Why All The Gratuitous Streamed Coarseness?
There is a trend of increasing vulgarity on-screen, seen in films like Saltburn and Babylon. But does it really add anything of value?
Increasing vulgarity in film and television is nothing new. But the advent of streaming, with its avalanche of quickly produced and greenlit “content” vying for subscribed eyeballs, has suddenly thrust us much deeper into a gutter of needless tastelessness.
There are two major problems with this area of entertainment criticism. The first is that the critic all too easily comes off as a humorless prude. The second is that such criticism often fails to introduce the concept of context.
The generous use of, say, the F-word may be usefully authentic in a film set in a forward U.S. army base in Afghanistan. Less so in a dialogue between a mother and her young children. Stand-up performers like Chris Rock or Bill Burr use profane language in ways that fit well with their jokes, stories and personas. Comedies like the American Pie franchise feature scenes that, while they might normally be considered gross or offensive, are funny in the contexts in which they are written.
Because context, and appropriateness, and credibility with regards to setting, story line, and characters, is key to the use of language and imagery of any kind in creative pursuit: it’s basic entertainment craft. The use of contextually inappropriate or illogical vulgarity and images that make us gag or squirm isn’t just a fundamental failure of creativity: it’s a betrayal of the audience’s trust.
Here’s a tiny sliver of examples from recent viewing, limited to streamed content on just two platforms, Netflix and Prime Video. Apologies in advance for the necessary precision of the descriptions.
Season One of the series White Lotus gives us graphic scenes of homosexual intercourse; graphic depiction of defecation (and its result). Season Two features more graphic scenes of homosexual intercourse.
In the Rom-Com The Holidate, about a young woman having invited a young man to spend Christmas at her parents’ house, within the first seven minutes the script manages to slip in references to “poop,” “peeing,” the young woman’s first period, and then — in the immediate presence of the young woman’s parents while the family opens Christmas presents — this gem of a dialogue:
Jackson (the young woman’s sister’s casual boyfriend): “Because you said we’re not doing the whole present thing.”
Carly (the young woman’s sister): “I see. So, you know me well enough
to cum in my mouth but you don’t know me well enough to get me a Christmas present?”
In the film Saltburn, we are treated to a scene where the protagonist drinks leftover bathwater laced with semen, followed by one in which he dry-humps the dirt of a freshly filled grave.
In the series Black Mirror, we get to see a British Prime Minister having sex with a pig while the scene is being broadcast live on British television.
And in the star-heavy film Babylon, about the decadence of early Hollywood, within the first 10 minutes of the film there is a very drawn-out scene of an elephant defecating in the face of its handler, followed by a shot of a prostitute urinating on her obese client.
Was that really necessary?
Did any of this language or imagery really add anything to the ideas and story lines these productions were trying to convey, except perhaps a bit of facile shock value? Had the points made so crassly and graphically been made instead with innuendo or suggestion or more subtle visual cues — or not at all in fact — would the end result have suffered?
All too often, this type of gratuitous coarseness is to be found in otherwise bland and unimaginative Rom-Coms and mundane “satirical” series. Why is this happening?
One reason is that the flood of new work required to populate the multiplying streaming platforms has lowered the bar for the craft of scriptwriting and directing, and for that matter producing.
Getting a major studio film financed or broadcast television network production greenlit was once far more difficult, involving intense scrutiny of the project and several levels of “adults in the room” script approval. We now have, instead, a proliferation of immature writers having gained sudden and accelerated entry into the industry. All too often, insecure as to their craft, they feel a need to “spice up” or add what they perceive to be humor to their humdrum or me-too scripts. Unable to fashion compelling characters or credible plots, or to make an audience truly think or feel, they resort to cheap tactics designed to provoke mere visceral reactions.
These writers, directors and producers commit the sin of blithely thinking that their audience is just like them — urban Millennials and Gen Z’s inured to baseness — rather than households that include minors, boomers and older viewers. More generally, their output is the product of a culture of mediocrity that has sacrificed quality in favor of quantity.
Entertainment is now consumed via an endless faucet, whereas it was once to be found and enjoyed in individual bottles. Gorging ourselves from this digital river polluted with gratuitously coarse content desensitizes us to genuine intelligence, beauty and emotion. Mike Judge’s prescient 2006 film Idiocracy indicates where this may eventually lead.
True art has always pushed boundaries and challenged societal norms. But it did so with purpose and skill, not merely for the sake of provocation. The great films and series of the past managed to tackle complex themes and human experiences without resorting to crude exhibitionism. The writers, directors and producers of those films and series understood that restraint often yields more powerful results than excess. They trusted their audiences’ intelligence and emotional capacity, rather than assaulting their senses with grotesquerie.
Too many of the current crop of shock merchants lack the talent or vision to distinguish between transgression that serves a higher artistic purpose, and mere sensationalism. It’s time for audiences to demand better. We must reject the notion that disgust equals depth or that vulgarity is a valid substitute for genuine creativity. Networks, streaming platforms, and studios need to reevaluate their priorities and invest in writers who can craft compelling stories without resorting to cheap tricks.
Click your remote and cast your vote
The ray of hope here is that the very technology that has made space for this tawdriness can also be the solution to it.
Walking out of a film in a movie theater takes a certain amount of resolution, and requires the viewer to ignore the sunk cost — in time and money — involved. Switching out of a stupidly offensive streamed product in favor of something better, on the other hand, takes a second. The streamers monitor and measure these early exits. Enough abandoned films and series will end up penalizing the lazy and puerile “creatives” involved.
For those of us fed up with feeling embarrassed at the lowness of some of the entertainment upon which we increasingly stumble, that day can’t come soon enough. Your remote control is a powerful tool. Use it.
