Obscenity: Hating the Human Body

     A huge disservice has been done to America by the Religious right, and by so-called "conservatives" in general, in arguing that "obscenity" revolves around the sight of the naked human body, or humans involved in sexual expression.

        In fact true obscenity revolves around the desecration of the human body in the form of violence -- something that apparently has come to entertain us tremendously.  From the looks of it, we can't get enough violent images in our daily diet of entertainment, and the ante has been consistently upped as we tire of the usual forms of death and dismemberment.

      The number one box office lead movie the weekend of October 28th -30th, 2005 was Saw II.  It grossed $30.5 million in three days.  As of 11/25/05 it has earned over $79 million.  The movie cost "only" $4 million to make.  (I know this is an out-of-place question, but do you ever wonder how many starving people in Somalia could be fed by $79 million?  Or even "only" $4 million?)

     For those of us who may have missed the first Saw, and are not up on what people are flocking to see in Saw II, I'll tell you what you and I have been missing (according to James Verniere, of The Boston Herald).  In the first Saw: "One woman (Shawnee Smith) is forced to wear a bear traplike device that will blow her jaws apart if she doesn't slice open the stomach of a living person to find the key to free herself.  Another victim must crawl through a maze of razor wire to escape being buried alive.  Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Elwes), one of the two chained men, is informed by tape recorder that he has eight hours to kill Adam (Leigh Whannell), the other man, or he, his wife and daughter (Potter and Makenzie Vega) will die...If any of the plot sounds like the sick reveries of someone who pulled the wings off flies as a child, well, maybe it is." 

     The original Saw earned over $55 million in 9 weeks last year; it earned over another $4 million in VHS/DVD rentals in 2005.  Clearly, we loved it.  (Compare these numbers to those of the gorgeously offbeat Garden State, which earned less than $27 million in 21 weeks, or Kevin Spacey's gifted, daring Beyond The Sea, which earned little more than $6 million in 10 weeks.)

     The sequel, Saw II, on the other hand, earned $30.5 million in three days.  That means about nine times as many people flocked to see it in three days than saw Kevin Spacey's movie in seventy days. 

     What were they paying to see?

     The first victim gets the back of his head blown off; a woman unknowingly slips her hand into a vessel of razor blades and is ultimately impaled by falling into a pit full of dirty hypodermic needles; a character has to choose between gouging out his own eye or getting his head smashed by a robotic device around his neck with hundreds of sharp teeth waiting to snap onto him.  "It's not a film, it's an excuse to show victims bleeding at the mouth, or getting shot in the eye, or plucking out their own eyeballs...No point in labeling this a horror film.  This is a sadism film..." according to Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune.  "Real porn is more dignified than this," concluded Mark Palermo, of The Coast (Halifax).

     I wish that Saw II was an isolated phenomena.

     Consider last year's The Exorcist: The Beginning.  Generally reviewed by the critics as "atrocious" for its "groundbreaking badness" the movie offered up images of a frightened young boy being torn apart by hungry hyenas as he tries to feel them, a stillborn infant covered in maggots, and "repeated scenes of a young girl getting her brains blown out...Then there are the axes to the brain, the faces rotting and falling off, the leeches, the throat slashings, and the endless blood..." (John Puccio, www.dvdtown.com)

     This entertainment brought in almost $42 million in 2004, with another $1.5 million in home rentals thus far.

     We are constantly being reassured that repeated exposure to this kind of obscene material has no effect on us, other than to help us blow off a little steam, and that any link between any actual violence in our society and these movies are purely coincidental.

     But there is another issue to consider: what this is doing to us as human beings, psychically, emotionally, and spiritually.  Do these movies come anywhere close to affirming the best versions of us that could exist?  Of course not; they exist to celebrate, and sell back to us, images of us at our very worst.  "Here's what we look like when we've abandoned all sense of our humanity," you can hear the directors and producers saying.  (Actually, here's what the director of Saw II says: "They [the audience] are really going to dig it." http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/saw_ii/about.php)

     So...how bad does it seem, really, when "assailants dressed in black beheaded three teenage Christian girls" in Indonesia the same weekend that Saw II opened? (CNN, 10/30/2005, reuters, Asia/Pacific)  We've already seen the movie, or something like it, right?  You feel bad, but...it's not quite the same feeling after seeing people's heads already get smashed, disfigured, blown apart...

     What happens is that we flip into a sense of helplessness that results in our regarding the world as if it were just another major Hollywood release.  One critic corrected sized up the blood-and-spatter crowd of producers, directors, and audiences: "It approaches suffering with a meaninglessness that must be a luxury for anyone who has never lost anyone, or is incapable of empathizing with someone who has."  (Wesley Morris, www.boston.com)  For those of us who still have a tentative connection to reality and at least a talking relationship with our own mental health it is an ever-increasing struggle to keep the others focused on reality -- real suffering, and our obligation to relieve it -- instead of fake thrills.  I do find it difficult to get worked up over images of physical nudity, or sexual behaviors, in the context of the popularization of the most vulgar, soul-denying forms of violence we apparently cherish.

     The pornographer Al Goldstein once said that you weren't free to show a female breast in a popular film unless there was a knife going through it.  While his remark may seem quaint now (there are plenty of breasts prominently bared and left unharmed) his point still stands: blood sells.

     Expect the All-Blood, All-Torture Cable T.V. Network soon.

                                                                                                                         J.S., 11/05

   Copyright © 2005 Thesandsoftime.net -Jerry Sander All rights Reserved.