Haiku Thursday: Don’t look now, but….
Torture film billboard:
off-putting, or unfit for
public consumption?
Billboards for the new movie Captivity went up last week in New York and L.A., only to be taken down again when the studio that made the movie began receiving calls from irate citizens. The billboards show actress Elisha Cuthbert, the star of the movie, being kidnapped, caged, tortured, and ostensibly murdered (which, it must be said, pretty much weeds out potential audience members just looking for a pleasant afternoon at the movies). According to studio spokespeople, the billboards were a mistake: the production company received the wrong files and didn’t get any kind of greenlighting from the studio. This begs questions of why the images existed in any billboard-able form in the first place and why nobody at Lionsgate is checking their ad proofs these days–i.e. I’m not sure I believe them–but it still brings up some interesting points. What makes a film ad “too much”? What brings a violent image from “unpleasant” to “unacceptable”? Is the American public especially sensitive to images of torture these days (i.e. would this poster be less offensive to us in a different national context)? How could the studio have put together an effective but less offensive ad?
Readers? What do you think?
Captivity, Captivity billboard, Elisha Cuthbert, censorship
March 30th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Remember when I spent several minutes trying to remember the name of the stupid blonde who plays Spawn (aka, Jack Bauer’s daughter on “24″)? It’s Elisha Cuthbert.