Time seems to take the shock out of things. Maybe its the non-stop access to interesting things on the internet and photos and videos of everything taking the rumor and imagination out of things.
GWAR's shows were mythic but now we have a nice wikipedia entry explaining it all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwar.
Now it's so mainstream that they can't find a plot that offends people anymore, not so much because they toned it down, but because society caught up to the Simpsons.
I doubt that is true. I bet that it is more like the people they offended could not really do much about that offense other than yell about it which just made the sows writers more popular in Hollywood.
Now, if they come up with a plot that offends, they are likely to get de-platformed and lose their ability to find a job in Hollywood.
Now we show the most offensive plots of all but call it "reality TV"
It's not completely fair to say they toned it down (although they absolutely did to some extent), it's more that they fell into a establishment rut and repeated themselves endlessly.
You could effortlessly write a humanistic/heartwarming, funny script every week that would deeply offend the powerful. The network that airs the Simpsons wouldn't air them, though. That's not what they're paying for.
I finally got around to watching Lord of the Rings. I was struck by how the costume design was nearly identical to GWAR’s. It made me wonder if or even how a self proclaimed cartoonist could have influenced someone on the other side of the world.
Its sad that he died; I’m losing all my old friends, Adam, Mike, John, my older brother. Jim Carroll was funny to us way back when. Not so funny now.
This is one of the most interesting and intriguing "opening" I've read in a long while.
I still want to turn Serial Mom into a Netflix series
I need a Waters-only fortune module.
Sometimes it is, but not always.
Widespread acceptability of formerly fringe-lifestyles and a rejection of socially-conservative values ranging from widespread availability of high-grade marijuana to drag-queens showing off their twerking capabilities at public libraries. It's in, it signals you're not "part of the system."
In a way it reminds me of the path that "shock rock" has taken, from Alice Cooper to Marilyn Manson and beyond. There was a good show on the history, I believe "Metal Evolution," which featured an interview with Till Lindemann of Rammstein who remarked, when asked about what he could do to shock at this point, "Suicide on stage." Which I think is a fair statement from a band famous for simulated sodomy on-stage. Perhaps they should try the real thing for sport.
There is some extreme metal that will never be mainstream or widely listened to but that mainly comes down to the amount of work that's required to listen to it (Deathspell Omega) or the purely misanthropic production quality (Darkthrone's Panzerfaust, an album I adore). This sort of music is "shocking" in the sense that most people assume bands make music because they actually want people to listen to it.
Hard work and devotion to a cause is, in itself, respectable. Having the courage to stick with something even when it was unpopular is respectable.
Heck even Terry A. Davis, late creator of TempleOS, gets some grudging respect on here.
There was only one, unique place in history for his genre and he took it.
He didn't become respectable. His mental illness became mainstream.
I wish I knew how this happened. Maybe the mechanism was a combination of internet porn and the destruction of real life social spaces. Maybe it's something else. But people should perhaps spend some small fraction of the time that they spend freaking out about the weather, and use it to freak out just a little about how we are going to survive the next 50 years as a civilization with a functioning social and political system.
However, I will say that reading the classics in their original Greek and Latin has added a lot of sanity to my life, and I would recommend it to anyone. Your own conception of Greek and Roman sexuality is highly romanticized, and would fall away with a course of general reading.
This is not to say that I would hold the ancients forward as examples of "sane" societies. Generally the opposite, in fact. General societal sanity is a post-Enlightenment condition.
I'm glad everything he represents is now accepted. I remember watching Pink Flamingos in the early 2000s when I was discovering cinematography and understanding the industry and it's evolution. It has shock value, but it was deeper than that. When I saw his film, it reminded me a little of Warhol in a way.
I'm actually glad the acceptance is so quick, just 13 years ago the United States federal government arrested someone for 'obscenity-related charges' in film production, though admittedly it was considerably more disturbing footage than what John Walters ever produced. *
I truly wonder what's the next set of values to go through this process. By definition we can't know what they are and speculation has a terrible history of accuracy, especially if it is what we know as the truth (as defined by the majority, i.e. the establishment)
Also wonder if as technology accelerates the rate of social change, so will the typically generational cycle speeds of acceptance of new ideas.
* Danilo Croce https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2007/June/07_crm_410....
-Mahatma Gandhi (Maybe?)
Tons of people have attributed it to him though.
Personally, if I don't have the book and page of a quote, I don't source it.
One still cannot do a funny movie/work of art about the Holocaust, as far as I can tell that’s one of the most taboo things to work with as an artist. Benigni’s movie was not a 100% comedy and maybe that’s why it eventually worked the way it did, but as far as I know Jerry Lewis’s movie was much more on the comedy side of things.
And if the King of Comedy himself cannot pull this off I think nobody else can. I also find it interesting that nobody else seems to be even trying nowadays, it has become too much of a taboo.
Then I watched Female Trouble which is a completely insane movie and thought, this person is out of his mind, I can’t believe they’re letting him go on the Today Show and that he’s assimilated into square culture, does anyone know what he’s all about? The question of whether his films would “shock” seems besides the point, they feel totally electric whether or not the culture has supposedly acclimated itself to certain things.
The problem is that too far outside the average conception of normality it becomes difficult to judge if your Radical Thing is net-positive or net-negative for society. Gay rights? Yes. Legal incest? No.
Some people can tell the difference. Most can't. And that's why "you can't shock anyone anymore" is exactly as true as it's always been. It's just that radical art 40 years ago and radical art in 2019 look different. Too different for John Waters to tell.
Literal shit.
That's still not acceptable in 2019 last I checked. Hell, nearly nothing in Pink Flamingos wouldn't be shocking today, though much of it (like rape or animal cruelty) hasn't aged well.
But you've seen two girls one cup. You've seen people dress in fursuits and fuck, and been fisted, and sounded, and it may not be attractive to you but it's not shocking. That's what he's talking about.
I'm guessing that a minority of people on HN haven't seen video of someone dying in a gruesome manner. Perhaps it was ISIS sawing off someone's head. Perhaps it was someone falling from the twin towers. Perhaps it was somebody murdering a homeless man for fun.
It's not shocking. It's despicable, but it's not shocking.
Nazism and white supremacy and racism and misogyny isn't shocking - it's dismaying, but it's not shocking. It may be socially acceptable, but it's not shocking. If anything, it's hackneyed.
What is this radical art? Maybe 4chan shocked people a decade ago, but goatse/gap3 pranks preceded that, at least in my world.
Honest question: Why not yes to both? I’m fine with it.
Meaning - WWII's "the greatest generation" was a relatively conservative generation, and it's gone more liberal in terms of social movements ever since. Are we going to keep seeing this movement toward liberalism, or are we going to see children rebel against their parents and move toward more traditional and conservative values?
Liberalism, fundamentally, is about freedom (negative rights), both economic and social. The freedom to offend, to abhor, to hate, to disagree, to keep one's own money, to control one's own body, to decide himself how he should live his own life. This means legal drugs of all kinds, this means legal hate speech, legal death threats, legal sodomy, legal polygamy, legal bestiality, etc.
We are so far away from this world of liberalism and freedom that it makes me sad every time I think about it. In fact, I feel like in the past few decades we are getting farther away still.
What would you suggest companies like Cloudflare do exactly? There have been talks of 8chan being accessory to literal terrorism; do you think that they really want to be hosting that stuff? Isn't it part of Cloudflare's free speech to say "we don't want to be party to this"? Isn't it a very liberal position to say "all these private companies can do business with people that they want to"?
Now, I'm actually totally willing to entertain the discussion that these corporations are so big that they should be either broken up and/or treated as utilities, but that seems to fight against classical liberalism.
EDIT:
Also, in the United States, it wasn't that long ago that marijuana possession was an enforceable crime in all fifty states, which is slowly going away. I wouldn't bring this up, except you mentioned drugs being illegal as some sort of evidence that we're becoming less liberal, despite the fact that cannabis legalization has been happening and expanding.
Not exactly sure how legal bestiality fits into liberalism; if you view the animal as a thinking entity, wouldn't having sex with something unable to provide consent be a violation of liberal principles?
Liberalism does not mean the unrestrained freedom to do as you please.
(I don’t even know where to start responding tbh.)(you’re fundamentally misunderstanding even society as a concept)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2017/08/11/why-demo...
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/01/17/generation-z-look...
We've already had it, remember Family Ties, the Yuppies, that "hippie" had become a dirty word, the "stick it to the Man" type a caricature, and so on?
Those were still within the framework of Baby Boomers though. Now we'll see even more backlash. It's a tide, not a line...
Maybe he just started hanging out around people with lower standards?
Getting gross stuff shown in a modern art museum is hardly an accomplishment. Manzoni did his "canned poop" thing in 1961. You're gonna have to try a lot harder than clips from porn movies. Pink Flamingos is still gross. You could do that again, if you wanted.
Though these days you're competing for attention from everybody on YouTube. You were an attention whore when it took some real effort to get it distributed. Now everybody can do it. They'll censor Pink Flamingos to put it on TV, but I'd be shocked if there weren't a dozen imitators on YouTube. (No, I'm not going to look.)
Congrats, you lowered the bar on bad taste, and I guess that's enough of an accomplishment to make you a commencement speaker. But once people figured out your formula, the bar lowered pretty far pretty fast, and rather than get ahead of it you let 'em make Hairspray.
He should have sold out, though. He's old and he did a bunch of wonderful things. If he had waited any longer, the cash-out would have passed him by. Should everyone work forever?
Attending exhibitions of his work as the guest of honor, giving talks at film festivals, doing lecture/stand-up tours every once and a while for a bit of travel and excitement; that's the life and a well-deserved victory lap.
He didn't have to sell out, but it wasn't like he was a activist or something, he was a grotesque Douglas Sirk having a little fun.
I'm glad he got rich. That's cool. Bawlmer kid makes good. But the article feels like flaunting it, without providing either insight or introspection.
