Bleep

not at all timely

The arc of history is long, but it benders toward censorship. No, that’s not it. Why do I feel like I’ve heard this song before?

I remember a song where they actually bleeped the word “gun”. I guess it had something to do with school shootings (which at that time had not quite became the unremarked background of our daily lives). They won’t cut down on the number of guns, but they can damn well make sure you don’t get to hear that word in a song.

Never mind, that moment also passed. Meanwhile they continue to play (as an oldie) “All Right Now” by Free (which for years I thought was the Rolling Stones) where the line goes: “Let’s move before they raise the fuckin’ rent.” Guess it’s the accent. Maybe they think it has something to do with “falcon”.

For awhile a lot of the movies I saw were rated R; now more & more of them are PG, like a tilt reasserting itself. And people in general seem less likely to want to exhibit the old curse words in front of strangers. I’m more worried about banning books, but I still think prudes (or more precisely, bureaucrats afraid of being criticized by prudes) have an outsized amount of clout in American society.

Back when I thought freedom was synonymous with progress, I toyed with the idea of romance revisionism that inserted porno scenes in the fadeouts of old movies that were so coy about intercourse. But the dishonesty there is that sex is about visuals & not tactile plus (hopefully) the feelings…

Meanwhile the violence depicted becomes more & more “graphic”. I can remember when the bad guys were shot & they didn’t even bleed. Now every violent act is accompanied by the amplified sound of watermelons being abused, & just like closeups of needles sliding into veins (which I believe no filmmaker has ever in the history of movies declined to show, despite no viewer in the history of movies ever once wanting to look at it), it is inescapable.

But it’s not realistic. It’s a convention, just like the comic book convention of putting sound-effect works inside spiky clouds of “POW!”

Every depiction of violence lies, & most egregiously when our storytelling depends on it so much to further the plot. Not only do we elide the laws of physics, both in terms of momentum & physiology, we flat out erase pain & trauma, as if those weren’t the most important outcome of every act of violence in the real world.

I’m going to make a movie that tells the truth about war. No one will be able to sit to the end of it, & when the audience storms out, they will demand the movie to be destroyed at once. You start out with innocent soldiers & innocent civilians. Every one of them is harmed to some degree, many of them terribly & permanently. Hours of pain & just as you know the way light reflects off its victims has almost nothing to do with what they feel, so is this artwork a travesty of description. There’s a small part of Saving Private Ryan that at least conveys how frightening war is (the handheld photographed D-Day scene)—which makes it almost unique. The only lying part of that, perhaps, is that it ends so soon.

Having made such a movie, I would then prop open the eyelids (like in Clockwork Orange) & force to watch, all the politicians who advocate war as a matter of policy or enterprise.

(There’s a couple I would start the projector running with them tied to the chair--& go off on a nice long cruise.)

What’s that (I hear from the back of the room)—you say Metonymy? Indeed. The famous three monkeys, eyes covered ears covered mouth covered, comprise the reign of the censors & all their monkeyshines. A child can figure it out.

Heaps & heaps of dead ones.