace, black-and-white flashbacks to his parents' divorce when he was fifteen, Oscar nights, media hysteria, and at the center of everything an attractive, cruel man of outsized ambition and ego who starts off with a desire to be the Joseph Conrad of cinema and ends up riding horseback for the cameras with Subcommander Marcos in Chiapas—who over the course of the film becomes harder and harder to distinguish from the cheap, glamorous, violent culture that his films portray. The early part of the film would have the grainy realism of Salvador, but the camerawork would grow increasingly distorted, with rapid-fire cuts and long bacchanals on and off the set, and by the end Stone's character would appear literally as a cartoon grotesque in the manner of Natural Born Killers. Stone would be a mirror of a mirror, perfectly suited to its director-subject's hyperkinetic style. Watching it, moviegoers would get to see a fine artistic and political consciousness lose its bearings before their eyes.

Except for Heaven and Earth, which almost no one saw, I've caught every one of Stone's films when it first came out. Platoon (1986), which followed Salvador, moved and terrified me and I left the theater feeling that I had been to hell. The familiar streets home seemed an illusion; the truth lurked underneath and it was dark and extreme. At twenty-five I accepted the implication that Vietnam was more real than Somerville, Massachusetts, and that I had to have the courage to face the demon of violence.

Nothing afterward matched Platoon's power, but I kept going to see Stone's films, for two reasons—his subjects, which are always interesting, and his cinematic style, which has grown increasingly riveting. The furor in the press over JFK (1991) seemed unnecessary, because the movie's politics were so ludicrous; in the movie theater its techniques—slow motion, extreme close-ups, multiple angles, off-camera voices, blended film stocks, newsreel footage, fast tracking shots—were tremendously exciting. And for its first hour Natural Born Killers (1994), Stone's most viscerally violent and reviled film, felt like a wild ride through the most startling cinematic imagery I'd ever seen. It evoked the mental world of its homicidal young lovers—a pulsing blend of music, television, psychedelic mysticism, adolescent syrup, and casual viciousness—more convincingly than straightforward realism in the John Sayles vein could have done.

Excitement is not the easiest emotion to produce and sustain, as anyone who's sat through a big-budget action picture knows. Evoking feverish interest takes a crude narrative intelligence together with technical skill. I began to recognize this emotion as the characteristic experience of a Stone movie, the experience that kept me coming back even when the movie was bound to be as silly as The Doors: feeling grabbed and jostled, crowded, rushed, dazzled, unable to think. Each film depended more and more on the editing room—on confusion—for its effect. When I sat down recently to watch some of them again on video, it became clear how much that effect requires the large screen of a movie theater. Even Platoon, with its good-and-evil sergeants and mythic structure and swelling music of Barber's “Adagio for Strings,” comes off badly diminished. The shrunken visual scope magnifies the text, especially the painfully obvious voiceover of its young hero Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), a character who starts off convincingly high-minded and frightened but makes less and less sense as his creator plunges him into moral conflict. In the theater this didn't matter—the movie had me by the throat.

For most of Stone's movies, emphasizing the text turns out to be fatal. In JFK Kevin Costner/Jim Garrison's case against a supposed assassination conspirator goes to pieces before your eyes; never was a movie trial's verdict less surprising and more deserved. Parts of JFK have the inadvertently hilarious quality of a movie-of-the-week. “There's nothing wrong with feeling a little scared, Jasper,” Garrison says, sitting between his children on the front porch. “Telling the truth is a scary thing sometimes. It scared President Kennedy and he was a brave man. But if you let yourself be too scared, then you let the bad guys take over the country, don't you?” Kids: “Yeah.” Costner/Garrison: “Then everybody gets scared.” Which is JFK's central insight.

What the video screen gives you is room to think, and thought is what a Stone film can least afford and tries most to avoid. It's like turning out the light in a shadow-puppet play. For the premise of his films is false. Not just historically false—JFK's sanctification of Kennedy, Nixon's cabal of right-wing Texas millionaires—but false in their worldview. Violence is not realer than civilization, and what lies beneath the surface is both more complicated and more truly exciting than Chris Taylor's destructive urges in Platoon, or the grand web of conspiracy in JFK, or the prophecy sung by Leonard Cohen as the credits roll at the end of Natural Born Killers: “Get ready for the future / It is murder.” The James Woods character in Salvador—mendacious, shifty, self-serving, sympathetic, morally outraged, sometimes within a single scene, almost a single line—is, in an exaggerated way, uncomfortably reminiscent of you and me. And there's no place for him in Stone's other films. He would be turned into a truth-teller or made to stand for the corruption of American journalism or simply lost in the blur of rapid cuts and hand-held camera jostling.

“No one's innocent,” Stone told his New Yorker profiler, by way of comment on the week-old Simpson case. “The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major. Isn't that the point of Natural Born Killers, in a way?” It's at least the point of a director who knows that muck—a firefight in the jungle or a Wall Street wheeler-dealer or the last seconds of the Zapruder film or Jim Morrison's peyote quests or young bloodlust—sells more tickets than the ordinary struggle to be good, and that the image will always overpower the word. Amid the technical wizardry and visions of excess, goodness comes to seem ridiculous. Stone sets out to immerse us in the destructive element, then leaves us down there so long that by the time we resurface to hear Martin Sheen, as the hard-working union man in Wall Street, say, “The rich have been doing it to the poor since the beginning of time. The only difference between the pyramids and the Empire State Building is the Egyptians didn't allow unions,” all we can do is laugh in his face. Natural Born Killers never lets you back up at all. Because there's no moral framework to invoke (“No one's innocent,”), what the movie purports to criticize it ends up glamorizing, which may help explain why a teenage couple from Mississippi went out and shot two people after watching it over and over.

In fact, the line between thinking murder and doing murder is everything—and a more interesting subject than homicidal rampage. But it's also the kind of subject that's beyond Stone's reach. As he's come to depend so heavily on visual effect, the moral and emotional shadings of a John Sayles film—disappointment, restraint, compromise, redemption—are impossible for Stone. This is why a news report several years ago that he had bought the rights to Homage to Catalonia seemed so disastrous. One pictured Orwell/Charlie Sheen on a train leaving strife-torn Barcelona, where an evil Communist (Tom Berenger) and a good anarchist (Willem Dafoe) have just blown each other away on the Ramblas, and saying in voice over. “I think now looking back that we did not fight the enemy. We fought ourselves and the enemy was in us.” Or Orwell/Kevin Costner exhorting a group of P.O.U.M. militiamen in a trench on the Aragon front: “You all gotta start thinking on a different level, like the CP does. Now we're through the looking glass here, people. White is black and black is white.” And back in London, sharing a Hyde Park bench with a carefully disguised Trotsky/Donald Sutherland. Orwell: “I never knew you were such a threat to the establishment. I can't believe they'd kill you because you want to change things.” Trotsky: “Remember, fundamentally people are suckers for the truth, and the truth is on your side, Bubba. I just hope you get a break.”

(Homage to Catalonia, or Militia, never appeared. Recently, though, the family of Martin Luther King and Time Warner entered a joint venture to commercialize King's life and work. Warner Bros. is Stone's studio. The King family's weakness for conspiracy theories might suggest to the conspiracy-minded a synergistic tie-in with the as-yet-unmade Oliver Stone film MLK.)

In Stone's climate of madness there's no room for human relationships—they are always static, and his women have no life on the screen except in the case of a strong performance, such as Joan Allen's as Pat Nixon. Nor is there room for real politics, which is to say, moral and historical complexity. Nixon (1995) tried and maybe for that reason suffered from longueurs. This famously political filmmaker has little to say about the really important political matters. On inequality we get Wall Street, on bigotry Talk Radio. Stone brings the shallowest instincts from the sixties—paranoia, grandiosity, romantic primitivism—to the skillful manipulation of images and celebrity culture of our own decade. His audience is at once seduced by technical dazzle, served tempting portions of corruption, and flattered by getting to identify with a moral hero at the center of an historic drama. “They” go about their dirty work while “we” seek the truth—unless, as in Natural Born Killers, “they” and “we” are equally guilty.

In either case, nothing much is asked of us. As the celluloid spell wears off and thought resumes and the op-ed pages turn to other topics, it's hard to remember what the commotion was about. A year or two later Stone releases another film, and the lines are long, and I'm standing in one of them. That his career has been so loud, and John Sayles's so comparatively quiet, shows the power of the electronic image, the attraction of glamorous muck over common decency, and the difficulty of saying something serious about politics through the vehicle of mass culture, which seems the only way left to be heard.