A federal district court judge has ruled that The Prude People may no longer copy motion pictures, delete or mask content containing sex and drugs and nasty curse words, and then release these bowdlerized versions for sale to the American public. This effectively puts out of business a clot of companies dedicated to erasing from the screen nudity, profanity, "language which refers to sexual activity," and "visual content of a graphic or stimulating nature." Meaning these people may no longer forcibly remove Kate Winslet's breasts from the movie
Titanic.
Alas, The Prude People were ready for this decision. During the pendency of the suit, they slammed through a spineless Congress the Family Movie Act of 2005, which permits the proliferation of technology that enables prudilicious editing of motion pictures, just so long as no fixed copy of any altered version is created. At this instant, machines using such technology are flying out the door at--yes, you guessed it--Wal-Mart.
Why should you care? Because in what Freud identified as "the struggle between Eros and Death," these people are on the wrong side.
The people slapped down by Senior Judge Richard P. Matsch in
Clean Flicks of Colorado v. Steven Soderbergh ran under rubrics like CleanFilms, FamilyFilms, Play It Clean Video, FamilyFlix, and CleanFlicks. Since 2000 they have maimed motion pictures through "redaction of audio content, replacing the redaction with ambient noise, 'blending' of audio and visual content to provide transition of edited scenes, cropping, fogging or the use of a black bar to obscure visual content."
The Prude People would purchase a DVD, copy the entire movie onto the hard drive of a computer (meanwhile disabling the disc's copyright-protection system), cut and hack and blur and crop and blend and redact and obscure the film to create a new "master" copy, then download this Frankenfilm to create a new recordable DVD-R to be sold to the public.
Matsch told them to cut it out. The Prude People claimed their editing was "fair use"; Matsch called it "illegitimate." He ruled that directors have the right to have their films sold the way they were originally created, and studios have the exclusive right to sell and distribute their movies.
Unfortunately, while the wheels of justice grind slow, the skids of Congress are easily greased. And so Judge Matsch, by the time he reached the issue of whether it is legally permissible to offer technology that enables bowdlerization, but does not create an actual bowdlerized copy, was forced to conclude that it is.
This is because Congress, in the spring of 2005, approved legislation that permits the sale of DVD players that annihilate content eschewed by The Prude People as a disc is played. This measure sailed through the Senate by unanimous consent, and was agreed to in the House by voice vote.
So out there now is this company called ClearPlay, which will sell you a DVD player with pre-loaded filters that will prudify an ever-growing number of motion pictures. Wal-Mart, which already prudifies your music, video games, and reading material, wants to sell one of these machines to you--for just $59.87!
Now these sorts of people always carefully claim that they're after violence, too, but you know what? I think they're lying. Blockbuster does not stock most NC-17 or unrated films, but it will cheerfully rent you every disgusting, sickening, misoygnist slasher film extant. CleanFlicks very carefully details its purging of every possible objectionable sexual image or reference, and pathetically notes that it strikes down "the B-words, H-word when not referring to the place, D-word, S-word, F-word" and "references to deity (G-word and JC-words etc.)." But it hastens to add, under "Graphic Violence," that "this does not mean all violence, only the graphic depictions of decapitation, impalements, dismemberment, excessive blood, gore etc."
In the world of American moviegoing, children under 17 may, unaccompanied, view films in which entire worlds are destroyed, or, accompanied by their parents, may take in utterly unredeemed odes to the death instinct. But they may not, until they are old enough to be ground up in George II's war machine, view a penis or a vagina, even at rest, much less at play.
I used to collect coins through reviewing movies. In 2000 I was forced to sit through one of the most vile, repellent snarls of celluloid in the history of the medium. It was called The Cell. Here's a description (not by me) of the film's opening moments:
A young woman, beautiful, but quite dead, floats in a bathtub filled with bleach. Her killer, seated along side, reaches into the tub and begins to pull out her organs. First, the kidney, then the heart....
Chains hang from the ceiling of the madman's reeking lair, just above the pale, eviscerated body. He attaches these to the hooks that are permanently embedded in his back and gradually lowers himself onto the deceased. After gratifying himself, he dresses the body in doll's clothes and adds her to his collection.
Michael Medved, out there in the vanguard of The Prude People, also viewed The Cell. In a film filled with eviscerations, disembowelments, gratuitous horse slicing, nonchalant strewing of organs, obsessive mutilation and self-mutilation, endless endless scenes of panicked screaming dying women, and vicious brutal assaults on terrified children, guess what horrified Medved?
In the kinky film The Cell, sultry Jennifer Lopez plays a psychotherapist who risks her life and sanity to enter the mind of a twisted, comatose serial killer. Smart, sexy, fearless, compassionate and successful, her character stands out as a role model for a new generation.
Why, then, did the filmmakers find it necessary to provide a 15-second scene showing their peerless heroine relaxing alone at home, smoking a marijuana joint? This is not an accidental inclusion, and there is no doubt that the character inhales. Other than providing a free commercial for the Pot Growers of California, what would motivate the movie men to associate so glamorous and admirable a character with an illegal habit considered dangerous and destructive by most Americans?
The dope-smoking scene was probably the most benign, restful moment of the entire film! But to Medved it was anathema. Why? Because it portrayed a woman succumbing to pleasure. Pull the organs out of a woman on screen and Medved has no problem with it. But let a woman put a joint to her lips, and he's foaming at the mouth and calling for a new crusade. Why? Because, as Medved and all other Prude People know, marijuana is Evil, because marijuana can lead to Sex.
Kate Winslet's breasts are holy. Harming those breasts is unholy. And the efforts of those in the legions of The Prude People to erase those breasts, to convince us that there's something nasty, dirty, wrong, about those breasts, is, it seems to me, a form of harm to those breasts, and thus is also unholy.
The aging Sigmund Freud was pretty much convinced that the human race as a whole was roiled by two competing instincts. Here's some of what he said about it in Civilization and its Discontents:
I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and I return to my view that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. At one point in the course of this enquiry I was led to the idea that civilization was a special process which mankind undergoes, and I am still under the influence of that idea. I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species.
And we may probably add more precisely, a struggle for life in the shape it was bound to assume after a certain event which still remains to be discovered.
In the world of The Prude People, a breast must be erased, but a shot to the head may roll on by. Like Freud, I haven't a clue as to what will constitute human life "in the shape it was bound to assume after a certain event which still remains to be discovered." But I'm betting all my chips that it will more resemble a breast than a shot to the head. Without a breast, I would literally not be alive. With a shot to the head, I would literally be dead.