MISCmedia for 6/20/00
Will the Real 'Idiots' Please Stand Up?

THE AMERICAN DISTRIBUTOR of the Danish movie The Idiots demanded its frequent shots of male nudity be (crudely) censored, to insure an 'R' rating (and, therefore, the chance at mainstream theatrical bookings and big-newspaper advertising).

My first thought: What's so horrible about a penis and a couple of testicles anyway? I think my own are just fine. I've been in locker rooms and at nude beaches, and my finely-attuned writerly senses were never offended by other men's dangling participles.

As for female viewers, some sensitive ones might indeed feel confronted by the organs some women associate only with rape and violence, not with lovemaking. But such viewers, I believe, would be helped if they could see more male bodies in the nonthreatening environment of a cinema; they might learn to see them as symbols not of male power but of the ultimate male weakness.

(I've seen naked men running, in a nudist camp's annual Bare Buns Fun Run, and it can be as silly and awkward a sight as one can imagine.)

In certain other jurisdictions of the civilized world (namely Britain and Japan), the formulaic, ritualized entertainment known as hardcore pornography does not legally exist, but less extreme sexual and/or anatomical exhibitions are freely and openly available (nudity in newspapers, cuss words in the comics, simulated film-sex on network TV).

In certain other jurisdictions (such as much of the European continent), this dichotomy is considered superfluous and just about anything goes.

Here, things are a little different.

The Motion Picture Association of America, the media conglomerates who control it, and the other media conglomerates who control major-newspaper advertising have conspired to keep anything more salacious than one Kate Winslet breast from being seen in anything that looks like a real movie theater (where IDs can be checked) and instead relegated to premium cable TV (where anyone living in a subscribing household can conceivably watch) or the adult-video market (where the use of sexuality to reveal characters or tell stories isn't a high priority).

Anyhoo, I went to the U District and saw the censored version of The Idiots, with the quaint black censor bars around the male parts (and, in only one shot, around female parts).

The movie would've been a lot less disturbing if they'd shown the full nude scenes and cut out all the scenes with the cast wearing clothes.

Essentially, this is a story of six men and five women, all young adults of solid bourgeois upbringings, who crash in one of the men's uncle's second home and turn their lives into a performance-art project, by acting in a rude and obnoxious manner to anyone they meet. (I can see that sort of thing in the U District any day without spending $7.00 for the privilege, but that's beside the point.)

Specifically, they do this by pretending to be from a group home for retarded adults. (You might expect me, as one with a retarded older brother, to be offended by this, and I was.)

Back at the house, the film's characters continue the role-playing as a means of releasing their "inner Idiots." They justify this with the age-old young-intellectual blather about overcoming everyday consciousness to become one with primal nature; but at least they don't do this by pretending to be blacks or Indians.

In the last reel, we're supposed to suddenly poignantly identify with the faux-Idiots, because at least three of them are revealed to have had real emotional problems, and to have been using the Idiot game as therapy. I didn't buy it.

Nor did I buy the "purity" of the film's Dogme 95 wobbly-cam technique, which (thanks to too many bad Amerindie fake-documentary films) already seems like just another gimmick.

Director Lars Von Trier has done far better stuff. Any regular filmgoer who tells you otherwise is a, well, you know.

TOMORROW: Flann O'Brien, my current Main Man.

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