[Bleep] the Heck?
May. 9th, 2008 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfield"Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime."
- Potter Stewart (former U.S. Supreme Court Justice)
Last weekend, I was flipping through the channels and came upon an airing of Under Siege, the 1992 "Die Hard on a Battleship, with Kung-Fu" movie starring Steven Seagal.
It's actually a decent enough film, being what it is, featuring pitch-perfect performances by Tommy Lee Jones (slumming it before his big breakout in The Fugitive) and Gary Busey (before he went batsh!t crazy) and better writing and direction than is typical for the genre. If you can get past the silly plot and Seagal's unintentionally hilarious Clint Eastwood impression, it's not a bad popcorn movie.
Of course, as with other films of its kind, and Steven Seagal pictures in particular, you have to be prepared for some pretty gruesome violence. Given that I found the movie playing on the A&E network -- a basic cable station that belies the terms "arts and entertainment" by specializing in middlebrow reality programming -- I expected that there would be a generous amount of editing of the film's more mature content. And I was right, in a way.
During one five-minute sequence, in which the terrorists take control of the USS Missouri, I saw:
- A man shot in the dead center of his forehead;
- A man shot in the chest at point-blank range;
- A man shot in the knee, revealing a gush of blood and a clump of skin that resembled roast beef;
- A man -- while trying to disarm one of the terrorists -- riddled with automatic assault weapon fire;
- The unarmed, innocent man standing next to that victim shot in the head, upon instructions from the head terrorist ("Let this be a learning experience, gentlemen: if you resist, we will kill you and the man next to you");
- A sentry shot by sniper fire, sending him plunging several stories to the deck below; and
- The guy who was shot in the chest, shot twice more, apparently just for good measure.
It was unapologetically violent; my descriptions do not do justice to the sheer brutality and aesthetic versimilitude of the images on screen. And then, not a minute later, one of the characters says, "Listen to the _____ I've had to put up with." And the blank was literally blank -- the word "sh!t"[1] was erased entirely.
So apparently, the stuffed shirts at A&E Standards and Practices are A-OK with the bloody deaths of at least six innocent people, but are concerned that someone might hear a swear word? A swear word that does not even literally refer to the swear word's actual meaning?
But that's not all: in a scene shortly thereafter, a hapless private is summarily executed -- shot in the back by two men with machine guns, such that bloody squibs explode from his chest. This leads to a skillful escape by our hero, who stabs one man in the neck with a knife and casually chokes the other to death as if he were hugging a teddy bear. Then, using random kitchen materials and a microwave, our hero fashions an improvised explosive device that will later kill a number of villains.
Moments later (while the primary evildoers are shooting a U.S. sentry aircraft into the Pacific Ocean while sipping champagne), our hero comes upon a stripper who pops out of a large birthday cake doing her stripper dance. In the A&E version, her thong area and bare breasts are discreetly covered by a strategically placed blur. (When Miss July 1989 tries to explain the circumstances of her appearance, he exclaims, "What kind of babbling bull___ is this?")
To sum up: gruesome executions? "Fine, no problem." Curse words? "Not on A&E, buster." Tits? "Whoa, stop right there. That would be inappropriate for the network that is the home to Gene Simmons' Family Jewels."
I should point out that this movie aired twice on A&E on this particular Saturday -- once at noon and once at midnight. So at noon, impressionable children were witnessing the bloody deaths of numerous American servicemen, while at midnight, mature adults were being spared the word "sh!t."
I'm not going to try and make a point about our country's enduring love affair with guns; that's a losing cause. I'm certainly not going to align myself with the cryptofacists in groups like the Parents Television Council. I'm not even saying that the anything-goes attitude of pay cable stations like HBO are the way to go; anyone who's seen Real Sex knows what I'm talking about.
I'm just asking for everyone to back away from their "bleep" buttons and strongly-worded-letters for a moment and actually think for a moment about whom we're protecting, and what we're protecting them from. Let me just suggest that a world that appreciates the cathartic qualities of swearing and the aesthetic qualities of breasts would be a much better place than a world that appreciates the muzzle velocity of an Uzi submachine gun.
- Potter Stewart (former U.S. Supreme Court Justice)
Last weekend, I was flipping through the channels and came upon an airing of Under Siege, the 1992 "Die Hard on a Battleship, with Kung-Fu" movie starring Steven Seagal.
It's actually a decent enough film, being what it is, featuring pitch-perfect performances by Tommy Lee Jones (slumming it before his big breakout in The Fugitive) and Gary Busey (before he went batsh!t crazy) and better writing and direction than is typical for the genre. If you can get past the silly plot and Seagal's unintentionally hilarious Clint Eastwood impression, it's not a bad popcorn movie.
Of course, as with other films of its kind, and Steven Seagal pictures in particular, you have to be prepared for some pretty gruesome violence. Given that I found the movie playing on the A&E network -- a basic cable station that belies the terms "arts and entertainment" by specializing in middlebrow reality programming -- I expected that there would be a generous amount of editing of the film's more mature content. And I was right, in a way.
During one five-minute sequence, in which the terrorists take control of the USS Missouri, I saw:
- A man shot in the dead center of his forehead;
- A man shot in the chest at point-blank range;
- A man shot in the knee, revealing a gush of blood and a clump of skin that resembled roast beef;
- A man -- while trying to disarm one of the terrorists -- riddled with automatic assault weapon fire;
- The unarmed, innocent man standing next to that victim shot in the head, upon instructions from the head terrorist ("Let this be a learning experience, gentlemen: if you resist, we will kill you and the man next to you");
- A sentry shot by sniper fire, sending him plunging several stories to the deck below; and
- The guy who was shot in the chest, shot twice more, apparently just for good measure.
It was unapologetically violent; my descriptions do not do justice to the sheer brutality and aesthetic versimilitude of the images on screen. And then, not a minute later, one of the characters says, "Listen to the _____ I've had to put up with." And the blank was literally blank -- the word "sh!t"[1] was erased entirely.
So apparently, the stuffed shirts at A&E Standards and Practices are A-OK with the bloody deaths of at least six innocent people, but are concerned that someone might hear a swear word? A swear word that does not even literally refer to the swear word's actual meaning?
But that's not all: in a scene shortly thereafter, a hapless private is summarily executed -- shot in the back by two men with machine guns, such that bloody squibs explode from his chest. This leads to a skillful escape by our hero, who stabs one man in the neck with a knife and casually chokes the other to death as if he were hugging a teddy bear. Then, using random kitchen materials and a microwave, our hero fashions an improvised explosive device that will later kill a number of villains.
Moments later (while the primary evildoers are shooting a U.S. sentry aircraft into the Pacific Ocean while sipping champagne), our hero comes upon a stripper who pops out of a large birthday cake doing her stripper dance. In the A&E version, her thong area and bare breasts are discreetly covered by a strategically placed blur. (When Miss July 1989 tries to explain the circumstances of her appearance, he exclaims, "What kind of babbling bull___ is this?")
To sum up: gruesome executions? "Fine, no problem." Curse words? "Not on A&E, buster." Tits? "Whoa, stop right there. That would be inappropriate for the network that is the home to Gene Simmons' Family Jewels."
I should point out that this movie aired twice on A&E on this particular Saturday -- once at noon and once at midnight. So at noon, impressionable children were witnessing the bloody deaths of numerous American servicemen, while at midnight, mature adults were being spared the word "sh!t."
I'm not going to try and make a point about our country's enduring love affair with guns; that's a losing cause. I'm certainly not going to align myself with the cryptofacists in groups like the Parents Television Council. I'm not even saying that the anything-goes attitude of pay cable stations like HBO are the way to go; anyone who's seen Real Sex knows what I'm talking about.
I'm just asking for everyone to back away from their "bleep" buttons and strongly-worded-letters for a moment and actually think for a moment about whom we're protecting, and what we're protecting them from. Let me just suggest that a world that appreciates the cathartic qualities of swearing and the aesthetic qualities of breasts would be a much better place than a world that appreciates the muzzle velocity of an Uzi submachine gun.
