A couple of weeks ago, I was walking around these streets of New York, and, for the first time in my life, I was shocked by a movie poster. It was for the movie "Saw V." There, at eye level for any toddler in a stroller, was the huge image of a man, with his face covered by the skin of another man's face.
Now, while I'm no fan of this brand of gruesome, sadistic horror genre, I have no problem with what anyone wants to watch in a dark theater once they've paid their twelve bucks. But I was literally stopped in my tracks when I saw this image foisted on every passerby regardless of age or sensibility. I tried to imagine the filmmakers, the marketers, the advertising company, and the ad space owners all agreeing that this is a perfectly fine image to shove in front of the faces of children. And the elderly. And librarians.
I just learned about the controversy surrounding the poster for Kevin Smith's new movie, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno." Apparently the original poster was rejected by the MPAA in the U.S. (I didn't even know that the MPAA had jurisdiction over movie posters). It had featured photos of Rogen and Banks, while fully clothed, positioned suggestively.
So the movie company instead devised a poster picturing two stick figures, one male and one female, in front of a movie camera, with the text: "Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks made a movie so titillating that we can only show you this drawing." But even this stick-figure version was banned at bus stops in Philadelphia because it contains the word "porno."
If there are entities that regulate what images are allowed to appear on movie posters (and I'm surprised to learn that there are), shouldn't their chief concern be protecting children from a nightmare-inducing image of horrific murder, torture and psychotically sadistic mutilation? And what does it say about our society that we're more concerned about our children seeing something that's mildly suggestive of sexual pornography, than an actual example of torture-pornography?
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