A well-known, professional model is kidnapped by an unknown captor, who is also a deranged psychopath and her biggest fan. As she is locked in an unknown location, she meets a chauffeur who has also been kidnapped. As their captor plays deadly, psychological mind games with them, they fall in love and try to survive their ordeal.Far be it from me to argue that this is going to be a remotely good movie, but I just don't see the connection to the Juarez murders - to be more specific, I don't think the makers of this movie intended to depict the Jaurez murders, or any real-life murders, in the slightest.
That said, I think we can generally agree that film is an art form, dismiss the notion that films made with the intent of making money aren't art as naive and kind of ridiculous, and move on from there.Well, if we're going to open the can of worms of what is and what is not art, I can actually think of one objective measure that makes sense: the author's own intent. Conversely, you might argue the viewer's own perception, but bear with me for a moment. In fact, any other definition of art is too broad to be useful or too narrow to be fair.
So...what? Censorship is wrong, but we'd be fools not to censor things? Sure, that makes sense -- congrats, you've won me over. Can't argue with that logic.False dichotomy much? We don't need to pass laws to reaffirm in a social context that certain behaviors and messages are wrong. Creating sensational, PTSD-triggering push-media billboards with the purposeful intent of manipulating a public outrage and then mocking it to raise profits ranks decently high on the socially unacceptable scale.
whir said: The fact that both of these things are coming back into the mainstream at the same time does not seem like a coincidence to me, but the idea that violent movies have somehow given rise to increased incidents of torture, or tolerance for it, implies causation that I just don't buy.I'm not arguing causation, although that might be a piece of the puzzle on the individual state torturer's level. I'm arguing that there was a trigger (terrorism) that caused the majority to wish for kneejerk vengeance. All of this would probably happen regardless of the mass media. But the problem is that the media has (inadvertently, randomly) given everybody a convenient (if nonsensical) logic loophole to stave any possibility of ethical enlightenment. The profit motive means that all of this happens totally by chance.
Kittens said:Like I said above, I think "fantasy" is a pretty loaded term -- to me, at least, it implies that somewhere out there millions of people are jacking off over Hostel [...] I would argue that fantasy is not the problem there, but rather one's ability to interface in a healthy fashion with the real world.First of all, I think you're right about the town hall. I just hold creative content creators up to a higher standard than I hold up average people. I'm an elitist, delusional snob that way. John Milton arguably molded the idea of free speech in Western society and he was a big old snob who thought that free speech should be maintained for the educated class and kept away from the riff-raff and definitely kept away from the Catholics. I find that idea revolting, but I am also wary of letting lowest common denominator media go unanswered. I'm not totally sure what that would look like right now, but I don't think it's a binary between state censorship and freedom.
Profitable sensationalism (not loaded at all!) is only profitable because, you know, people pay for it. This may be an important conversation to have, but do people want to have it? I'm not arguing that they shouldn't want to, I'm just wondering whether they do. I have to be honest and say probably not.
« Older Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig provides ... | Gary Stasiuk's beautiful Digit... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by doctor_negative at 9:20 AM on April 11, 2007