Popular Entertainment and Commercial Interests
Popular entertainment is overly influenced by commercial interest. Superficiality, obscenity, and violence characterize films and television today because those qualities are commercially successful."
Through a variety of overt and subtle ways, commercial interests are the key determinants of the content of popular entertainment.
For example, two summers ago, a movie called The Cell opened amid criticism of its stylized depictions of extreme violence. In the opening scene, a pretty girl lies dead in a bathtub. The camera zooms into her vacant eyes and pulls out to show the killer fishing out her bloody kidneys. A later scene shows the killer twirling his victim's intestines around on a stick. Critics complained about the senseless violence, but the movie made $57 million in the United States alone. However, when it was time to release the movie in the international market, New Line Cinema had a problem with The Cell.
Apparently, it was not violent enough.
The director ended up making a more graphic version for the European audience. Incredibly, the Japanese arm of New Line Cinemas found the new version too tame. They had the director add more graphic scenes, to pull in a bigger audience.
No one probably remembers The Cell by now. It was one of those summer blockbuster movies, not meant as an Oscar contender.
There have been a host of similar movies since then. Most...
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