offensive

[JundtHeald]

David,
Have you ever seen a movie or heard a piece of music that you, yourself found offensive?
Jamie

[Edwardt]

Don't mean to steal David's thunder, but I've always found the Slasher movies, per se, to be offensive, because they present the phenomenon of murder, particularly serial murder, as a spectator sport, a form of pornography, rather than the societal disease that it in fact is. To me, murder is the most egregious act one can commit (and I say that out of no particular religious belief or philosophy). To me, the fascinating thing about movies like "In Cold Blood", or "Last House on the Left", or "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer", is that they attempt to examine man's inhumanity to his fellow man, which is an empirical reality of our existence and our history, without facile explanations or rationalizations. Why do people butcher their fellow human beings without compunction or normal human feeling? This is the eternal dilemma of our human species. How does one explain a Nero, or a Caligula, or an Elizabeth Bathory, or a Himmler, or a Stalin, or a Ted Bundy? Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil, and yet that doesn't make it any more explicable. It's beyond conventional human understanding and that's what elevates the best of these films beyond the commercial norm. The power of a movie like "LHOTL" is that it makes us recognize that these killers, these butchers, are not a breed apart, but flawed human being like ourselves, warped and distorted. What is it that separates us from a Richard Speck or a Charles Manson? These are cogent issues that the best of these films raise, but don't answer, because there are no answers, at least none that we can adequately propose. I guess that's what separates a film like "LHOTL" and "Henry" to me. A film like "LHOTL" is disturbing because of its realism (thanks in large part to the naturalistic acting of David and Fred Lincoln). A film like "Friday the 13th" or "I Spit on Your Grave" qualifies as pornography to me (and understand that I'm not suggesting they be banned or censored) because they address nothing substantial and could be termed as the most voyeuristic or of self-indulgent of films.
As far as music, I think the music of someone like "Eminem" is offensive, not because of the issues it addresses, but because I think it's motivated by nothing more than the lure of big bucks.
Ed T.