Philistine critic confesses her shame

All praise to Ann Hornaday, a Washington Post film critic, who confronts a couple of gory films that she's supposed to like -- and admits that they disgust her.

The first time I heard of [filmmaker] Dario Argento, I was working in Austin, where the terrific Austin Film Society had programmed one or two of his films. As a helpful film society programmer no doubt explained, Argento was hugely important as a godfather of contemporary gothic horror, helping to create a lexicon of blood, nudity and searing depravity that would find its apotheosis in slasher films and, now, torture porn.

I don't remember which Argento films I saw way back in Austin, nor do I recall my immediate reaction. But I suspect that, cognizant of the film society's imprimatur and reluctant to be considered hopelessly unhip, I either muttered something noncommittal about transgressive imagery or subversive visual grammar or, worse, nothing at all. That's how canons, however dubious, get created: with dissent being swallowed in one self-censoring, intellectually dishonest gulp.

So, dear readers, in front of you and the movie gods and everybody, I'm here to say: I don't get it. I don't get why, in "Mother of Tears," I'm supposed to find some kind of taboo thrill in watching a young woman being strangled by her own intestine. I don't get that Argento can write some of the most wooden dialogue and elicit some of the most risible performances to be seen in a movie (think "The Da Vinci Code" with an even more cockamamie mythology), but still get credit as some kind of auteur because of the ingenious weapon he creates to impale two eyeballs at once. I don't get why, in the course of a 40-year career, Argento can still find anything new in a shot of a slit throat and rivulets of burbling, viscous blood. (To the inevitable defense that Argento's work is simply camp, I would say that anything this aggressively hateful forfeits the right to be called camp. As Susan Sontag rightly observed, even camp at its most outlandish reveals some truth about the human condition.)

Good for her. I had my moment like this as a critic at the Toronto Film Festival at the screening of Todd Solondz's "Happiness." (Read Jonathan Lethem's review of it in Salon -- a "masterpiece" he called it -- for an idea of the kind of revolting stuff the sicko Solondz stuffed into the picture). It's the kind of movie that plays a child molester's attempts to drug and anally sodomize his son's playmate for comedy. It's the kind of movie that ends with a dog lick semen unobserved, and then lick an unsuspecting woman's face. Oh, how transgressive!

I remember riding back to midtown in a cab from the Manhattan screening of some movie, can't remember which, and listening to the two well-known film critics sharing the cab with me talk about what we had seen. It was a very violent film of some sort, as I recall, and the thought occurred to me as we rounded Columbus Circle -- I do remember that part vividly -- these people don't have children. They could analyze the film more coolly than I -- who was not a father yet, but who would be in a few months -- in part because they didn't imagine, or didn't seem to imagine, what it would be like to raise kids in a society where lots of people had their moral imaginations informed by eviscerations and the like.

In fact, I thought then, I don't know many film critics at all who have children. The art of film exists outside of that kind of social context. It affects one's judgment, I think, and not in a healthy way. I'm not talking about an impulse to make films that are suitable for all audiences. I'm talking about the cultural environment in which children are raised, and acculturated to adulthood. We don't tend to think about that in any serious way in our culture. It's all about satisfying immediate adult desire.

Seriously, though, does anybody these days watch a film or TV show and say, "I really shouldn't be watching this, this is bad for me" -- and turn it off? Does the thought occur to anybody that people ought not to be encouraged to make films in which women are strangled by their own intestines for the entertainment of the audience?