Society OKs violence in ‘Titanic’ but blushes at nudity in film

Friday, October 2, 1998

Society OKs violence in ‘Titanic’ but blushes at nudity in
film

COLUMN: Society should confront sexual phobia, not glamorize
violence

"Titanic" thus far has managed to gross over $1.2 billion at the
box office, and that’s not even counting the massive profits from
videos, books, T-shirts and any other assorted crap upon which you
can affix Leonardo DiCaprio’s now-famous face. The whole world
seems mesmerized by this entertaining yet conventional, piece of
storytelling, and the small town of American Fork, Utah is no
different. Their local video store, Sunrise Family Video, is
selling the "Titanic" video just like every other video store
around the country.

But if you buy your copy of "Titanic" in American Fork you will
receive quite a peculiar offer: the store will, for a $5 fee, edit
your copy of the video for content before selling it to you. What
does this mean? It means that your copy of "Titanic" will no longer
include two scenes that the manager of Sunrise Family Video found
inappropriate for children.

Which scenes were these? Was it the intense scene in which a
suicidal Kate Winslet almost plummets to her doom off the side of
the oceanliner? Was it the gruesome sequence in which people are
violently thrown down the ship’s deck, now standing almost
vertically in the water, while the people below drown in the
freezing North Atlantic? Was it the harrowing finale, in which a
frigid DiCaprio sinks to the depths of the ocean while his lady
friend, hypothermia and all, paddles helplessly toward a rescue
vessel? No. The scenes omitted were (1) Kate Winslet posing topless
for one of DiCaprio’s sketches and (2) a tasteful love scene in the
back seat of a car aboard the ship.

First, I’d like to stress that there is nothing wrong with this
service that the video store is providing. People have the right to
edit their own personal copies of "Titanic" any way they see fit,
as long as their doing so doesn’t prevent anyone else from seeing
the movie the way it was meant to be seen.

Paramount debated filing suit against the store for violating
director James Cameron’s artistic integrity and butchering the
original copy of the film, but I have no ethical problem with
people who want to modify their own videotapes of the film. I say,
take out whatever you want. In fact, why not go the distance and
not even bother watching "Titanic" at all?

But, I digress. I only bring up this current event because I
find it so telling about the morality of our American society. As a
culture, we are more offended by the sight of a woman with no shirt
on than we are by the deaths of thousands of people. I want to
repeat this because that is really the message these Utahites are
sending to the rest of the country. It’s OK for their children to
watch the gruesome, painful, incredibly realistic deaths of
thousands of passengers (men, women and children) but it’s not OK
for them to see a part of the body possessed by over 50 percent of
the population.

This scene in which Kate Winslet revealed her breasts isn’t even
sexual in nature. Of course, you could argue that the scene was
placed there both to titillate the audience and to imply an erotic
undercurrent to the relationship between the two characters, but
the scene has nothing to do with sex or even sexuality. It is
merely an image of someone drawing a sketch and someone else posing
for it. It is an examination of the human form. Why does this upset
us so?

What is it about American culture that makes nudity, just
nudity, so taboo? I can understand if parents wanted to shield
their children from watching characters have sex in a movie, and
again let me stress that parents are allowed to shield their
children from anything they want, but I don’t understand why anyone
would care if their child saw a woman’s breasts.

Even more troubling than this realization is that violence is so
pervasive in film everywhere. I’m not one to argue for censorship,
and I think a filmmaker should be allowed to put anything they want
in a movie, and it’s up to the viewer to decide what they do and do
not want to see. Yet, it disturbs me that violence has become so
accepted and nudity so rejected.

To illustrate my point, CBS recently featured the network
television premiere of Martin Scorcese’s "GoodFellas," which, I
might add, is one of my all-time favorite films. Though the
violence in "GoodFellas" was toned down significantly for
television, it was still seen throughout the film, including a
scene with Ray Liotta smashing someone’s head in with the butt of a
gun and another shot of Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro burying and
then digging up a corpse. I ask you, which scene do you think is
going to warp a young mind more: the burying of murdered corpses or
drawing Kate Winslet’s breasts? I think the answer should be
obvious. Unfortunately, I think the average American might give a
different answer than me.

This really is just an observation. It is the decision of all
consumers to censor what they view and how they view it, and it is
up to parents to dictate what programming their kids should see and
which would best be left on the rental shelf. I just think that we
might want to lighten up as a nation and stop being quite so
uptight at the very mention of the word "sex" or the sight of a
bare bosom.

Look, half of the population has breasts, and the other half has
probably seen them in some form or another. There’s nothing
mysterious, dirty, naughty or inappropriate about them. And they’re
certainly less obscene an image than a man dying of a gunshot wound
or a passenger drowning on a doomed oceanliner.

Harris is a third-year history student.

Lonnie Harris

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© 1998 ASUCLA Communications Board