Philip's Defense

Philip Coggan of Australia came to my defense, sort of. My replies:

"Good taste" is the art of keeping the demons behind a screen, a silk screen charmingly decorated with paintings of Disney monsters like Sulley and Mike. For example, in 1946, when even "prolonged kissing" was banned by film censors, Hitchcock made a movie ("Notorious") featuring a woman forced to copulate with a Nazi in furtherance of a political agenda. Since no sex acts were shown, or even mentioned except in the most oblique terms, the movie passed the "good taste" test. On the other hand, a movie showing a legally married, loving couple actually Doing It would have been, and in puritanical places still is, in bad taste.

Sex and death, the two great levers of evolution, are too strong for some viewers. They can't bear to look at the real things, but they'll pay big bucks to watch their shadows dance on the wall. (2/9/2004)

Philip wondered why Americans protested “Mr Bun,” since they were so fond of grand-guignol movies and TV, and saw so much gore in the daily news.

Ah, Philip, you're on the other side of the world. Photos from Iraq and Palestine are carefully picked over by stateside editors: the blood 'n guts component is elided. What's shown on European TV, much less by Al-Jazeera, would be considered in the worst possible taste. If such images were published here, the word "gratuitous" would certainly bob up on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

This isn't new. War photos from Vietnam, Korea and WW2 were generally quite tame. When I was a boy I was amazed at the snapshots brought home by men who'd fought in the Pacific -- they were so much more, well, explicit than the stuff I'd seen in Life Magazine.

Your point about the Victorians is well taken. During the reign of that dear old queen anti-sodomy laws were passed in England, but they applied only to men (like Oscar Wilde). It's said nobody had the courage to tell Victoria that some ladies were guilty of a congruent sin. (2/9/2004)