As “Saw VI” is approaching theaters, I find it an appropriate time to ask if entertainment has gone too far, if the industry has gone too perverse.
It’s time’s like this when I wonder, what’s the difference between artistic and sadistic or whether people should really see a dummy explain bizarre instructions to various men and women about how to violently remove themselves from their overly twisted death traps. Sure, it’s probably not going to be as bad as “Hostel” or “Hostel 2,” two entire movies about watching people get tortured for a couple hours, but it’s up there. There are a lot of people that I know who claim that somewhere between three and six of the “Saw” movies were unnecessary.
And then there’s the sex! Or at least how much of it can make it to the screen. Extreme amounts of violence are okay, apparently, but sex isn’t. For a movie to be rated R a woman could be naked, but once male genitals show up on screen it’s straight to NC-17. Looking at the reasons for the ratings on the Motion Picture Association of America’s web site presents an odd view of the ratings system. They display an R rating for movies not to exclaim that the movie is for adults, but rather that the movie is not for children. Very few filmmakers or companies are willing to take the trip down an NC-17 lane; so most movies become edited down to rated R if it must be done.
There’s the sex and the violence. There’s horrible amounts of plotless torture, movies about college bound students receiving an education in T and A and bad comedies filled with innuendo. But is the entertainment industry getting too perverse? I don’t think so. As long as people pay money to see any new “Saw” film, they will make a sequel. It’s not really the industry that decides how violent or sexual it wants to be, but rather the people who decide how violent or sexual they want their movies.
Now then, “Hostel” might seem like an extreme example of a violent film, sporting torture, torture and more torture, but then look at Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of Christ.” The entire movie was about watching Jesus suffer. That’s pretty much it. There are other scenes where he builds a chair, and Judas betrays, and a bag of money is tossed in slow motion, but what people remember most about the film is a couple hours of Jesus being whipped and tortured. The movie was heralded and decried in equal measure, and my question would be what makes that movie special in comparison to Hostel? Do people just want to see their religious figures with their blood on the outside and are disinterested in seeing average people dying violently?
Maybe one day they’ll stop making Saw movies, Kim Cattrall might one day grow too old to disrobe as Samantha from “Sex and the City” and someone might release a movie about Jesus where he’s not being beaten for most of the film. It’s possible.