Scanners

The Shamus, Mr. Shoop, & blogger catch-up

Jim Emerson

Pop quiz!

I’ve spent the summer going to cardiologists and gastroenterologists, how about you?

I like a hemochromatosis screening in June

How about you?

I dig a cardiac catheterization balloon

How about you?

I love an MRI

And a CAT scan, too

I love endoscopies

Holter monitor EKGs

How about you?

Oh, it’s been fun, fun, fun till the doctor takes the Ambien away! Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with a good rhyme for “ventricular tachycardia” that scanned. “Gastric carcinoid” is also tough. But I’ve really had all those things — and a colonoscopy and seborrheic dermatitis and daily zombifying doses of Coreg and more — just since May! Unfortunately, this has put me far, far behind in my movie blog coverage.

For example, did you know that the terrific critic Michael Atkinson, late of the Village Voice, has joined the blogosphere? Welcome, Michael! You’ll find him at Zero for Conduct.

And, weeks ago, TLRHB, the splendid blogger formerly known as That Little Round-Headed Boy, transformed himself into The Shamus over at bad for the glass: a culture blog. The Shamus writes about noir and “Chinatown,” of course (BTW, I own the domain name badforglass.com — and egbertsouse.com and sitonapotatopanotis.com, too, for that matter), movies, records and record covers, television, cartoons, and all forms of pop culture. I’d love to link to a favorite post or two but… I can’t. As The Shamus explains:

If you like a post, copy it today. It may not be here tomorrow. The Shamus doesn’t play by the blog rules. The template will change. Often. No archiving. One other thing: I don’t roll on Shabbas. And Walter, will you put down the god-damned gun?I’ve been meaning to link to this post by the invaluable girish (The Cinema in Your Head) since the end of May, but where does the time go? Who knows, maybe one day I’ll even get around to writing about it myself.

Our beloved David Bordwell has a wonderful piece about the tactile pleasures of studying films frame-by-frame — not on DVD, but on archival equipment that encourages the practice of Watching movies very, very slowly. A snippet:

Viewing on an individual viewer has both costs and benefits. Sometimes details you’d notice on the big screen are hard to spot on a flatbed. But with your nose fairly close to the film, you can make discoveries you might miss in projection. (Ideally, you would see the film you’re studying on both the big screen and the small one.) In addition, of course, you can stop, go back, and replay stretches. Above all, you get to touch the film. This is a wonderful experience, handling 35mm film. Hold it up to the light and you see the pictures. You can’t do that with videotape or DVD.And because it’s summer quarter, our Man For All Seasons, the fantastic Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, has posted another pop quiz: Mr. Shoop’s Surfin’ Summer School Midterm. Questions this time around include:

2) A good movie from a bad director

6) Best movie about baseball

7) Favorite Barbara Stanwyck performance

8) “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” or “Dazed and Confused”?

13) “Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom” — yes or no?

20) Name a performance that everyone needs to be reminded of, for whatever reason

Oh, and so much more. PLUS two extra credit questions suggested by recent posts at Scanners!

Also, for a taste of the best of past quiz responses, be sure to sample Professor Corey’s Honor Society, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

And do not neglect to read Dennis’s defense/appreciation of Martin Scorsese’s misunderstood magnum opus, “New York, New York.” As I posted in the comments section: “New York, New York” (after the “Happy Endings” sequence was restored) is a masterpiece. I think it would make a nice (loooong) double-bill with “La Dolce Vita” because both movies are about performance — creating scenes, playing to the crowd, adopting roles, in public and in private. Those brutal hyper-emotional Scorsese confrontations against mockingly artificial backdrops — genius. And your selection at this time is a fine tribute to the recently departed Laszlo Kovacs, whose fluid “NY, NY” camerawork is positively musical.

* * * *

I’m mad about polyps

Can’t get my fill

Needles in fingertips

They give me a thrill

Holding breath for the ultra-sound

Pooping in Sensurround™

May not be new

But I like it, how about you?

Biggest Acting, Best and Worst: Over the top, Ma!

Jim Emerson

View image Looming large.

I believe it was Gordon Gecko who proclaimed: “Ham is good!”

The “Wall Street” supervillain (superhero?) was not advocating violation of any dietary laws, of course, but simply stating a fact: Sometimes Big Acting can be quite enjoyable. Other times, of course, it can be cringe-worthy, irritating, risible, embarrassing. Only you can decide which is which. For you.

Take for example the story of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest” — she of “No wire hangers!” and “Eat your meat!” (both precursors of “I drink your milkshake!”). Pre-release publicity reports claimed that Dunaway was giving a serious dramatic performance. But from the very first screenings it was painfully (yet fasciatingly) clear that somebody was going off her rocker — but which actress was it: Crawford or Dunaway?

Performances pitched at the balcony, or the moon, always take the risk of falling somewhere between “tour-de-force” and “trying way too hard,” virtuosity and showboating. And opinions may very about where they come down. (See “A Journey to the End of Taste,” below.) You may wince at the Method nakedness displayed by Marlon Brando or James Dean in some of their most intense emotional moments (“You’re tearing me apart!”). Or you may rejoice at even the most outré dramatic and/or comedic efforts of Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, Bette Davis, Jack Nicholson, Klaus Kinski, Will Ferrell, Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Kevin Spacey, Whoopi Goldberg, Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Nicolas Cage, Ben Stiller, Tyler Perry, Owen Wilson, Gene Wilder… while others find them excruciating, overwrought or unintentionally campy.

The bigger the performance, the bigger the risks. Or maybe not. Just look over the history of Oscar nominations for acting.

Trix Nix Pix Crix: The death of Variety

Jim Emerson

What does Variety — once known as “The Showbiz Bible” — think it has to offer its readers? After Monday’s news that the paper has jettisoned (what’s the reverse of “ankled”? I forget…) veteran film critic Todd McCarthy, whose name was synonymous with Variety even before the publication’s reviews had actual bylines, I don’t see much future in the once-essential trade paper. Lay off the people who are your reputation, your authority, your influence, and what’s left? Nothing. There will still be a batch of web and paper pages legally entitled to call itself “Variety,” but so what? It’s like one of those bands that tours under a once-famous name without actually offering the work of any of the names that made it what it was.

How much is that worth to you right now?

Black humor: Stepin Fetchit to Richard Pryorto Tyler Perry (Part II)

Jim Emerson

Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, 1902 -1985

“We need to examine the history of blacks in film to appreciate their deep roots…. Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, the top comedy stars of the 80s, have a strange, subversive ancestor in Stepin Fetchit, America’s first black millionaire actor.”

— Richard Corliss, Time, “The 25 Most Important Films on Race”

See: “Stepin Fetchit to Denzel Washington (Part I )”

“Stepin Fetchit, then and now” by Jim Emerson (2005)

* * *

The day Clarence Thomas was nominated by George H.W. Bush for the Supreme Court, I was interviewing 23-year-old writer-director John Singleton about his upcoming movie “Boyz N the Hood” (1991). Singleton was sitting in front of a hotel-room TV tuned to CNN and the first words out of his mouth were: “He’s the biggest Uncle Tom.”

That memory came back again recently as I was reading Harvard Law Professor and Supreme Court bar member Randall Kennedy’s book, “Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal.” [1] Kennedy writes:

Sometimes “Uncle Tom” is used interchangeably with “sellout.” In a Washington Post profile of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, two journalists write that “Uncle Tom is among the most searing insults a black American can hurl at a member of his own race.” They describe “Uncle Tom” as a “synonym for sellout, someone subservient to whites at the expense of his own people.”

How to Act Black: “Black Acting School” from “Hollywood Shuffle” (see clip below).

This usage is ironic. The original Uncle Tom — Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom — was a character who chose death at the hand of his notorious owner, Simon Legree, rather than reveal the whereabouts of runaway slaves. Still there are those who use “Uncle Tom” to refer to any black whose actions, in their view, retard African-American advancement. Others are more discriminating. For many of them, the label “sellout” is more damning than “Uncle Tom” or kindred epithets — “Aunt Thomasina,” “Oreo,” “snowflake,” “handkerchief head,” “white man’s Negro,” “Stepin Fetchit”….

View image The late Richard Pryor, All-African-American. Negative criticism of Pryor is usually limited to his acceptance of inferior material.

Of course, all those terms aren’t synonymous, either. The name of Stepin Fetchit is nearly as well-known, and almost synonymous with “Uncle Tom” — and that, too, may be somewhat ironic. Fetchit (born Lincoln Perry, 1902-1985) was a tremendously popular movie star with black and white audiences. But his act, on stage and screen, was also vilified for perpetuating a stereotype of African-American men as lazy, shuffling, bowing and scraping buffoon. (Other stereotypes of black men as pimps, gangstas, rapists, con artists, drug pushers/addicts, violent criminals, woman-abusers would come from elsewhere, and long outlive him.) He was admired and in many ways emulated by Muhammad Ali, with whom he converted to the Nation of Islam, and he was honored with an NAACP Image Award in 1976.

But how many people today have actually seen him in a movie?

Jake Gyllenhaal stops the show!

Jim Emerson

This guy’s pretty talented. He should go on “American Idol” or something. He could be as famous as Clay Aiken one day.

Will “Mean Girl” Palin herself appear on SNL?

Jim Emerson

And, if she does, how many viewers will be able to tell the difference? Is this gonna be the talent portion?

Bill Zwecker reports in the Chicago Sun-Times:

It’s looking more and more likely that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will appear on ”Saturday Night Live” — to have some fun with Tina Fey.

As the comedian’s impressions of the GOP vice presidential candidate draw laughs from Republicans and Democrats alike, a top honcho from the John McCain campaign tells me there’s a debate going on about how to respond.

The Signal: What to do (and not to do) when the world ends

Jim Emerson

View image Duct tape: Effective in an emergency or no?

My review of “The Signal” is at RogerEbert.com. Here’s an excerpt:

A few things we can learn from the experimental horror-comedy “The Signal”:

1. Do not live in a place called “Terminus.” There’s no future in it.

2. If your cable goes out, don’t stare at the mesmerizing static, just turn off the TV.

3. Do not put on headphones and listen to music while strolling down the corridor in your apartment building if it’s strewn with freshly slaughtered corpses, especially if madmen with garden shears are also present.

4. It doesn’t hurt to wear a tinfoil hat sometimes.

That first one is a given. The second one you should already know from life experience and from movies like “Videodrome” and the Japanese horror film “Ringu” (“The Ring”). The third one you should know from every zombie or slasher movie ever made, and besides it’s common sense. And the fourth, well, that’s just a bonus tip that could come in handy someday.

Is Judd Apatow John Hughes? (Answer: No)

Jim Emerson

View image Those plucky, sympathetic teens of yesteryear.

You know what? “Sex and the City” was for girls! Yes, it’s true. First it was for (and about) gay boys, but eventually it revolved around a certain brand of perfume-insert, fashion-magazine womankind: rich, white, co-dependent, status-obsessed, desperate for a man to complete her.

Know what else? Judd Apatow makes movies about guys — and heterosexual relationships with women, but mainly about what used to be known as “male bonding.” (The fashionable term now is “bro-mance,” which is cuter and invoked largely by what used to be called “metrosexuals.”) The Apatow guy tends to be underemployed, white, Jewish (or Canadian), slobby, geeky, smelly, childish (not just “childlike”) and more or less happy, unaware that he’s desperate for a woman to complete him. Then, once he becomes aware, he’s not entirely sure that’s possible, or desirable.

This, I submit, is a minor breakthrough in romantic comedy. OK, perhaps I am single and bitter, but I’m also right.

In the New York Sun (also known as “the conservative New York Sun”), Steve Dollar mentions that Catherine Keener’s character in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” “pretty much takes the blame for making the poor guy sell all his collectible model toys (but whose side is Apatow on?), and spends much of her screen time mothering her infantile boyfriend.”

Is that what happens? Even if so, whose side is Mr. Dollar on? (And who said it was necessary to divine and choose “sides”?)

Two-timing Basterds

Jim Emerson

Roger Ebert writes of seeing “Inglourious Basterds” for the first time at Cannes: “I knew Tarantino had made a considerable film, but I wanted it to settle, and to see it again. I’m glad I did. Like a lot of real movies, you relish it more the next time.” Keith Uhlich says he’s “loving [it] more and more as I reflect on it.” Glenn Kenny has already seen it twice and has offered “a structural breakdown” of the film’s five chapters.

And Karina Longworth — well, she has a whole new take on “Inglorious Basterds” since she saw it in that French place last spring:

When I first saw “Inglourious Basterds” at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was … off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. “Quentin Tarantino,” I wrote, “has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film.” I complained about the film’s pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. “‘Basterds’ plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is,” I concluded.

Two reviews: “The Lives of Others” & “Climates”

Jim Emerson

View image Listen (doo-dah-doo), do you want to know a secret?

I have new reviews of two fine films — one from Germany and one from Turkey — in today’s Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com:

The Lives of Others

It feels like science fiction — “Fahrenheit 451” or “THX-1138” or “Brazil,” with roots in Kafka and Orwell — but the chilling and chilly dystopian world of writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Lives of Others” existed. The film, which begins in 1984, is a depiction of historical reality, not a cautionary fiction. It’s set in East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, then a Soviet bloc communist-totalitarian state. Think of it as “The Conversation” behind the Iron Curtain.

Climates

The air is alive in Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylon’s “Climates” — more alive than the characters, who are like inert lumps of rock or sand. But that’s the point. In this movie, so finely attuned to frequencies of light and sound, it’s the invisible space around the characters that swarms with life and possibility. Their interior lives are muddled, opaque even to themselves, and they can’t express anything directly, not even their own anguish and dissatisfaction.

Opening Shots: ‘Raw Meat’

Jim Emerson

View image

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They don’t grind ’em out like “Raw Meat” anymore. I don’t know if horror movies will ever seem as seedy as they did in the first half of the 1970s, when even the emulsion itself seemed to carry dread and disease. In this British horror-thriller, released in the UK as “Death Line” and directed by Gary Sherman (“Dead & Buried”), there’s Something in the Underground. Yes, there’s a through-line to “The Descent” here. And Guillermo Del Toro (“Cronos,” “The Devil’s Backbone,” “Pan’s Labyrinth”) considers it one of his favorites.

View image

A Semi-Important Brit (with mustache and bowler hat) is seen checking out various porn shops and strip clubs in a seamy area of London, before descending into subway where he attempts to pick up a prostitute and is then found dead. That begins an investigation by Inspector Calhoun (a tartly over-caffeinated Donald Pleasence) and long-suffering Detective Sergeant Rogers (Norman Rossington — the put-upon manager, Norm, from “A Hard Day’s Night”). Christopher Lee also appears as an MI5 operative, doing what seems to be a nutty send-up of Patrick MacNee’s Steed on “The Avengers.”

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The opening shot itself begins with an out-of-focus blur of colors, accompanied by a dirty, grinding, sluggish, metallic guitar/bass/drums riff that sounds like Angelo Badalamenti’s score for the endless-nightmare Roadhouse scene in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks; Fire Walk with Me.” As the image comes into focus we see a Magritte-like silhouette of a British gent looking at dirty magazines. Then the shot goes out of focus again. The pattern is repeated throughout the titles sequence as the naughty fellow visits one unseemly establishment after another: out of focus (indistinguishable, unidentifiable); then in focus (ah, that’s what we’re seeing/where we are); then back out again. And, wouldn’t you know it, that’s the shape of the mystery (and the investigation) itself: Someone’s whereabouts are unknown. Then he is seen. Then he disappears. The aim is to fill in those out-of-focus parts, to figure out where he came from, how he got there, and where he went.

I’m sure “Raw Meat” is not as shocking as it must have seemed in 1972, but Sherman’s use of real, atmospheric locations is still eerily effective. And for fans of long takes, this guy loves ’em! There are whole stretches where the camera simply prowls around underground, revealing its horrors one by one. The film was cut for its original release in the UK — some gore, a bit with a rat’s head, an attempted rape — and wasn’t passed by the censors until the DVD release in 2006.

The 411 on 420

Jim Emerson

Ryan Van Duzer reports for the Boulder Daily Camera from the heart of pot country: the University of Colorado. Bill O’Reilly’s gonna love this.

How “Star Wars” changed the world (as we knew it)

Jim Emerson

View image Corporate branding at its very finest.

I have another new essay at MSN Movies now, on How Star Wars Changed the World. Yes, it was 30 years ago today (well, Friday, May 25, to be specific) that the Death Star blew Alderaan into space dust, contributing to galactic warming and allergy problems throughout the GFFA. An excerpt:

What “Star Wars” did best was combine corny stock characters and “Amazing Stories” plotlines with state-of-the-art Industrial Light and Magic visual effects and Dolby (later replaced with Lucas’s patented THX) Surround sound. No more rockets made out of cardboard toilet-paper tubes with sparklers stuck in the rear for thrusters. Mix that with a wisecracking, almost postmodern sense of humor (more gung-ho earnest than the arch self-awareness William Goldman pumped into the Western in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” eight years earlier) and an old-fashioned Hollywood military-symphonic score by John Williams, and you have a rousing, roller-coaster space adventure for children of all ages, as the marketers like to say.

Sure, the movie was criticized for being infantile, but that misses the point. It’s aimed at a sensibility somewhere between infancy and the second year of college (or high school). A space fantasy with the emphasis on interstellar swashbuckling (and with romantic mush kept to a minimum), “Star Wars” appealed to the 3- to 12-year-old boy in all of us — and still does.

But although all those things may have contributed to the “Star Wars” phenomenon, they don’t explain why it “changed everything”, or what accounted for “the mania” (as George Harrison used to call that unaccountable epochal thing that engulfed him and three other lovable mop-tops). Because it wasn’t really the movie itself that shook the world (not like the Beatles’ music shook up pop/rock music, anyway); it was the popular response to the movie, and the motion picture industry’s response to that response. […]

Ben Horne’s “Twin Peaks” set snaps

Jim Emerson

View image The Man From Another Place (Michael J. Anderson, that is) with The Man From Spokane (David Lynch) in the Red Room. Photo by Richard Beymer.

The owls are not what they seem. And Richard Beymer has the photos to prove it, in this beautiful online gallery from the set of “Twin Peaks.” The shot of Hank Worden (“Grateful to the hospitality of your rocking chair, ma’am!”) with Lynch makes me very happy.

Look for marvelous/creepy shots of Ray Wise, Grace Zabriskie, Harry Goaz, Heather Graham, Carel Struycken, Frank Silva, Charlotte Stewart and Don S. Davis and more of your favorite “Twin Peaks” stars, hanging out in the Great Northern, the Double R, the Red Room, and the woods!

(tip: Movie City Indie)

TIFF 2007: Brian De Palma on the front lines

Jim Emerson

View image Look familiar? A redacted web image from Brian De Palma’s “Redacted.”

Because of the whole “Hitchcockian thriller” rep that’s stuck to Brian De Palma for so many years and so many movies (“Sisters,” “Obsession,” “Carrie,” “Dressed to Kill,” “Blow Out,” “Raising Cain,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Femme Fatale,” “The Black Dahlia”) some people seem to forget that De Palma is (was?) first and foremost a political filmmaker. Because his “Redacted,” a fictionalized film that uses a variety of documentary techniques from amateur combat videos to “Al Jazeera” to YouTube,” concerns war crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq, the connection to his Vietnam movie “Casualties of War” seems obvious.

But the stronger connection, I think, is to “Greetings” (1968) and “Hi Mom!” (1970), two then-counter-cultural comedies, more influenced by Godard than Hitchcock, that toyed with our perceptions of Vietnam, terrorism, law and order, Black Power and other issues of the day as they were filtered through the mass media. De Palma provocatively mixed satire, “documentary,” pornography, voyeurism, journalism, improvisation and Godardian alienation strategies into volatile, combustible Molotov-cocktail-movies.

I don’t know when De Palma has ever been accused of being sincere, but “Redacted” feels to me as close as he’s ever come. He’s engaged in a way he did not seem to be with “The Black Dahlia” (though I realize that’s not saying much) and sections of the film are shocking and incendiary. De Palma won the best director award at the Venice Film Festival, and I think he really set out to give the audience a better, more visceral understanding of what has been going on in Iraq for years now — not by painting the Americans as “villains,” but by showing what happens when raw recruits are thrown into guerilla warfare. Very much like in that other undeclared war that we’re told we’re not supposed to compare the current one to. And, as the title suggests, this effort is designed to get past the heavily censored narratives and images we have gotten from our government officials and embedded reporters (WMD, Jessica Lynch, looting, Pat Tillman…), to tell some of the stories that the mainstream press is still too cowed to report.

But chief among my problems with “Redacted” is that, if you’ve seen “Greetings” and “Hi Mom!” (and you absolutely should — they’re both on DVD), and you know that De Palma has now made an Iraq movie, that pretty much tells you everything you need to know. The night raid scene in “Redacted” is the “Be Black, Baby” National Intellectual Television documentary in “Hi Mom!” But what seemed radical and revolutionary and experimental in the late 1960s and early 1970s is now fairly commonplace. Adding visual references to Arab satellite networks and Islamist web sites and video conferencing doesn’t have the same immediate impact. We’ve all seen this sort of thing in other movies and on network TV.

In fact, if you’ve watched the actual documentaries about Iraq on “Frontline” (“News War,” “The Soldier’s Heart,” “The Lost Year in Iraq,” “A Company of Soldiers,” “Beyond Baghdad,” “The Insurgency”) and “Bill Moyers’ Journal” (“Buying the War”) and “60 Minutes” (“The Killings in Haditha”), “Redacted” looks like pretty tame and routine stuff, despite its inflammatory subject. (Do check out those links in the previous sentence, if you haven’t seen them already.)

And while I think the movie is pretty fair about making points on all sides (it’s a good sign that His Ignorance B— O’—— started attacking the movie as “anti-troop” before he or virtually anyone had even seen it), I think it fatally wrongheaded in its handling some of the boots-on-the-ground characters. It’s self-consciously a take on the platoon movie, with Kubrick references from “Paths of Glory” to “Barry Lyndon” to “Full Metal Jacket” on prominent display. We have the requisite platoon types, of course: the book-reading, glasses-wearing intellectual/moralist; the “journalist” who’s out to collect war stories (only here he’s an aspiring, untalented filmmaker who uses every cheesy transitional device in iMovie and doesn’t stand a chance of getting into film school); the fence-sitter who’s so morally shellshocked that he can’t make sound decisions between right and wrong; the idiot follower; and the psychopathic killer the idiot follows. Although a French documentary takes pains to show the stress the troops are under, and how these men must make split-second decisions about life and death at any moment (see “Frontline”‘s “The Soldier’s Heart” for some real un(der)reported stories), the American Psycho and his fat toady are just flat-out cartoon-evil in ways that don’t illuminate anything and, what’s worse, simply hand ammo to the enemy (e.g., B— O’——, A– C——, and other propagandists and demagogues who unfailingly value ideology uber alles).

Where are the many, many good, decent soldiers (and Marines) who signed up after 9/11 and then, because they were thrown into this situation without adequate preparations or resources, found themselves ill-equipped to deal with blowback beyond anything their leaders had led them to expect? We know they’re out there (over there and back here, if they were lucky), and any one of their stories is much more inherently dramatic and tragic and morally challenging than simply pitting “decent” American fighters against “evil” ones. I’m sure both kinds exist, but this is exactly the kind of senseless black-and-white false dilemma that got us into the Iraq-mire to begin with. There’s a scene in which the two “bad apples” (did Donald Rumsfeld tape this bit?) shoot their own badass video that is so callous and crazy and pointless that I began to wonder if De Palma had consciously decided to include it in order to feed inflammatory material to the Fox News agit-prop machine. That ought to help promote the movie….

Torture porn: Want popcorn with that?

Jim Emerson

Peet at NegativeSpace knows it when he sees it.

In the 1957 case Roth v. United States, the US Supreme Court held that the First Amendment did not protect obscenity, which Justice William Brennan characterized as a form of expression that was “utterly without redeeming social importance…” and which “… to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest.”

In Jacobeliis v. Ohio (1964), Justice Potter Stewart wrote his famous description of pornography:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case [Louis Malle’s 1958 “The Lovers”/”Les Amants”] is not that.Nine years later, in Miller v. California, Chief Justice Warren Burger offered his famous definition of obscenity:The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.Today, of course, porn is made for the World Wide Interwebs, and so-called “torture porn” is mainstream multiplex fare. In a post called “The 120 Days of HOSTEL PART II” at The Exploding Kinetoscope, Chris Stangl argues that the phrase “torture porn” is simply a meaningless critical buzzword, “a non-position that allows a critic not to engage the work. It’s critical name-calling.” Stengl writes: “Any review, op-ed piece, or coverage of ‘Hostel Part II’ that includes the phrase ‘torture porn’ as if it were a meaningful genre designation, I will not finish reading. A line must be drawn. We all have our limits.” (Thanks to The House for calling my attention to Stangl’s site.)

I was about to disagree with this (after all, I happen to know torture porn when I see it!) — but then…