Hello, my name is Manda, and I consume entertainment.
All kinds. Movies, books, video games; it’s all there. My tastes are right up there with the psychologically fucked up and the sound of blade slicing through flesh like butter and resisting at the bone, unrelenting until it splinters.
I’m dark. I would say I was raised that way, but my other siblings turned out just fine. I think some of us were just born to see the beauty in things most otherwise shy away from. And that’s okay. You can bask in every Lifetime movie known to man and live to cry at every theatrical adventure. You can read a raw romance novel and have your mind flooded with every euphemism for penis known to man and lose yourself in fantasies of Fabio and sea-side infidelities.
I’m getting off topic. Our tastes are not what I want to talk about here. You know, in case you couldn’t tell by the title.
Censorship. It’s such a disgusting word to me. It takes something that’s raw and true and pours sugar all over it to make it seem better than what it actually is, what it was meant to be. It takes something horrible—let’s say a dead body found on the side of the street—and covers it up with a few choice flowers. But the people say, “Oh, I don’t see the dead body, but something sure does stink here,” so censorship digs in elbow-deep to the rotting guts of the truth, just to get to the soil underneath that, so they can plant a god damn rose bush.
Gross, right? But bear with me here. I’m getting to the point.
Think back to a song on the radio. (Do people even still listen to the radio these days???) I feel like there’s gotta be one of these on every station (minus I suppose Christian stations or something). You know the one. The one where the song is so diluted with extra sound effects or areas of so many lyric cuts that you sit there and wonder to yourself, “The fuck? Why are they even putting this on the radio if it has to be so heavily edited?” It could be a song you like or a song you hate, and it doesn’t matter, because the whole thing is filtered down to a couple radio-approved words.
You see where I’m going with this?
Here’s the deal. I’m not saying that fucking-god-damn-shit-ass-cunt should be on the radio. I’m just saying if you can’t play it in its entirety the way it was meant to be heard, why are you bothering playing it at all?
Same thing goes for any medium: art, writing, films, video games, whatever it may be. In fact, you may remember a book I reviewed where I had this same complaint. Tell it like it was meant to be told; show it like it was meant to be shown.
And here’s the trick: if it doesn’t feel right, reword it, reshoot it, redraw it. It’s a problem that can be solved by camera angles easily, and your audience will marvel at the way you handled the issue. Don’t slap a censor bar on it and call it a work of art. It’s not. It’s (god, dare I say it?) lazy.
Again: If it doesn’t feel right, adjust the camera angle. If you are writing a romance novel and you want to really convey how much the two people love each other, bring the camera out and up. Show it in the little extra movements aside from whatever is going on downtown. You know, where their eyes focus on, where their fingers trace, blah blah blah. However, if you’re writing porn, dude, exchange that big fancy camera for a cock ring camera (they make those homg they fucking make those what the hell) and just…yeah…let it go to town. Camera angles. Not censorship.
Camera angles.
Now, ready for me to be a huge hypocrite? Because through the years, I’ve gotten amazing at that.
I watched a movie about a year ago, and two scenes have stuck with me in a squeamish sort of way. Now usually, I applaud that sort of thing. Like, okay, my favorite horror movie of all time is Audition, and that thing is absolutely fucked up in so many ways. It got under my skin, but in a good sort of way.
The movie in question is called mother!, all lowercase and everything (if I remember correctly).
SPOILERS WITHOUT CONTEXT AHEAD
The first scene that fucked me up was a shot of a baby’s neck snapping. It came out of nowhere, which I’m not saying was a fault necessarily on the movie’s behalf, since the whole thing plays out like a nonsensical dream. The second scene was an up close and personal view of a woman being beaten almost to death. This did not come out of nowhere, in fact I had a feeling the movie was leading up to it, but the way they approached it just felt…wrong.
Two things come into play here that I feel made the movie fall flat, because otherwise, honestly, up until that point, I rather enjoyed it. The first thing is camera angles. The second is medium.
The same point could have come across without the shock value for the sake of shock value (which is what it came across as, for nothing in the movie was hinting at anything but psychological horror) with the help of camera angles. You can have the baby get lost in the crowd (alive) and then have the mother find the baby with it head at an odd angle (dead). The action of the neck snapping doesn’t need to be shown on camera. The audience can figure it out on their own.
Same for the woman being beaten. You can get the point across with a shift of camera that doesn’t make it feel like a body horror flick. Instead of having every punch and kick be up close and personal all the way to the bitter end, fade out and pan up. Show the crowd circle in above her, covering her, and when it’s done, fade back to her body, once beautiful, now broken.
Another thing to keep in mind is the medium in which it was brought to life. Despite what I said, I feel that if it was presented as a book, it would have been just fine as it stands. What works in one medium won’t necessarily work in another. Some things don’t translate well from audio to visual to written. Another example: Stephen King’s It. In the book, the infamous “child orgy” scene works for a number of reasons: the symbolism, the description, the way the topic is handled. However, if they tried to put the same scene in the movies, it would not pass the censors, and it would never see the light of day. What works in one medium won’t necessarily work in another.
Let me back up and say that generally, people dying in horrible ways doesn’t throw me off this hard (in fiction, obviously). My list of taboos is short by nature. I’m willing to sacrifice comfort for the sake of a good story (and trust me, there are some scenes in books and movies that are hard to get through). But maybe that’s what it all boils down to: a damn good story. In this case, mother! fell short. It flows through time and space like a dream, a nightmare. It floats from one event to the next, so when it spirals to dead babies and beaten women, it comes across like less a form of art and more a snuff film. It felt wrong, like something I wasn’t supposed to watch. But now I have, and no amount of bleach is going to get those images out of my memory.
But maybe I missed the point altogether and it’s actually a masterpiece. I don’t know. What I do know is that I think had camera angles been tweaked just a touch, it could have been spectacular. Instead, I just feel kind of dirty.
And maybe, just maybe, fuck what I have to say about it. Maybe had those changes been made, it would have missed the point the director was trying to make. Maybe all that snuff film add-ons were necessary to tell the story he needed to tell, unaltered, uncensored, right down to the gory details. Maybe my changes would have dug in elbow-deep to plant a fucking rose bush.
What about you? What’s your view on censorship in the entertainment industry? Good? Bad? Don’t care either which way? Let me know!
Manda Kay Writes 