A couple films showing this year at Sundance are poised to top the charts . . . that is, if there are charts for which devotees of one-handed magazines are allowed to vote. Mouthbreathers everywhere, beads of earnest sweat on their foreheads, will no doubt blog their early a.m. approbation of this documentary about bestiality. The bestiality is “tastefully done,” oh good, and the film is breathlessly announced as not being exploitative. The result was “an elegant, eerily lyrical film,” in which fifty-gallon drums of true artistic disinfectant had to be shipped in and dumped all over the project. If everyone downwind holds their collective nose, and remembers the high calling of True Artistry, they might be able to write a stern letter to the local newspaper rebuking everyone else for their prudish refusal to pay attention to this final taboo. On the bright side, the producer had some disinfectant left over and so they are thinking of making an important docu-film about some guy who pushes oysters up his nose.
As if all this were insufficiently edifying, some other important aesthetic philosophers made a film in which a twelve-year-old girl is brutally raped. There will probably be some naysayers out there, of course, there always are. Some people don’t know that we simply cannot turn back the clock to that oppressive era when . . . oh, I don’t know . . . that oppressive era when preteens didn’t have to worry about their caregivers pimping them out to an American public lusting after Art that is Honest enough to be Real.