Comrades of the European Internet Forum,
enough is enough!
For decades, we have placed ourselves in the cultural shadows - well-behaved, conformist, as if we were the ill-educated child of the great American moral uncle, who must not be too loud, not too naked and certainly not too independent. While half-naked shoulders are censored at high school graduation ceremonies in the USA, heads are thrown around like bowling balls in TV series. All normal, all ‘entertainment’. But woe betide you if you see a nipple - then the censorship hammer screeches louder than a Trump on Truth Social.
I ask you: What has become of Europe?
We, the continent-born of the Enlightenment, the revolutions, the renaissance of nudity on canvas, in stone and on film - we have allowed a country that bottles cheese in cans, of all things, to tell us what is ‘moral’!
It's not moral, it's demurely stupid.
Why are depictions of violence in mass media allowed to flow freely like American fracking oil, but natural, aesthetic, tasteful nudity - which has been part of European art and culture for centuries - is algorithmically filtered out, demonetised and labelled with warnings as if it were uranium?
No more prudish double standards!
We need a cultural return to what we have to offer:
- Enlightenment instead of transfiguration.
- Pleasure instead of violence.
- Nudity as an expression of naturalness - not as a moral offence.
I call on you: Banish pixelated prudery! Let's tear apart the corset of American moral dictatorship like a badly programmed DRM protection! Save the freedom of the breast - for Europe!
Stop aligning your films, games and series with a market that beeps ‘fuck’ five times but completely waves ‘shoot him in the face’ through.
We are not Hollywood's post office box. We are Europe. We are culture. We are naked! - So, metaphorically. And sometimes literally. And that's okay.
Thank you for your attention!
Violence often does serve a purpose. For example, in superhero movies it's often how the heroes stop the bad guys. That teaches us important lessons about life, like that we should shoot health insurance CEOs.
I agree. The only people that can claim the violence doesn't serve a purpose with any intellectual honesty are the tiny number of anarcho-pacifists.
However, a superhero punching out a bad guy, or even a realistic depiction of a recent-ish war like in the opening of Saving Private Ryan, is very different from the kind of gratuitous onscreen gore that's all over the place now.
They'll claim the woodchipper serial killer stuff establishes who the badguy is or whatever, of course, but I don't buy it, and I definitely don't believe the producer is paying out that much on special effects for the sake of artistic integrity.
The closest thing I can remember seeing in the last few years to that is in The Boys when A-Train liquefies Huey's girlfriend. But I think giving us a sense of Huey's shock and trauma is absolutely necessary in that scene, because it establishes why he doesn't just take the settlement money and move on with his life. We need to believe this event has profoundly affected him and made it impossible for him to ignore the problems with superheroes.
Really? Just since I posted this, I saw Mikey Madison getting shot into a lit stove and catching on fire.
I guess if you seek out slasher flicks... I like science fiction and cartoons
I actually have no idea what it was in originally - it was just a clip shown in the intro to Saturday Night Live. Which goes to show how normalised that sort of thing is.
Oh, it was slapstick. So, would you call Charles Chaplin senselessly violent?
It was not slapstick. The show starts with a monologue by the guest star. They were clips drawn from actual recent works, and the punchline was "gee, I sure do have a lot of intense scenes!". There was another one where she's lit on fire as well, although that one was goofier. I'm not a moron who watches comedies, while somehow not understanding comedy.
I'm sure I could find stronger examples if they didn't all blur together, but it was the one from my lived last 24 hours.