FILM: $1.43 million for a woman’s behind, and a killin’ every 23 seconds

Adverts for (sorry, pieces about) new low budget, viral-promoted JJ Abrams flick Cloverfield have it that the shaky camera work is making cinemagoers nauseous. Did they experience the same problem while watching NYPD Blue? The FCC found themselves sickened not by the mode of camera work, but by what it was filming, recently proposing a fine of $1.43 million for shots of an ‘adult woman’s bottom’ – or ‘full dorsal nudity’ as the Washington Post puts it – in an episode from 2003. (Why has it taken them so long to get around to deciding about this? Does it take five years to figure out exactly how long a shot should be allowed to linger, pre-watershed, on a woman’s behind? Could they just not tear their eyes away?)

In any case, Cloverfield is, as many movies seem to be, apocalyptic (it also shares its New York location with I Am Legend), part of cinema’s continuing trend toward extreme situations, extreme violence being the more socially acceptable. People go to a certain type of movie to experience a white knuckle ride, so perhaps the idea that this should inspire nausea should not surprise – but the old limits of violence in cinema are falling away. Without characters you care about or a strong plot to back it up, Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, falls back on making its victims unpredictable – killing children and pregnant women, using the latter as alien breeding grounds. That’s enough to make anyone hurl, and your correspondent very nearly did.

It’s all shock and little awe, but even AVP pales into comparison next to the new, Burma-based Rambo movie, in which the Vietnam veteran averages a kill every 23 seconds. Filmed on location, it boasts the use of real amputees, while the screen villain – a genuine rebel fighter, by all accounts – had his family put in jail as a result of taking part in the film. Coverage of the deplorable situation in Burma has died away in recent weeks, so this film may bring some benefits. Still, while the violence could be argued as making a point, we seem far more willing to accept hardcore killing than extreme, or even honest depictions of sex. (Or even an ‘adult woman’s bottom’.)

The sex scenes in Lust, Caution tell the story of the two main characters far more effectively than dialogue could in the context of the film (set in 1940s Japanese-occupied Shanghai, neither character is able to be honest with the other). They run from vicious to tender (which violence can never be) and, while possibly overused, one could argue the principle is underused in the general context of cinema – hence the half-baked ghettoisation of sexual content into pornography that’s freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

So, does the mainstream certification of Ang Lee’s movie (at leasy in Britain) mean that Western cinema is moving in the right direction? As this content is still ghettoised into foreign language – where it can be held at one cultural remove – one suspects not. The Hays code lives on, albeit in a milder form.