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I found myself engrossed in a movie that kept me up until 2am last night. The film in question was 2000's Dirty Pictures, a based-on-the-true-story drama of Daniel Barrie, once the curator of Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center, who brought a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition to his museum and subsequently faced fanatical right-wing opposition, community censure, and criminal charges.
I was really knocked back by the theme of this film, which was essentially an exploration of the nature of freedom and the efforts one is sometimes forced to exert in order to maintain freedom. I felt, and still feel, that the struggles over this exhibition were about more than just a definition of art, or of obscenity, but instead were about one person's right to hold intrinsically to their own beliefs in the face of other people's derision and outrage. I found the dramatization of these themes and questions very gripping.
But I have to admit, watching the film made me angry. It irked me to see the mobilized coalition of right-wing religious fanatics in full swing, pompous and narrow-minded as most of them are, so jealous of the private lives of others that they would spend any coin to control them. I found myself biting my tongue in places to avoid screaming at the television screen in frustration (it was almost 2 in the morning, after all, and I do have neighbors).
These people scare the shit out of me.
And I see things like Governor Sarah Palin saying on national television that she doesn't know if she'd call the bombing of an abortion clinic domestic terrorism (because McCain associates with those people, after all), and I want to shriek.
And I note that at the beginning of the film I watched last night, there was an additional parental discretion warning to let the viewers know that Mapplethorpe images would be seen in this film. (Quelle shock, ne? Mapplethorpe images in a film about Mapplethorpe!) So we still have not completely won our freedom.
I was really knocked back by the theme of this film, which was essentially an exploration of the nature of freedom and the efforts one is sometimes forced to exert in order to maintain freedom. I felt, and still feel, that the struggles over this exhibition were about more than just a definition of art, or of obscenity, but instead were about one person's right to hold intrinsically to their own beliefs in the face of other people's derision and outrage. I found the dramatization of these themes and questions very gripping.
But I have to admit, watching the film made me angry. It irked me to see the mobilized coalition of right-wing religious fanatics in full swing, pompous and narrow-minded as most of them are, so jealous of the private lives of others that they would spend any coin to control them. I found myself biting my tongue in places to avoid screaming at the television screen in frustration (it was almost 2 in the morning, after all, and I do have neighbors).
These people scare the shit out of me.
And I see things like Governor Sarah Palin saying on national television that she doesn't know if she'd call the bombing of an abortion clinic domestic terrorism (because McCain associates with those people, after all), and I want to shriek.
And I note that at the beginning of the film I watched last night, there was an additional parental discretion warning to let the viewers know that Mapplethorpe images would be seen in this film. (Quelle shock, ne? Mapplethorpe images in a film about Mapplethorpe!) So we still have not completely won our freedom.
