The movies’ distinguished history of breaking taboos started right away. The Kiss, an 1896 short filmed in Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio, was considered scandalous and “absolutely disgusting.” Edison’s company, perfectly anticipating the marketing strategies that would long benefit future purveyors of controversial cinema, did not shrink from the public’s heated reaction, instead boasting of its potential by advertising in its film catalog how effectively the less-than-a-minute epic “brings down the house every time.”
What caused the uproar? We don’t really need to post a NSFW warning here. See for yourself if the film insults your moral sensibilities:
That’s a far cry from Last Tango in Paris. Replace that couple with Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger, on the other hand, and in many parts of the country, we actually (still) have something to talk about in terms of controversy.
Foul language? The employment of “damn” in the movies didn’t originate with Gone with the Wind, but that notable stir over Rhett Butler’s sensational piece of dialogue began our growing maturity over the words we heard in everyday life that we could tolerate being repeated in the theater. As focused and shocking as that utterance may have been at the time, it can’t begin to compare with the four-letter poetry of David Mamet. There are few examples of verbal vulgarity more elaborate and entertaining than that famous early scene in Glengarry Glen Ross where Alec Baldwin dresses down his company’s impotent and desperate sales staff, a segment not found in the original stage play. As brief as it is, it remains one of Baldwin’s greatest performances. However, leave it to Stanley Kubrick to truly turn obscenity into art, and birth the superstardom of ex-drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey in the process. The following clip really, really isn’t for the faint of ear:
Come to think of it, though, in the age of HBO and viral videos, haven’t we now heard it all?
Extreme violence? Not exactly a recent development. On January 4, 1903, Topsy the Elephant was electrocuted and Edison filmed it for public consumption. Curiously, Americans tend to be less squeamish about onscreen violence than they are about matters of sex. To paraphrase a well-worn Jack Nicholson quote: If you hack off a woman’s breast with an axe, it’s a PG; if you kiss it, it’s an R. I had plenty of firsthand experience with this phenomenon while the Movies Unlimited brick-and-mortar stores were still open. The exchange below, while not being an exact set of quotes, is certainly representative of the way these conversations went:
Customer hands clerk a grisly-looking movie Junior has in his hand.
Customer: Is this movie OK for my 10-year-old?
Clerk: Well, there’s quite a bit of gore. Beheadings, stabbings, shootings, chainsaws, eye-gougings, that sort of thing.
Customer: But is there any nudity or sex or anything like that?
Clerk: I don’t think so.
Customer: OK.
Hands video to Junior and checks out.
Strangely enough, violence in the movies also doesn’t tend to get a rise out of folks unless it is actually done well, with some sense of gravity, when it means something. The societal impacts of viewing consequence-free, cartoon-style bloodletting have been argued about for decades, but the films that treat it seriously and intelligently draw the harshest scrutiny. Just ask Martin Scorsese, the man who made the film that was blamed for the assassination attempt on President Reagan:
Movies that not only deal in violence intelligently but also have something to say about a society that tolerates or inspires it can also come under fire for appearing to lack a sense of sufficient moral outrage—although it can easily be argued that the lack of sermonizing itself creates a stronger and more powerful sense of condemnation:
How about religion? Faith in the movies presents its own unique set of taboos, with the depiction of, say, Jesus in cinema deserving a much fuller column of its own. (I have a set of Nazarene-related pictures to go through right now, as a matter of fact, and I intend to return with a fresh report on them sometime soon)
There are a lot of questions to ask about where we sit today with respect to breaking taboos in the movies. First and foremost among them: What’s left? Pick almost any subject matter you think might be too “hot” for the moviegoing public to handle, and chances are, there’s been a movie made about it. You may not have seen it in this crowded and fragmented marketplace, but yes, it’s probably out there:
What's Taboo in the Movies Today?
We might also follow the question of “what’s left” with another: How do we deal with the matter of taboos changing? Is it a topsy-turvy world when depicting smoking in the movies is greeted with more alarm than graphic violence or sex? Or, does that world make more sense? What kind of controversy is a reported remake of The Thin Man going to stir if the filmmakers want to keep Nick Charles’ drinking habit intact?
On the rather superficial side of taboo-breaking, there’s the question of remakes. You can imagine many folks getting more agitated over a remake of Casablanca than anything else. (Hey, it’d give today’s hottest young scribe the chance to rectify all of Gary’s complaints about it!) I’m generally agnostic on the whole “don’t remake that” or “too many remakes” question, perhaps because coming equally from a live theater background, I’m very used to the idea of reviving already-dramatized product, and see nothing inherently wrong with successive generations getting their creative exercise by stomping around the playgrounds built by the previous ones. Not to mention the fact that the very “permanence” of (properly preserved) films means the “original” won’t ever be lost to us, much in the same way an inferior filmed version of a beloved book can never actually destroy the book. The print is all still there.
It would be taboo today, obviously, to make a film advocating the worldview of The Birth of a Nation, for example…but who exactly would go ahead and break that contemporary taboo? Or, better, who would want to? The notion of depicting Hitler onscreen as a more-than-one-dimensional “human being” was met with strong outrage well before clips from Bruno Ganz’ towering performance in the historical drama Downfall became the subject of a hilarious Internet meme.
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The subject of movie taboos is thorny and complicated. Whether we are examining the earnest progressive messages found in movies like The Defiant Ones or the toilet flushing in Psycho or the multiple outrages that scorched our sensibilities in Pink Flamingos, the conversation can never just be about content. And it can never just be about motive.
To answer my own headline, I’d say I can think of a few taboo films yet to come: Jodie Foster discovered that getting a movie about Leni Riefenstahl off the ground was going to require a lot more courage than her own. The makers of South Park went about as far as anyone was willing to go in tackling the matter of depicting Muhammad onscreen (by physically representing him, albeit concealed in a bear costume), and earned themselves a fatwa from Virginia resident and Islam convert Zachary Adam Chesser for their trouble; given the continuing (and not entirely irrational) jitters of the post-9/11 era, what forms will this taboo-breaking continue to take? Christian moviegoers grouse often about the beating they feel their faith is taking from Hollywood—what’s to come if and when, say, the tenets of (and prophets behind) Mormonism and Scientology get their fair share of scripts greenlit? Did Big Love “count”?
We live in an era ripe for taboo-busting. Not that there’s a significant lack of intelligent moviemaking these days—you need to look a little harder to find it in abundance, or rely a little less on falling back to re-watching old favorites—but the clear indication from audiences remains that the preference is for the comfortable more than ever. The flood of fantasy- and comics-inspired blockbusters isn’t just due to advances in technology, though they certainly helped things along; it’s more evidence that, in addition to catering to the “14-year-old boy” demographic (or the 40-year-old man demographic, it’s much the same today), Hollywood is busy answering the prayers of individuals and families looking for relief from a difficult-to-manage world steeped in a culture of assault, where if you’re not the attacker, you’re the attacked—and if you’re not either of those things, well…you may as well not exist at all.
Maybe that’s the biggest problem for films and filmmakers looking to not only to entertain but to shake viewers out of complacency. Maybe people are just too exhausted by provocations they endure (or instigate) during every other moment of their lives. Maybe taboo-busting is shied away from because the challenge of getting people’s attention by way of tearing down their assumptions appears to require gestures that are too extreme, when really, what is required is more ingenuity than force.
What’s the phrase? A scalpel, not a sledgehammer.