Video Nasties

[heslopian]

For the record, I don't believe in censorship. I've enjoyed many violent films and books, precisely because the violence was redeemed by the aesthetic. Take American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Possibly the most repulsive mainstream novel ever written, with indescribably graphic scenes of torture and killing, it is still an excellent work of art, because Ellis has an attitude towards the violence; he comments on and uses it, creating a bleakly funny satire of shallowness and greed. The material is probably no less gross on a visual level than I Spit on Your Grave, maybe even more so in some respects, but the latter is the more reprehensible piece, because the violence has no reason to exist beyond inspiring masturbation fantasies.
Take also Derek Raymond's great novel I Was Dora Suarez, which contains a scene where a psychopath ejaculates into the leg wound of a dead, AIDS infested prostitute. Disgusting? Of course. But not really exploitative, again because Raymond has a vision; his prose is stark and beautiful, he uses aesthetic technique, as opposed to just lovingly relating these horrible acts.
Violence and art have been bedfellows for thousands of years. The classic Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex contains incest and a man gouging his eyes out with a brooch; even more, unspeakable acts of depravity are committed in other examples of classic theater. Art isn't necessarily about what it is about; it's about how it is about it.