On Sex and Violence (or, We Have Powerful Friends)

So there's this movie called Return of the Jedi. Had a cult following back in the day, you may have heard of it. In the first act, Princess Leia gets captured by Jabba the Hutt and forced to wear this crazy space bikini which, for half my generation, first introduced us to the notion that girls weren't always big dumb-heads but could sometimes be intensely interesting in ways that we didn't quite understand. Then a bit later, she shorts out the lights and strangles him to death.

I was never a little girl, but I imagine that seeing this for the first time would be a pretty empowering experience. Not Luke, not Han, not even Chewie ends up whacking the Hutt, but the skinny princess with the silly buns in her hair. And even better, she kills him with the very chain that he himself put around her neck. You go, girl. (Or whatever they say nowadays.) Thing is. Before that empowering moment could happen, she had to be shoved down into the slime of degradation. You could've had Leia keep the bounty hunter costume and just blow up the palace with her thermal detonator, but it wouldn't have meant anything. The meaning of her ascension is derived from the demeaning that precedes it.

Now the very real and awful danger is, what I just said is absolutely artistically true, but there's also absolutely no way to draw a solid line at where the aesthetic begins to drift away from the ethical. In other words, exactly how much degradation can an artist depict before it becomes titillation? There's no algorithm for it. If life were an equation, we'd none of us be here. Free will is a frigging mess. It has to be. We've discussed before how difficult it is to give a cut-and-dried definition of pornography that objectively separates it from Art. Both undertakings call for nudes, and neither can succeed without challenging boundaries.

When Rhett told Scarlett that, frankly, he didn't give a damn, it was shockingly obscene. But try to think of a single word that could possibly shock an audience these days. Oh wait, here's one: the N-word. Which, come to think of it, Rhett and his contemporaries used as casually as we use the word potatoes. Standards float. If I passed Jesus on the street I'd probably think, looks like a cool guy but he could use a haircut. Good grooming is always good, but societies differ on the specifics of what constitutes it. This is what moral relativism fails to understand: things change on the surface precisely because the truths underneath are eternal. Everyone everywhere has always understood on some level that sex is sacred. And not despite that but because of it, every culture and religion has tried to find some way to make it special, to set it apart—in ways unique to each culture. The particulars, the trappings, change radically with place and time; the bedrock is universal.

Same with the portrayal of violence. In the fifties, the hero typically shot a villain once and the guy would grimace and hop off a balcony. By the eighties, Schwarzenegger was throwing a steel pipe through a villain into the boiler behind him and saying "Leddoff somm steeeeam" while the guy stood there bleeding and screaming and letting off steam. (Heh! It's still funny.) But compare it with some of the stuff in the Iliad and it's fairly pedestrian. Why, mathematically, is one of them eternal art and the other one basically exploitative (though awesome) garbage? There is literally an entire branch of Philosophy going back 4,000 years that has not yet conclusively settled that question.

T. S. Eliot in his great, strange "Choruses from the Rock" speaks darkly of modern heathens who spend their lives "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good." Ain't no such. Because we're fallen, there must be systems to guide us; but they can never replace the necessity, and the responsibility, of individual human judgment. Was the Leia bikini exploitative? Mmmaybe. Was it necessary to the development of both her character and Jabba's? Mmmaybe. My real contention is simply that an intelligent case can be made in either direction, and infinite nothingness comes of contemptuously dismissing the enemy argument. It's worth talking about. Let's talk it through.

Also, Boba Fett died in the Sarlaac Pit.