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Nov. 5th, 2010 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camrogersA casual hobby of mine is trying to pick the way things are going to go. I wondered if we'd ever see a Stephen Fry backlash and I think we are. It started before his recent comments on women and sex, and the slide seemed triggered mainly by overexposure, secondarily by tone and thirdly by his running out of material (ie. a lot of the same anecdotes and stories and bon mots are surfacing time and again.) The guy isn't a machine and I'm not standing here demanding he dance; I'm talking about Fickle and how it works.
I think 'internet celebrity' might be moving into a Scheherezade phase. You could argue it always was, to a degree, but I think it's now concreting. We keep them around because they entertain us on a daily basis, but once they become confident, gesticulate a little too wildly and move outside the chalk circle we've drawn on the ground for them, they get slapped. And when that happens, they retreat, keen to retain their shape and form. Fry's done it, and I've seen a couple of authors do recently as well. It seems like the social rules for this new proximity between star and fan are being quietly, unconsciously codified. Rules of behaviour are being established and enforced. The dynamic now more than ever seems to be that the crowd holds the power, and 'stars' are dancing for their dinner.
One prediction I've stuck with for 20 years now is that violence against children onscreen would eventually become graphic, commonplace and accepted. The poster for Man Bites Dog caused upset in its day, as it showed a man firing a revolver into a baby carriage, with a pacifier flying skyward on a jet of blood. The Professional featured a small boy being machinegunned off-camera. People left the cinema I was in over that one. Pan's Labyrinth shot a little girl. Most recently was Kick-Ass which featured a grown man kicking the crap out of an 10-year-old girl. Artfully cut so that, technically at least, you never saw a blow land... but really you may as well have.
The Walking Dead is the new zombie series from American cable. First episode was pretty good, and I've got hopes for it. But the first scene ends with the main character shooting an eight-year-old girl in the forehead with a large-calibre handgun. Not cut away, pretty graphic. The get-out with that one is that the eight-year-old is a zombie.
I don't know how I feel about it, but I do find it interesting watching society change. What's a hanging offence one decade is de rigueur the next.
I think 'internet celebrity' might be moving into a Scheherezade phase. You could argue it always was, to a degree, but I think it's now concreting. We keep them around because they entertain us on a daily basis, but once they become confident, gesticulate a little too wildly and move outside the chalk circle we've drawn on the ground for them, they get slapped. And when that happens, they retreat, keen to retain their shape and form. Fry's done it, and I've seen a couple of authors do recently as well. It seems like the social rules for this new proximity between star and fan are being quietly, unconsciously codified. Rules of behaviour are being established and enforced. The dynamic now more than ever seems to be that the crowd holds the power, and 'stars' are dancing for their dinner.
One prediction I've stuck with for 20 years now is that violence against children onscreen would eventually become graphic, commonplace and accepted. The poster for Man Bites Dog caused upset in its day, as it showed a man firing a revolver into a baby carriage, with a pacifier flying skyward on a jet of blood. The Professional featured a small boy being machinegunned off-camera. People left the cinema I was in over that one. Pan's Labyrinth shot a little girl. Most recently was Kick-Ass which featured a grown man kicking the crap out of an 10-year-old girl. Artfully cut so that, technically at least, you never saw a blow land... but really you may as well have.
The Walking Dead is the new zombie series from American cable. First episode was pretty good, and I've got hopes for it. But the first scene ends with the main character shooting an eight-year-old girl in the forehead with a large-calibre handgun. Not cut away, pretty graphic. The get-out with that one is that the eight-year-old is a zombie.
I don't know how I feel about it, but I do find it interesting watching society change. What's a hanging offence one decade is de rigueur the next.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-05 01:32 am (UTC)I mention it, because while going through the history we talked about how horror pushed the boundaries for what was acceptable. In Wale's Frankenstien it was considered shocking for its day when the Monster picked up the girl and threw her in the lake. 30 years later a splash of blood, when Lee's monster was shot in the eye (or the grotesque transformation in the Quatermass Xperiment) were graphic enough to be X-rated for their day, and the censor had a fit when Lee's Dracula was in Mina's bedroom.
We'd barely even blink to see any of those things now. These things move as they do. There will probably be a winding back, there usually is.
I'm not surprised by the Fry backlash either. I'd been picking it up for a while too.
Twitter, Facebook and "Internet Celebrity" are curious to watch unfold.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-05 03:35 am (UTC)Internet celebrity might just be a new-ish vector for attaining "tall" status but the remainder of the process seems fairly ordinary.
Let's face it, Fry's comments amounted to poking the bear regardless of context or humourous intent.
I don't know how I feel about it, but I do find it interesting watching society change.
Presumably it will surpass my lowest expectations eventually. It's not quite there yet.
I tend to agree with Greylock. Eventually it will instead become cool to be *less* graphic. Maybe that's just wishful thinking :)
no subject
Date: 2010-11-05 04:06 am (UTC)RE less graphic - technology pushed graphic in this instance I think. "Look what we can do!" Saving Private Ryan - especially the scene where some hapless soldier botches the placement of a sock bomb - made me realise that before long this technology would switch to horror films, and once that happened the benchmark of acceptibility would shift really quickly.
If there's a shift away from the graphic I think it'll be once the audience becomes tired of SFX personnel flexing their muscles, once the technology plateaus, and then we'll see a return to a focus on the crafting of an experience and a story. Sometimes more is less, and once we get over this current infatuation with seeing what we can pull off technically, I'm hoping the expanded toolkit available to filmmakers will see them using it deftly and with restraint for maximum effect.
Christ I sound like a twonk sometimes.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-05 05:58 am (UTC)For my money, some of the most effective uses of graphic violence i've seen were cases where a single, excessively violent scene is used to set the emotional pitch for the rest of the film. Bound and Pan's Labyrinth are a couple that spring to mind. Perhaps the films could have worked as well without those scenes, but at least they served a purpose story-wise.
By contrast, i was dragged along to see the latest Saw movie on the weekend, which seemed nothing more than an exercise in voyeuristic sadism, with the barest semblance of a plot tacked on to join get to the next juicy bit, just like a porno flick.
Maybe if graphic violence does become more commonplace and accepted, this sort of thing will be looked at as being as ridiculous as '70s tits'n'bums films or '90s gee-whiz sfx blockbusters.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-05 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-05 02:22 pm (UTC)What the hell is my daughter's generation going to get up to?
Every generation pushes boundaries when it comes to entertainment. It's just what happens. As you note: What's taboo one generation becomes acceptable the next.
So what is my daughter's generation going to come up with to blow our minds 10 years from now?
This applies to all forms of entertainment, by the by. Literature, art, comics, movies, music, hobbies, drugs. All of them consistently evolve to push boundaries and eat taboos for breakfast.
I'm a heavily tattooed 35-year-old with piercings, who listens to a wide variety of music - from hardcore German techno to blisteringly-noisy black metal. One of my favorite movies of all time is True Romance, which includes a pretty savage scene of a gangster beating the hell out of a woman. A book that I love is based around the idea of mocking Jesus in a way that would have gotten the publisher hanged in the 1960's. I also enjoy graphic novels full of satanic sex and kink that would make a Mormon faint.
And history shows us that the next generation is going to come up with some shit that will have us clutchin' our pearls.
Sometimes I laugh about it. And sometimes it keeps me up at night.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-05 09:53 pm (UTC)The cynical possibility is this: the current generation recycle the superficial tropes of older generations like no generation before it. They're not really coming up with their own take on things AFAICT. In fact, their take seems to be not having one, but rather sitting back comfortably and mocking previous generations without offering a better alternative. That, at least, the Eighties was good for. So with that in mind it's entirely possible that what they'll come up with will blow *their* minds, but older people will find incredibly tired and obvious.
The other way of looking at it is that if we could imagine it it wouldn't blow our minds. More graphic sex and violence won't have that effect, it'll just be sad.