Isn’t that amazing? I’m 36 years old and have seen one or two life-size ***s over the past 15 years, and I’m still shocked when I watch a movie where a guy holds his *** into the camera or ***s another guy’s *** with a ***. The movie was Brüno, and yes, I completely understand why some people left the theater after 15 minutes. It was offensive.
Thinking about the movie and why I felt so uncomfortable I noticed a couple of interesting things. First thing: when it comes to movies, I’m almost completely Americanized. I just didn’t expect somebody to say the f-word on screen. I have heard so many bleeps on tv recently, that I was really shocked. It’s funny because in Germany we don’t bleep. If you feel like it, you can say Scheiße and Arschloch and ficken all you want – even at prime time.
Second thing: Bleeps or blurred pictures or black rectangles don’t work. At least not for my brain. It’s like the blind spot in your eye: although you know there are parts missing, you still see the whole picture, because your brain blends in all the surrounding colors and covers it up. To me it doesn’t make a difference if somebody says the actual word or I hear a bleep, the content is still the same. To me „bleep“ is as clear an acoustical sign as the acoustical sign „fuck“. The same with blurred images: I don’t need to see every detail of a big *** slowly ***ing somebody’s ***. My brain fills in the missing parts automatically. Thank you, brain! Well, I think I’ll get over it. But – third thing - it got me thinking. If we want to keep kids from seeing or hearing explicit or violent content, is it sufficient to bleep and blur? Or does the offensive message get across, no matter which acoustical or visual alteration is used? Sometimes I feel we overestimate our mind’s capacity for dealing with irritating images. Once they are inside our head they are hard to get rid of.
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