Some thoughts on shock value and controversy

The escalation of that-which-will-shock-average-audiences-without-offending-them-enough-to-lose-their-attentions is fairly evident over the course of western civilization and most noticeable since the advent of modern art (circa 1863). Icons to leaf-censored nudes to battle scenes to piss christ is the sort of time table I have in mind. Of course, there have been instances where this progression took the form of two steps forward, one step back hence the censoring of previously created art with leaves, the burning of art, etc... Anyway, so this seems like a linear escalation of subject matter. The Battle of Algiers was banned in France when it was released (1966) and unbanned five years later. More recent films of controversy that have been recently unbanned include Cannibal Holocaust (unbanned in 1999 in the US) and Sweet Movie which remains banned in several countries and was recently released in the US by Criterion. In this case, controversial material suddenly deemed fit for mass consumption has changed from the politically and emotionally charged Battle of Algiers to the overtly and realistically violent Cannibal Holocaust and the strange sexual accounts of Sweet Movie which include instances of copraphilia, shades of pedophilia and a gold penis.

Concerning this escalation,

I recall being desensitized to a variety of things during my early pubescent years. I had the fortune/misfortune/opportunity to share my pre-adolescence with that of the Internet. Thus, by 14 or 15, I had been exposed to photographs of autopsies, war casualties, bestiality, lynchings, gaping assholes, aborted fetuses, every fetish imaginable and otherwise, and of course, a girl shitting liquid onto her face in a bathtub. I remember that I was utterly disgusted at seeing a video still of Pamela Anderson giving Tommy Lee a blow job when I was about 12. Two years later, I was mostly unaffected by a close-up photograph of a woman's vagina featuring several mouse traps clamped to her labia.

What does this mean?

I'm not entirely sure. It seems like a linear progression, but there is room for cyclical interpretation. For instance, though I have seen photographs of all sorts of ridiculous things, I have never seen someone executed. Public executions used to be common-place and well attended as their entertainment value was top notch at the time. Would I still be desensitized to these things if I were to witness them in person? I can't really answer that truthfully. Perhaps, in an age where penises in paintings and frescoes were being covered with foliage, more horrible things than what I have witnessed were occurring on an incredibly regular basis. If we were to switch the elements in each time period (a nude depiction to the dark ages and a public execution to the present), then both would be met with equal disgust and horror. In this sense, shock and controversy can be something other than a finite resource. They can be recycled from the norms of ages past. Perhaps in some utopian pluralistic future where all intolerance has been eliminated along with prejudice, audiences will look back in horror at Birth of a Nation and cringe knowing that a nation could be born out of such ideals. Filmmakers and artists of that day will create works dramatizing accounts of racism and the socioeconomic separation between minorities and majorities, and they will be banned due to content to be unbanned years later. Who knows? I don't.