Rape in movies

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On a related note the Illinois House just passed a bill restricting the sale of violent or sexually explicit video games to minors (i.e., all those under 18). It looks like it will pass the Illinois Senate then signed into law by the Governor. Basically, it's going to be up to merchants to determine which games are affected -- and local law enforcement to decide if the merchants did it right.

 

Your objection to rape in movies is that users of the IMDB forums are too juvenile to discuss it maturely?

Awsome.

 

You're right, there is no need. On a related note, there's no need for movies, period.

If it offends you, don't watch it. Pretty simple concept, if you ask me.

 

ArtEChoke - I think the comments on IMDB were more sinister than juvenile.

AMaster - Its not about being offensive. I find most movies on WW1 and WW2 offensive as they are distorted and hardly relate to what had been documented or people's accounts of what happened.

As I said earlier would a movie depicting graphic pedophile rape be okay because people don't have to watch it - even if it was just realistic CGI and not real actors?

 

*shrugs* Sure, CGI is fine, IMO. Personally I doubt that I would want to watch it, but if it was done I would hardly protest.

And the people on IMDB are allowed to be as sinister or immature as they like - if they get off on movie rape scenes, that's their business. If they go out and rape people ... well, I suppose that's their business too. I do not like to think that people should miss out on the experience of horror which comes with watching such movies because of something that has nothing at all to do with them.

And I certainly don't think that just because one person (okay, probably quite a number of people) think that 'There is no need for such scenes to be depicted'.

 

Couple of points here:

A)By MY morals, is it okay to watch movies that are just about children being raped in the most graphic ways imaginable for no other reason than because censorship is bad?

No. Thankfully, no one argued otherwise(or if they did then I missed it) and this is a strawman.

B)Children are children. There is a reason we don't let them do any sort of work they can concievably get paid to do(including porn).

This is no cut-and-dried simple matter here. The film version of Lolita starring Jeremy Irons used an older actress who played a young teen(13) to avoid these issues and it was a masterpiece of a movie. Very moving and powerful and even if you had not read the book, it revealed a side of such improper relationships that a lot of people do not see(and hence do not understand why what Jerry Lee Lewis, for example, did was so wrong),

The physical, sexual scenes in the film were absolutely neccessary to make the points they made. I know this is hard for soime to understand but think of it like this: If I walk up to you and tell you that someone on a bicycle was just run over by a truck, you will think "Ouch! That's terrible!". If you SEE someone run over by a truck(trust me on this one) you will be hard pressed to ride a bicycle near the main roads again!

I don't buy the "desensitization" argument for a second. I have seen a few people shot and killed before in my lifetime adn the second or third one is no easier or more of a "turn on" than the first was.

Fangoria is legal(still being published?). It caters exclusively to a rather strange type of kid who goes to movies for no other reason than to see gore. I doubt they get sexual gratification from such but that is hardly the point. Believe it or not these same people will go to see a movie like Saving Private Ryan with a walkman/IPOD player headphones on their ears. They could care less about whatever point Speilberg was trying to get across. They are turned on by violence.

So what part of Saving Private Ryan should have been "blacked out"(for the rest of us) because these kids exist?

Throughout the 80's and 90's, I was an avid comic-book reader. I did not read the CC approved crap Marvel was churning out for the most part. I was into the "underground" stuff. Either for the art or story or both(on rare occasions).
Many of these indie books were VERY violent and some very sexual.
There was one book however that took the cake and ran with it. Faust: Love of the Damned dared to not only be more sexually explicit than any other book and MORE graphically violent(artist Tim Vigil was probably the chief reason that you see so much more blood and gore in books like Wolverine, The Punisher and Spawn) but the book's creators dared to depict sexual violence of a sort so extreme that even though the scenes were only black and white illustrations, the book was the source of several comic shops being shut down by federal authorities and law enforcement throughout the 90's.

But here is the kicker: Faust was also the best written comic book published...PERIOD. The old adage that graphic violence & sexuality was always offered in lieu of substance did not apply here to this modern day retelling of Goeth's masterpiece! Authors David Quinn and Tim Vigil were quickly showered with offers from every single company in existence(including Marvel and D.C., which is ironic because Quinn and Vigil were Marvel's most outsppoken critics!) to write and draw(respectively) other books.
The story itself, about a man who wakes up with no memory of who he is and gradually discovers he was an artist who made a bad deal with the wrong guy and ended up an assassin/pawn for a Satanic Cult, simply could not have been told using the "off camera" approach. If they had censored ANYTHING in that book, it would not have worked and would have been just another B&W indie book with some interesting potential that went unrealized. Vigil's art hits you like a train wreck. It horrifies and amazes you all at once. It is beautiful in it's over the top depiction of ugliness. It gives you a real idea of John Jasper's (the protagonist) world and the potential consequences of emotion and complacency.

Another more well known example of a comic book that could not have worked without the disturbing imagery was The Crow by James O'Barr(which was almost NOTHING like the crappy movie with Brandon Lee). The book starts off as a film noire mystery, wherein a man in white face paint is targeting and murdering gang bangers in Detroit, reminding each victim of some incident that took place on a dirt road involving a broken down '73 Cuda and a young couple, "pain and shadows". Throughout the book, we are given small details about this couple. We get to know them as people.
Eventually the book comes to a chapter titled "The Atrocity Exhibition", in which the events of that night, one year prior, are revealed in relatively graphic detail. The woman is raped and beaten then has her head blown off before being raped again while her fiance watches helplessly from a puddle of his own blood where he has been shot in the head.
If O'Barr had NOT developed the characters and let us get to know them as he did(unlike the movie which chose this path of hurriedly glossing over these details) then the graphic rape and murders would hardly matter and if he had taken the off camera apporach to the "Atrocity Exhibition" scene then whatever happened to whom would not have mattered. The horror and sadness just would not hit home.
I did not give a lot of thought to just how bad a thing the psychopathic serial killer is until I saw Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer which depicted disturbingly realistic scenes of sexual violence. What's more, I would venture to say that no matter how much YOU think you appreciate the severity of such crimes, you will not have the full appreciation either.

But like others have said, if oyu don't agree...don't watch. Just try and keep your grubby little fingers off of the proverbial "scene deletion button" for the rest of us, okay? You would likely not take kindly to someone like ME editing the "adult material" from certain iconic texts for the good of everyone else.

[ March 18, 2005, 12:06: Message edited by: RuneQuester ]

 

If the actress was adult but the scene was still bad because she pretended to have been a kid, then your grounds for it must be that paedophilia is wrong. But adult rape is still wrong and even more so than "consensual" sex with someone one or two years below the age of consent. So if it was wrong to depict minors in a sexual way, it's wrong to depict rape because both paedophilia and rape are wrong.

 

What?

Rape is wrong, therefore we cannot depict rape. Well, alright...

Murder is wrong, therefore we cannot depict murder. Theft is wrong, therefore we cannot depict theft. Assault and battery is wrong, therefore we cannot depict assault and battery. Fraud is wrong, therefore we cannot depict...well, you get the idea.

The idea that depicting rape is inherently worse than depicting any other form of violence is befuddling to me. It's more intimate? Says who? Isn't torture kinda intimate? The movie Saw comes to mind. Or perhaps Seven.

Frankly, yes. I'd likely never watch it, but...
If it were an actual child being used for the scenes, that would of course be illegal, to say nothing of immoral . CGI is something else entirely.

 

What AMaster said.


The CGI depiction of child-sex is a touchy subject but I must agree with AMaster on this one as well. Should Hentai be illegal? I don't think so. How would you even ascertain, watching a hypothetical CGI hentai film just who was a child and who was an adult? Sure you could say "That one looks like a child" or "That guy looks like an adult....to ME." but this is CGI animation. How can you objectively establish such a thing?